Two of the most recognized German historians of the Third Reich, Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat, were staunch advocates of “functionalism,” and although Eberhard Jäckel did not share their approach, they set the tone — or so it seemed to me — for a “German position” at the conference.
Functionalism stressed the centrality of independent institutional processes, the constant rivalries between the “grandees” of the system and their agencies creating what Mommsen called “cumulative radicalization.” This led quite naturally to the conclusion that the policies of extermination were the unforeseen consequence of a blind dynamism turning into murderous activities unintended at the outset, that nobody could control anymore, and for which nobody carried specific responsibility. Thus, the extermination of millions disappeared in a dense institutional fog.
Mommsen’s lecture at the conference explicitly mentioned the fog covering intentions, decisions, and responsibilities, which thereby excluded the possibility of resistance. Martin Broszat did not give a lecture, but in his remarks he defined my criticism and that of others as an “Israeli” (he avoided saying Jewish) perception of this history, in contrast to a “German” one. He expressed thereby the underlying unease that could be felt throughout the meeting between the most vocal German scholars on the one hand and most of the Jewish ones on the other. A few years later, that opposition would turn into a more personal confrontation between Broszat and myself.
My relations with Hans Mommsen remained friendly throughout: we corresponded and met oftentimes over many years, although we disagreed in our interpretation of Nazi policies. Thus, in January 1985, I wrote to Hans at some length about his essay on Hitler in the series National-Sozialismus im Unterricht (National Socialism in Instruction), which he had sent me. After summing up our fundamental disagreement, I criticized the functionalist interpretation by addressing one aspect of the text in more concrete terms:
The chapter on foreign policy is as lucid as the others, but if you reread it carefully, you may notice that even when one takes into account that Hitler had no overall plan, that he left many issues open, that he was a master in exploiting opportunities created by others, you will not find one decision on any of the major issues you discuss or, in fact, on any other one in this field (and please refer to your own text), which was not taken by him.
Ribbentrop’s opinions on how to handle Great Britain were not taken into account, as, much later on, his military experts’ opinions on how to carry on the war were dismissed if they were not in agreement with his own views. If one started reading your text with this chapter, one could hardly be in agreement with the thesis presented at the outset.
Let me add a further word about the absence of resistance stemming from the chaotic aspects of the system and from the lack of clear decisions. As you know, I was very puzzled by this argument … I think you should reconsider this last point, as some of the most criminal orders were very clearly given: the Kommissarbefehl [the order to shoot all Soviet political commissars], for example, and as the criminal activities on the Eastern Front and in Poland, among many other places, were visible to many and could have elicited protests at any level whatsoever, if people had dared to protest.
Finally, the euthanasia program did create the resistance that you are looking for — as you yourself mention — within the same chaotic structure, for the very simple reason that, in this matter, the average German was directly hit by the impact of the atrocities. I am afraid that the explanation for the lack of resistance is simple: fear, indifference to the fate of out-groups and particularly that of more or less despised groups like the Jews, the faith in the essential worthiness of the system, of its Führer and of the Volksgemeinschaft [the racial community], and this almost to the end. The absence of any clear decision-making process seems to me a very minor matter and more of a rationalization than anything else.
My dear Hans, I am sure we will be arguing about these matters for many years to come. The trouble is that for those who were born during that time, on whichever side they may have been born, these remain the only issues they really argue about, mostly with themselves, whatever else they may be doing with their lives …
And, indeed, we continued to argue.
3
In 1983, I saw part of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (the elaboration of which I had followed for years). It would be shown in full in 1985. Thirty years beforehand, Night and Fog had been entirely based on the filming of the sites and artifacts of persecution and extermination. Although, in the fifties, the narration did not mention the word “Jew” even once, in good Communist fashion (both the screenwriter Jean Cayrol and the director Alain Resnais were Communists), the viewer knew that the film dealt in great part with the extermination of the Jews, if only by looking at the names on the death lists of Auschwitz displayed in one of the film’s sequences. Lanzmann’s film systematically avoided any presentation of visual remnants of the Shoah and was entirely built around narratives of memory, the memory of Jewish survivors, of Poles, and of a few Germans, some of them unaware of being filmed by a hidden camera. We have, on the one hand, artifacts and documents; on the other, only the words of the witnesses.
Lanzmann fought vigorously for the absolute primacy of the witness (vigorously is an understatement). I admired Claude’s work, a segment of which I described in When Memory Comes (based on what he had told me). Yet exclusive reliance on witnessing is not a position that the historian can accept.
These contrary approaches were turning the representation of the Shoah into a complex domain that, to me, became no less important than straightforward documentary history. Here was an apparent dichotomy that would inform and challenge my own work for years to come. The basic question was: How could one achieve a representation of the Shoah that would integrate both aspects as intertwined yet independent elements? It would take me many years to figure out a potential solution and build a historical narrative that would include both dimensions without the one being just a prop of the other, or, more specifically, without the witness merely illustrating documentary evidence.
Representation of the Shoah meant memory of the Shoah. What form would this memory take, within and beyond the memory of the Hitler years? This issue was never purely theoretical or artistic; it was, as we saw in Syberberg’s case, ideological. In its ideological dimension, it involved Germans and Jews on the one hand and turned into an internal German debate on the other.
The German–Jewish debate became explicit around the pivotal mid-eighties. Thus, in 1984, the German filmmaker Edgar Reitz brought out a remarkable television series, the first part of a trilogy, entitled Heimat. It described the everyday life of the inhabitants of Schabbach, a fictional village in the Hunsrück, Reitz’s own homeland (Heimat) in the west of Germany. The villagers, whose life in the first series was chronicled from the end of the First World War to the 1960s, lived their traditional existence throughout the years of the Third Reich, practically untouched by the political upheaval of 1933–45. A few words here and there vaguely alluded to the crimes of the regime. It was the arrival of the Americans, and of modernization in their wake, that destroyed the agelong traditions and, in Reitz’s eyes, represented the true catastrophe.
In and of itself, Reitz’s message would have been problematic enough, but his declaration in a major interview that the series was meant to restore German memory stolen by Hollywood’s Holocaust turned it into a “manifesto.” A year after the screening of Reitz’s Heimat, Lanzmann’s Shoah reached television screens and theaters.
As we shall see, this “confrontation” of memories was about to turn into an intra-German issue during the highly tense debates of the years 1985 to 1987; they took place almost exclusively in the Federal Republic but with a wide echo throughout the Western intellectual world.
The intense scrutiny of anything related to the Third Reich that characterized the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly after the NBC film, led to serious controversies and to some that were l
ess so. Thus, shortly before the Stuttgart conference, a morning news anchor at Kol Israel (the Israeli radio station) woke me up at home in Jerusalem with a real sensation: Hitler’s secret diary had been discovered, it was handwritten, it apparently did not mention the extermination of the Jews! What did I have to say about such an extraordinary event? I was told moreover that the diary was in a safe in Zurich, and that the world-known Oxford historian, Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper, had authenticated the manuscript, particularly its handwriting.
In my opinion, this sounded weird: Hitler spoke, dictated his speeches, had dictated Mein Kampf, but did not leave any lengthy handwritten texts. This was probably a fake. The interviewer didn’t believe me: after all, the world-famous Oxford historian … The Israeli reporter was not alone in setting his faith in Trevor-Roper. The German magazine Stern, followed by the London Sunday Times, used him as the expert and bought the rights to the diary for a huge sum. Some German colleagues declared their readiness to give up teaching and to travel delivering lectures about Hitler’s message from hell. Alas, it was a fake.
One of the funniest byproducts of this farcical embarrassment was a British cartoon (I don’t remember in which newspaper) that showed an exhausted Hitler sitting between two mounds of manuscripts and furiously writing when an adjutant informs him that the war is lost. “Don’t disturb me with such nonsense,” the Führer answers, “I’m writing my diary!”
4
During the early 1980s, I made frequent trips to Berlin as a member of the committee set up to choose the first director of the newly established Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Technical University. After rather lengthy deliberations we agreed on the American candidate, Herbert Strauss. On one of these trips, I met a publisher whom Roger Straus (no relation, as far as I know) had strongly recommended: Wolf Jobst Siedler.
The flamboyant Siedler tried to convince me to write a history of German–Jewish relations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (at first he suggested starting even earlier); I turned the offer down from lack of sufficient expertise regarding the early period. Siedler nonetheless succeeded in persuading me to moderate a television discussion about the Jews in Prussia, on the seven hundredth anniversary of Prussia, in 1982 (to this day, I don’t know how this date was calculated).
The one-hour discussion would supposedly be no problem, as the participants, all well-acquainted with the topic, had merely to be kept in line. Siedler did invite the historians Fritz Stern and Reinhard Rürup, the director of the German broadcasting authority and former ambassador to Israel, Klaus Schūtz, and — to my great pleasure — Nahum Goldmann. When on the eve of the event I arrived in Berlin from Geneva, I found a message: Nahum Goldmann, too ill to participate, would be replaced by Gershom Scholem, who was in Berlin as fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg (the Institute of Advanced Study) that had just opened its doors.
The last-minute replacement worried me: I felt sorry about Goldmann’s illness, and Scholem’s participation unsettled me, as it may be remembered that he and Fania had stopped talking to us once I decided to leave the Hebrew University for Tel Aviv. But it was too late to opt out. We all met an hour or so before the beginning of the program to discuss various technical matters. Slightly late, the Scholems arrived and we greeted each other courteously. As I had done with the other participants, I asked Scholem to step aside for a minute to discuss what he would like me to include in my introduction. I knew how to present his scholarship, I told him, but “was there anything else?” “If you are so kind, sir” — it was as formal as that — “maybe you could say that I just received the Pour le Mérite” (the highest German civilian award but, until the end of the Second World War, also the highest military award, and best known as such). At that moment, I simply could not help myself: “The Pour le Mérite? For military services rendered to Germany?” I previously mentioned how much I disliked Scholem’s story about his fake schizophrenia to avoid the draft. He smiled. The evening proceeded peacefully.
5
In the early 1980s, the Federal Republic appeared to move to the right. A significant segment of the German population opted for an explicit conservatism, a rolling back of the student rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s. This Wende (turn), as it was called, carried here and there a whiff of national self-affirmation that had been present in the past but hadn’t dared express itself.
Whether as a result of the rightward drift of German politics or of the painful fortieth anniversary of “the German Catastrophe” of May 1945, there was nervousness in the Federal Republic from the very beginning of 1985. The German liberal weekly, Die Zeit, asked me to contribute a short article to the series it was publishing on the occasion of that symbolically loaded year. I don’t remember the gist of my text but I clearly recall some of the other articles.
Thus, Golo Mann, the eldest of Thomas Mann’s children and a well-known conservative historian, protested in his article against “commemorations that reopen old wounds.” He wondered whether any Frenchman would have had the idea of commemorating Napoleon’s defeat, forty years after Waterloo. The recurrent theme of articles, speeches, and books coming from the right was clear: Enough! After forty years, the time had come to draw a line. Some authors, such as Andreas Hillgruber, were more aggressive, arguing, for example, that, on balance, the crimes of the Allies — of the Soviets in particular — and the criminal plans regarding the future of a defeated Germany, discussed even before the Western Allies knew of Auschwitz, proved an equivalence of evil.
Resentment from that political direction also swirled around the outcry, in the United States, regarding a meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Chancellor Helmuth Kohl in the military cemetery of Bitburg, where both German and American soldiers were buried, once tombs of Waffen-SS were discovered alongside those of the Wehrmacht. What was meant to be a symbol of reconciliation turned into a source of further bitterness.
Did this represent the attitude of a majority of Germans? I do not believe so. I rather think that the greater part of the population identified with the words of its president, Richard von Weizsäcker, in his eloquent and dignified address to the nation, on May 8, 1985, about historical responsibility. It echoed far and wide and for me it amply counterbalanced the demands for drawing a final line behind the past.
During the summer of that same year, another debate highlighted the Jewish issue as such. The director of the Frankfurt city theater intended to open the season with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play The City, Garbage and Death, in which “the rich Jew” played a central and unsavory role. On the opening evening, leaders of the Frankfurt Jewish community occupied the stage and compelled the theater to cancel the performance. It is in that somewhat tense atmosphere that I arrived at the Wissenschaftskolleg at the end of September 1985.
* * *
* In homage to Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich
CHAPTER TWELVE
Berlin
I knew some Berlin sites well before seeing the city for the first time, in 1981 or 1982. The trouble was that once I became a frequent visitor and then a six-month resident in 1985–86, I couldn’t help associating what I knew of Nazi Berlin with sites I recognized. On balance though, I like the city for its mixture of industrial buildings and vast areas of natural beauty. In my private ranking, Paris comes first, then New York, followed by Berlin. I am a big-city person, and in that category, Prague, Jerusalem, or Geneva can scarcely compete; nor can Los Angeles, in any traditional category.
The end of my stay in Berlin in 1985–86 was painful for me and potentially embarrassing for others. Thus, I have never mentioned some of it publicly to avoid bringing up a misunderstanding that — albeit thirty years old by now — could be hurtful to people for whom I keep much esteem. As a result, I was in a quandary regarding the present chapter: for more than a year I remained undecided and “stuck,” although the four or five people I asked for advice all suggested there was no reason for skipping such an “old story.” I finally decided to
go ahead.
1
The Kolleg, an institute for advanced study, partly imitates the Princeton model. Most of its fellows are invited for one year and given much leeway to work on their various projects while receiving the equivalent of their habitual salary. There are a few permanent fellows but they mostly deal with major institutional decisions and the choice of new fellows.
In 1985, the rector was Peter Wapnewski, a medieval German literature scholar who had written about the Jewish minstrel Süsskind von Trimberg (the only one there was, I guess). Wapnewski, in his sixties by then, had an engaging personality, which did help in dealing with a very diverse group of fellows. The second in command, the much younger Wolf Lepenies, a sociologist with a literary bent who had written on Melancholia and Society, among other books, looked more down-to-earth than the chief; while W.’s future was probably behind him, L. could expect a long way ahead.
Among the fellows (or second-year fellows), you could not miss the vivacious Nike Wagner, Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter, whose resemblance to her great-grandmother Cosima was almost eerie; she didn’t share her politics, though, and had some of the sharpness and the wit of the fascinating Viennese Jew, Catholic convert, monarchist, and editor of Die Fackel (The Torch), Karl Kraus, to whom she had devoted a major study. She also wrote about her own famous family with great emphasis on her father Wieland, who redeemed Bayreuth after the war.
When a former fellow came through Berlin, he or she was heartily invited to share the Kolleg’s excellent meals; if the former fellow lived in Berlin and was Jacob Taubes, he considered himself a quasi-permanent guest, despite Wapnewski’s silent anger. Taubes was a man of vast erudition, eccentric behavior, and unusual success with women. He ranked quite high on a list of evil people kept by Scholem, possibly because of the widespread belief that he had driven his first wife, Susan, to suicide.
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