29. Contented retirees. Source: Horst Andrée, Stationen meines Lebens.
Aware of “the short path which we can still pursue,” women were gratified by the growth of their children, since according to traditional gender roles they had played a crucial role in nurturing them. Many autobiographies are full of pictures of smiling infants and playing children, suggesting that “this was a happy time.” The texts also report the usual illnesses, problems in school, and disciplinary issues—but always with a positive undertone of difficulties having been overcome. Fathers such as Rolf Bulwin or Hellmut Raschdorff were proud of their offspring’s professional advancement, and delighted when their sons could take over the family firm. Mothers were more concerned with the personal relations of their children, hoping that they would find the right partners. Anneliese Huber recalled, “When I look back today, I am grateful to fate that we had healthy children who did not create any worries otherwise.”7 Once grandchildren arrived, the new grandparents were even happier, since they could enjoy their growth without any direct responsibility.
The texts suggest, however, that advancing age also brought increasing health problems to the Weimar cohort. Paul Debus’s hip pain got worse, although he strenuously fought it with swimming and exercise. Other setbacks came as shocking surprises, such as Paul Huber’s “slight vision problems and temporary paralysis,” the result of an almost complete clogging of his throat artery. During the subsequent triple bypass operation, he had a stroke, rendering him “completely helpless, connected to apparatuses and hoses, unable to move arms or legs.” It took a concerted rehabilitation effort to get him back on his feet. Even if it was “a hard time,” his wife was “glad and grateful that Paul could again lead an almost normal life.” Similarly, Günter Krause had a heart attack and was taken to his hospital by ambulance. He also suffered a subsequent stroke due to a blocked artery, but eventually recovered well enough to take extensive trips.8 Such incidents were early warning signs of mortality.
The awareness of “having to attempt to do less” because of no longer “being as resilient” was a major incentive for authors to write down their life stories as long as they could. If they were at peace with themselves, like Hellmut Raschdorff, they could look back upon “the great richness of my life” and clothe its meaning in the poetic image of a mowed meadow to reassure their children that cut flowers would grow again next year. For the bereaved Gerhard Baucke, “writing [was] a therapy for long sad winter evenings,” because it allowed him to create “a history, a lived life,” able “to reflect back” its disappearing light. For self-critical spirits such as Horst Grothus, drawing up a balance sheet required admitting errors and defeats that he wanted to pass on to his children as cautionary tales. “I have experienced, done, accomplished, and suffered much.” Nonetheless, he ultimately found his life “worthwhile.”9 Committing their own biographies to paper was therefore a way of living beyond death in their intimate family circles as well as a wider public.
Penning an autobiography was, moreover, a method for some Weimar children to cope with the recurring nightmare of mass murder and mass death that left indelible traces in their psyches. During their professional lives, they had been too busy coping with the destructive aftermath of the Nazi dictatorship to confront the question of what role they had played in it. Only the success of subsequent recovery provided enough psychological distance for them to face memories of the terrible events. In retirement, their thoughts returned to their adolescence, which was dominated by the HJ or BdM, evoking happy images of growing up, first love, and so on. But recollecting a Third Reich youth inevitably raised the troubling question of their individual and collective responsibility for the NS dictatorship, the subsequent war, and its attendant atrocities. Ursula Mahlendorf felt “a special obligation to speak to [her American] students about what we Germans had participated in and what had happened to us.”10 The Nazi terror would never leave her and her peers.
Coming to terms with their own past was even more complicated for East Germans, because it coincided with the peaceful revolution in the GDR. People who were born during the 1920s reached retirement age in the 1980s, so the collapse of Communism complicated their transition into a life after work. Surprised West Germans who were awed by the peaceful protests in the East were gratified when the Wall fell. “The first shot was not fired,” Gerhard Baucke marveled. “Once more we had gotten away with it and had little reason to triumph; we could only be grateful.” By contrast, the GDR historian Fritz Klein, who had long advocated a reform of Communism, was stunned when “the world of real socialism dissolved with ever increasing speed.” Clearly, he “had not wanted the change [Wende],” but since “our side had shown itself unable to resolve its problems on its own, I was ready to accept it as undeniable progress.”11 For those who had suffered from the division, reunification also brought political relief.
Older supporters of the SED dictatorship found the collapse of Communism especially galling, for it invalidated their life project. If, like the Union of Cooperative Stores, their employer went under, they were “released into preretirement” like Erich Hasemann. When the Academy of Sciences was dissolved, well-known scholars such as Marxist philosopher Alfred Kosing were forced to accept early pensions. “It started to become clear that great parts of the academic intelligence of the former GDR were to be pushed out of public life in a quite simple manner.” Refuting the media accusation that the SED regime had been a “lawless state,” the economist Günter Manz railed against the Western “process of colonization.” Hard-hit by the reduction of his “intellectual’s pension,” Werner Feigel zealously campaigned for an increase in retirement pay. Only when they were relieved that the SED was finally gone, as agronomist Heinrich Buschmann was, were they willing to give the new system a chance.12
By definition, the autobiographies of the Weimar cohort remain incomplete, since their authors can not report their own passing away. Most hoped, like Robert Neumaier, “to be able to spend a few more years together” in their “home in peace and contentment.” But the approach of death cast its shadow in advance. “I live with the idea of mortality,” Anneliese Huber noted, “and since then I have begun to consider life as a gift.” After her seventy-fifth birthday Ursula Baehrenburg sensed that “memory disappears in fog—everything pales.” Even her conflicts with her brother no longer bothered her after he died unmourned: “My heart grows calmer day by day. Thus a slow passing away takes its merciless course.” Already ninety-two at the time she began her memoirs, Ruth Weigelt was grateful for having her son to “write down my life.” Only religious believers such as Hellmut Raschdorff were more optimistic: “If one day God considers the time right to remove me from this world, I only wish that I can make a grateful departure in anticipation of the meeting with eternity.”13 In different ways, each writer sought consolation for the inevitable end.
BROKEN LIVES
The dominant experience shared in the retirement retrospectives of the Weimar cohort was the disruption of their own life courses by historic forces outside of their control. Their existence was not the expected progression from happy childhood via turbulent adolescence to mature adulthood with professional success and loving family, but rather a constant struggle against the surprising challenges of depression, dictatorship, war, privation, and the like. Engineer Heinz Schultheis called his account “an entirely unheroic history of a boy whose fate decreed to be growing up in a ‘great time.’” Looking back, he explained his “recurring astonishment about the often absurd vicissitudes of life” as the result of “the rather hectic multiplicity of the twentieth century compared to which even great events and transformations of the past generally pale.”14 Many private snapshots, as well as official photos of buildings, illustrate the tension between a depressing record of untold destruction and mass death and a later return to peace and prosperity (image 30).
30a. Wartime destruction. Source: Kempowski photo collection.
In most of these ego nar
ratives, the German Empire functions as a positive background foil. Transmitted by stories from grandparents and their adherence to a code of “secondary virtues” such as discipline, cleanliness, and thrift, the Kaiserreich appears as a period of order and stability, quite in contrast with its rapid population increase, economic growth, and rampant urbanization. The foundation of a national state through a series of military victories, the acquisition of overseas colonies, the rise of prosperity, the renown of scientific research and technical invention all contributed to a sense of continued progress, celebrated even by Thomas Mann. This optimistic self-image stood in startling contrast to the grinding rural poverty, urban plight, economic exploitation, social strife, militarism, and authoritarianism mentioned in many autobiographies. It was the even more negative experience of the Great War and the postwar chaos that made the Second Reich ultimately appear as “the good old days.”15
30b. Postwar rebuilding. Source: Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
Based on their own recollections, virtually all authors describe the Weimar Republic as surprisingly benign; their childhoods appear to have been quite happy in contrast to later suffering. This memory differs from much of the scholarly literature, which emphasizes the chaotic beginning and hyperinflation, the ephemeral stabilization, and the subsequent economic crisis that crippled the Republic from its birth. This widespread nostalgia is a tribute to the efforts of parents to shelter their offspring from economic and political strife and make their early years pleasant. But it is also a reflection of Weimar’s positive efforts in school reform and welfare support, which created progressive chances for some children of limited means. Only with the Great Depression did memoirists and writers such as Alfred Döblin mention deprivation from unemployment or the street battles between the SA and the Red Front for control of public space.16 These positive descriptions indicate that Weimar really did have a chance.
In many ways, representations of Nazi adolescence were the most difficult subject for the writers, since they were forced to reconcile positive memories with their disastrous consequences. Often written by former HJ or BdM leaders, the narratives paint their involvement in rather attractive colors. This ought not to be surprising, for these associations provided young people with leisure activities and freedom from parental contro, and promised them a generational project of making Germany great again. But many authors go on to describe a process of disillusionment due to the gradual realization of Nazi crimes that culminated in the collapse of their worldview and led to a personal breakdown, as with Christa Wolf. The incredible destruction, personal suffering, and enormity of mass murder inspired a bitter soul searching that confronted German guilt. The diachronic self-examinations that contrast youthful errors with mature criticism are fascinating testimonies of that wrestling with conscience that ultimately transformed memory culture.17
The memoirs show that the disruption of life plans began in earnest with World War II, when young men were involved in mass murder and mass death. The dirty reality of interrupted schooling, military discipline, and lethal danger was not what HJ leaders had promised during Nazi indoctrination. Initially the recollections still show traces of a spirit of adventure and enthusiasm for victory that could justify death as a heroic sacrifice. But the failure to conquer Britain, the invasion of Russia, the US entry, and rumors about terrible atrocities finally fed nagging doubts about the war’s legitimacy. Most of the accounts focus on the inevitability of defeat due to inferior weapons, lack of resources, and resistance by the conquered. The total collapse of the fronts in the East and the West therefore rendered all individual sacrifices and killings of comrades pointless. Young men lost their entire youth on the battlefield, leaving them, as Walter Kempowski recorded, disillusioned and confused about the future.18
The autobiographies demonstrate that the lives of young women were similarly disrupted by the war, even if they generally remained at the home front. The absence of men complicated relationships, breaking up families and forcing women to shoulder new responsibilities. While the Nazis initially tried to shield females in order to maintain morale, eventually many had to work in war production alongside slave laborers. From the middle of the war on, the killing started to threaten women themselves: saturation bombing did not differentiate between military and civilian targets. With the collapse of the Eastern Front, many mothers had to organize the precipitous flight from the Red Army and cope with the subsequent expulsion, since men were dead or in captivity. And then there was the crowning indignity of mass rape, with its attendant brutalization, pregnancy, and shame that sexually signaled defeat. Diaries, like the anonymously published notes of Marta Hillers, vividly describe female suffering.19
The texts also illustrate that actual Nazi victims were even more at risk. Millions of them lost their lives to the racial terror if they did not manage to flee in time. They describe countless instances in which the SA beat up, incarcerated, and killed political opponents on the Left with little regard for legality. Medical records also reveal the systematic attempt at euthanasia that sought to eliminate the “biologically unfit” from the body politic in spite of religious objections. With the war came the ethnic cleansing of Poles in the areas to be Germanized by settlement, as well as the starvation of Russian POWs and the exploitation of slave labor. All of these horrific crimes culminated in the discrimination, persecution, ghettoization, and mass murder of the Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others in what is commonly called the “Holocaust.” Only a few lucky or resourceful people, such as Victor Klemperer, managed to escape this orgy of killing and create an incontrovertible record of crimes against humanity in their diaries, letters, or memoirs.20
During the post–World War II chaos, the ego narratives demonstrate a frantic effort to reassemble the fragments of lives during defeat and under occupation. The liberated concentration camp and prison survivors needed to be nursed back to health in order to have a future. The millions of displaced persons had to be repatriated or allowed to emigrate to more hospitable shores. The Wehrmacht soldiers who had become prisoners of war were to be investigated for war crimes and then either used as reconstruction laborers in Russia and France or sent home. Over ten million German-speaking expellees from the lost Eastern territories needed to be processed and distributed in order to be integrated into new communities. The millions of homeless men, women, and children whose apartments or dwellings had been destroyed by bombs had to be housed. All of this swirling mass of humanity created an unforeseen humanitarian emergency for the victors and a confused search for meaning among the defeated pictured in Heinrich Böll’s novels.21
Western stories of subsequent rebuilding center on the desire for “normalization,” i.e., getting back to a predictable civilian existence. Concretely that meant some distancing from National Socialism, the source of the disastrous defeat. But many ordinary citizens were also reluctant to ask too many questions about their personal involvement in the Third Reich. The first priority was getting enough food and shelter so as to resume studies or land a decent job. Another concern was the reuniting of scattered family members and transforming of romantic relationships into marriages with homes and children. Many young Germans also looked to go abroad and learn what other Western countries had done better in order to rejoin the international community. But only a minority of intellectuals was ready to heed Karl Jaspers’ call for confronting German guilt or to follow Günter Grass in criticizing the oblivious success stories of the Economic Miracle.22
Autobiographies from the East focus on the exciting experiment of building a new socialist society. In disillusioned youths such as Hans Modrow, the example of anti-Fascist resisters inspired a conversion to a purportedly more humane ideology that would govern their lives. The deaths of older people and the purge of occupations also opened attractive career prospects in the GDR. Unfortunately, the Stalinist implementation of socialist ideals established a new dictatorship that justified itself dialectically as acting for the people. To escape persecution
, many businessmen, landowners, and professionals fled to the West, while SED members struggled with their consciences about whether to overlook repression in the service of their cause. In the end, the socialist project failed by not living up to its ideals and not providing a better standard of living. Eastern novelists such as Eugen Ruge wrestled with the disappointment of the failure of a noble ideology.23 All these accounts show that twentieth-century German lives were fractured in multiple ways.
CONTESTED MEMORIES
Among postwar Germans, these shared experiences created a largely apologetic “communicative memory” that was orally transmitted and differed from public memory culture. At its core were private stories shared at family holidays, gatherings with neighbors, or reunions with friends. In these meetings, people talked about their personal fates, trying to make sense of what had happened to them. Through frequent repetition, their tales of common suffering gradually evolved into group identifications among veterans, expellees, or rape victims, who found solace in hearing that they were not alone. Picked up by pressure groups such as the League of Expellees, these narratives also served to justify claims for political acknowledgment or monetary compensation for past pain. Generally, these memories lived in a semipublic realm of manuscript autobiographies, grey literature, or niche publication. In contrast to the critical stance of the public memory culture, this subterraneous social memory failed to fully describe Nazi crimes and focused mainly on German victimhood.24
Broken Lives Page 42