Broken Lives
Page 43
To a large degree, the thrust of this semipublic memory culture was determined by the truncated spectrum of authors who wrote about the past. Due to public shaming, hard-core Nazi perpetrators hardly dared to present autobiographical accounts, and even accomplices such as Joachim Bässmann felt they should apologize for what they had done. By contrast, SED functionaries such as Alfred Kosing insistently defended socialism as ideal while criticizing its real practice. Most Nazi victims’ voices were silenced. If they managed to flee, they wrote in the tongue of their adoptive country, as Lucy Mandelstam did. Supported by sympathetic media and foundations, people persecuted under Communism, such as Günter Krause, were quite vocal about the injustices done to them. Moreover, the Cold War split memories between Communist anti-Fascism celebrated in the GDR and the bourgeois-military resistance lauded in the FRG. Most of the apolitical authors, such as Ursula Baehrenburg, moved between the poles of somewhat apologetic to moderately self-critical narratives.25
In trying to explain the Nazi catastrophe to later readers, ordinary memoirists tended to resort to several standard excuses. Martin Sieg argued, “we did not choose the time in which we were born” and “were generally only reacting” to overwhelming outside forces. Will Seelmann-Eggebert claimed “that the majority of Germans did not know anything of the criminal murder of many million human beings.” Youthful ex-soldiers like Gerhardt Thamm blamed “the guilty, the Nazi party bosses, the executioners, concentration camp managers” for their misfortune and justified fighting against the Red Army by trying to “delay, to save, to stave off annihilation.” Some unregenerate nationalists such as Karl Härtel instead held the Allies responsible: “We were not perpetrators but victims of a pogrom against the German people and Reich, initiated by our opponents with the dictated [peace] of Versailles.” Accusing history in general, the Nazi leadership in particular, or even their wartime enemies absolved individuals from taking personal responsibility. Instead, they could claim, “We were cheated out of our youth.”26
A more complex explanation invokes the argument of betrayal of well intentioned patriotism by the Nazi leadership. Heinrich Buschmann formulated this popular reasoning: “[My] honest national feelings for the defense of the fatherland have been abused.” This frequent claim supposes that it is normal for young men to serve in the military in order to defend their country. With this appeal to patriotic duty, even those who did not share the racist ideology of the Nazis could be mobilized for the war effort. Due to fascination with the new technology of flight, Horst Grothus and other youths trained with glider planes to become prestigious Luftwaffe pilots. It took a series of reverses for disillusionment to set in: “After I had recognized that this war, for which I had volunteered, was not a defensive struggle but a war of conquest,” Buschmann reported, “my feelings changed during the year 1942 from a volunteer to an opponent of the war and of the Hitler regime.”27 Typical of veterans, this gradual change of mind beginning with Stalingrad informs many memoirs.
An even more critical argumentation often found in the memoirs of HJ or BdM leaders stresses the seduction of youthful idealism. By writing about her life on the basis of her student diaries, a mature Lore Walb sought self-clarification in order to “confront my having been a follower” of the Third Reich. As the daughter of a party member, she was “captivated by the spirit of the Nazi era, swept away by propaganda and slogans, fascinated by the figure of the ‘Führer’ and his speeches.” To her later chagrin, her banal young girl diaries “are representative of the enthusiasm of the silent majority during the Nazi period.” Only “through the pressure of war events alone, a process of disillusionment and change of thinking slowly began” that took years to complete, culminating in a psychological crisis. Later confrontation with the youthful self made it possible “to accept my involvement in the Nazi period and the degree of my share of guilt more clearly and precisely than before.”28 This testimony marks the critical turn of self-reflexive autobiographies.
For decades this semipublic memory culture of victimization persisted, irrespective of official condemnations of the Third Reich. Some memoirists merely wanted to defend their childhood and youth, which contained happy experiences, even if they took place within a criminal system. Others rejected the charge of collective guilt by claiming that they had neither been involved in committing war crimes nor in implementing the Holocaust. Asserting, “I am not conscious of any personal culpability,” East German engineer Albert Leithold typically argued “that the existence of concentration camps was known, but never their number and the degree of inhumane cruelty” in them. Though aware of the persecution of Jews, people had looked away so as not to have to oppose it. When confronted by the shocking pictures of the piles of corpses and living skeletons, many postwar Germans denounced them as Allied “brainwashing” and refused to accuse their fellow citizens in order “to maintain the peace of their community.”29 It was therefore quite difficult for the Weimar cohort to confront its own complicity.
Only after a long struggle did public memory culture succeed in turning the private social recollections in a more critical direction. One essential precondition was the total defeat of the Third Reich, which discredited the Nazi Party and set a process of reorientation in motion. At least initially, there was widespread agreement with the need to punish the NS leaders and the SS in the Nuremberg trials for launching a war of aggression and violating human rights. Though internment of perpetrators was a blunt instrument and denazification turned into something of a farce, these punitive measures removed Nazi elites temporarily from office and gave anti-Fascists a head start in rebuilding political institutions. The licensing of media also played a crucial role in providing critical information on the Third Reich. Finally, positive incentives such as America Houses and exchange programs appealed to young people such as Ursula Mahlendorf.30 The Western Allies used just the right combination of severity and liberality to transform political culture.
The clear anti-Nazi stance of postwar politicians also fostered a new orientation in youths searching for a democratic or socialist future. Many Western leaders such as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Theodor Heuss reemerged from internal emigration, while Kurt Schumacher, Willy Brandt, and other Social Democrats survived imprisonment or came back from exile. Similarly, prominent Communists such as Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker returned from emigration to Moscow or incarceration. Although Adenauer appealed to an apologetic center-right electorate, he understood that integration into the West would only succeed if he also expressed contrition for German crimes and offered restitution to the state of Israel and the Jewish community. Similarly, the East German leadership claimed an anti-Fascist mantle for integration into the Soviet Bloc. For young men such as Martin Sieg and Fritz Klein, such authority figures as Bishop Hanns Lilje and pedagogue Heinrich Deiters played a crucial role in deciding their allegiance.31
Several well-publicized court cases against prominent perpetrators in the early 1960s also turned the tide from widespread apologetics to a critical stance toward German crimes. Resenting the notion of “collective guilt,” many nationalists had been arguing for the reintegration of former Nazis and the release of war criminals, following widespread public sentiment. But the Ulm Einsatzkommando trial in 1959 brought incontrovertible evidence of police involvement in the mass murder of Jews in Memel. Even more spectacular was the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1960, which indicted the organizational mastermind of the Final Solution, who turned out to be a pale bureaucrat and was hanged in 1962. Closer to home, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial organized by intrepid prosecutor Fritz Bauer in 1963 accused twenty-two concentration-camp guards of mass murder. (It was immortalized in The Investigation, a stage play by Peter Weiss.) Though these efforts were far from achieving justice, they made it clear even to perpetrators like Joachim Bässmann that “there cannot be any excuse for the annihilation and murder of an entire people.”32
In East Germany, “mandated anti-Fascism” was an essenti
al element of legitimation for SED rule, which claimed to be constructing a better Germany. “After removing the material and intellectual rubble,” the “young anti-Fascists” such as Gerhard Joachim set out to “liberate the still slowly growing elements of a new society, which had formed in the lap of the hitherto disastrous development for the German people.” The Weimar cohort of East German intellectuals such as Fritz Klein bought into this socialist project of the GDR as the sole method of breaking the Nazi spell of the past. Unfortunately, the celebration of the anti-Fascist resistance in camps like Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen soon turned into the legitimation of a new minority dictatorship by the SED. Creative Marxists such as Alfred Kosing began to run afoul of party apparatchiks, were disciplined, and lost faith in “real existing socialism.” In the end, it was the opposition who claimed the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg in order to overthrow the SED dictatorship.33
The cumulative pressure of public memory criticism gradually also produced some genuine contrition, closing the gap to private recollections. The Weimar children were confronted with literary representations by famous authors such as Günter Grass and Christa Wolf, well-known memoirists such as Ruth Klüger and Victor Klemperer, powerful media messages such as the US Holocaust TV series, and local memorialization efforts by everyday historians that dramatized the ubiquity of Nazi crimes. Taken together, these initiatives documented the shocking extent of mass murder, substantiated the truthfulness of the Holocaust allegations, and created an emotional impact that could not be ignored. The result was a heightened tension between nostalgic recollections of youth and mature concern about responsibility that, for Ursula Mahlendorf and Lore Walb, resulted in psychological crises that could only be resolved by conscious admission of guilt. Some intellectuals, such as Gisela and Horst Grothus, Dorothee Sölle, and Werner Braune therefore dedicated their subsequent lives to doing penance through civic engagement.34
This critical turn of “communicative memory” also opened the door to a limited German-Jewish reconciliation. For some émigrés such as Albert Gompertz, the negative feelings ran so deep that they prevented meaningful communication during a return to Germany. Similarly, Niza Ganor had an awkward encounter with the family of her former Nazi employer, who had turned her over to the SS. But with her brother still living in her home town, Ilse Polak found her visits heartwarming because they connected her with childhood memories. For Lucy Mandelstam, a late-in-life visit was also liberating: “I felt my life had now come full circle and that I had come to terms with the past.” Of course, specialists in German history or literature such as Fritz Stern and Ruth Klüger developed professional ties to the FRG, whose liberalization they supported. But few went as far as Georg Iggers, who returned temporarily to Göttingen, or Tom Angress, who moved permanently back to Berlin in order to teach young Germans about the Holocaust. As Auschwitz survivor Judith Magyar Isaacson wrote, “We cannot forget, but we have to learn to forgive.”35
NEW GERMANS
The horrific experiences and troubling memories of the twentieth century have transformed the majority of Germans, making them profoundly different from their European neighbors. While British media can still be proud of their imperial past, the French public glory in their cultural achievements, and Polish patriots find solace in their “martyrology,” the citizens of the Federal Republic have a more negative history to refer to. In international comparisons of “national pride,” the Germans consistently rank at the bottom of the scale, below other developed countries full of robust self-esteem such as the United States. Even if they show some pleasure in their economic prowess, athletic success, or liberal constitution, they remain more willing to identify themselves as “Europeans” than do members of other countries. And, in spite of nativist backlash, Chancellor Angela Merkel has therefore been more inclined to accept refugees from abroad. Surprisingly enough, in a 2016 business survey by US News & World Report Germany came in number one among “the world’s best countries”—even beating out the United States.36
In part, these autobiographies show that this transformation was a response to the negative German experiences of the twentieth century. The initial confidence of the Empire was shattered by the privations of the First World War and the chaotic aftermath of defeat. The Weimar consolidation that provided happy childhoods disappeared in the Great Depression. The temporary improvement during the peaceful years of the Third Reich led into frightful suffering in World War II and the Holocaust. Moreover, the postwar project of creating a more egalitarian society ended up in a Communist dictatorship. Only the somewhat bumbling beginning of the Federal Republic led to peace, prosperity and reunification. Whenever Germans tried to lord it over their neighbors, they ended up suffering the consequences, turning from perpetrators into victims themselves. Even nationalists such as Karl Härtel realized that “in inhumane and cynical disregard such a policy has degraded the people and their fate into an instrument of their striving for power.”37
Having to deal with oppressive memories has made many postwar Germans more self-critical than their neighbors. Setting out to convey the “subjective feeling about this fatal development” required courageous introspection rather than evasive self-justification. Looking back on their lives, writers such as Heinz Schultheis understood that their individual trials were inextricably linked to the larger disasters of the country. This realization posed the question of personal responsibility: what had they done to support the Nazi genocide or what had they left undone to help the victims? For Renate Finckh, this self-examination led to “a terrible recognition. What I had wanted to keep safely in my heart, had turned into guilt and shame.” In this process, she “saw that I had been loyal to evil” and assisted in a “whole big lie.” But she found the courage to live on after such a youth. “Since I could grow, everything was not finished.”38 Even if a right-wing fringe continues to deny German responsibility, the critical consensus on the past remains strong.39
Heeding the lessons of experience and memory has transformed many Germans into sincere democrats and pacifists who want to prevent a recurrence of earlier horrors. Once a proud soldier who “believed in German victory,” Dieter Schoenhals sought to make his Swedish students learn from his own mistakes in order “to prohibit above all the abuse of youthful idealism by irresponsible demagogues” in a racist dictatorship. “Everything possible needs to be done in order to avoid another war, not just a nuclear conflict, but war, period.” Toward the end of their lives, Weimar children formulated their conclusion in the triple injunction “never again” to permit a dictatorship, war, or Holocaust. Seeking to come to terms with their broken lives, most of them embraced human rights, pacifism, social solidarity, and ecology.40 According to British historian Timothy Garton Ash, “it is an irony of history … that today it is Germany which is an island of stability and the last hope of liberalism.”41 Even if not all have seen the light, many Germans have changed so much that their imperial ancestors would hardly recognize them.
Acknowledgments
This book is an answer to “Spinoza,” a reader of my synthesis Out of Ashes, who called for a history “from what you would really experience on the streets of these German cities” on Amazon.com on July 31, 2015. Since books are written conversations, I would like to thank all the many interlocutors, such as Erich Helmer, Johanna Hagenauer, Dorothea Klessmann, Siegfried Mews, Irmgard Mueller, Joachim Petzold, Hellmut Raschdorff, and Gerhard Weinberg, who shared their personal stories with me. Moreover, I am truly grateful to Ulrich Grothus, Karen Hagemann, Katharina Hochmuth, Gerhild Krapf, Helmi Lehmann, Nina Lemmens, and Michael Schoenhals for allowing me to read the manuscript recollections of their parents or grandparents. I am also indebted to the families of Günter Gros, Karl Härtel, Anneliese Huber, Gerhard Joachim, Robert Neumaier, Heinz Schultheis, Erika Taubhorn, and Hans Tausch for permitting me to quote from their autobiographies. Moreover, I am thankful for being able to reproduce images from Horst Andrée, Ursula Baehrenburg, Ruth Bulwin, Horst and Gisela
Grothus, Winfried Weigelt, and the Kempowski collection, as well as the photo archive of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
I would also like to express my gratitude to Maren Horn of the Literaturarchiv of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Jutta Jäger-Schenk of the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv in Emmendingen, and Frank Mecklenburg of the Leo Baeck Archive for giving me access to their rich collections of autobiographies. At the same time, I want to give thanks to the Z. Smith-Reynolds Foundation for a senior research and study leave in 2016, as well as to the Georges Lurcy Foundation for supporting the gathering of material and the writing. Moreover, I am grateful to Christiane Lemke and Helga Welsh for commenting on the manuscript and to Caroline Nilsen for pre-editing the text. I am immensely indebted as well to Brigitta van Rheinberg’s criticism and encouragement during the revision of the manuscript. Finally, I want to dedicate this book to my many graduate students whose curiosity has inspired me to look at the past through the eyes of ordinary Germans.
Notes
INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVES OF GERMAN EXPERIENCES
1. Johanna Hagenauer, “Bericht über die Nacht vom 16. März 1945, in der ein englischer Großangriff Würzburg vollständig in Schutt und Asche legte” (MS, Munich, 2015). Cf. W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur (Munich, 1999). The brief notes only provide source citations and a few suggestions for further reading.
2. Bettina Fehr, “Erinnerungen” (Bonn, 2005), 227. For a general framework, see Konrad H. Jarausch, Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ, 2015).
3. Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001).
4. Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (New York, 2008).