Читать книгу Museum Transformations - Группа авторов - Страница 28

After the end of World War II, with its tremendous crimes and the atrocities of the Holocaust committed by the Germans, Germany was defeated and divided. In 1949 two states the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the east, and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the west were founded. Both states tried to gain legitimacy from what they considered to be the lessons of the past. Their dealing with the Nazi past was embedded in the politics and ideologies of the Cold War. While East Germany became a communist state and shrugged off responsibility by construing itself as the successor of the resistance against the Nazis, West Germany built up a democratic society with the help of the Allies and tried to reintegrate itself into the Western world. Part of these integration efforts was to accept responsibility for the Nazi crimes, to pay restitution, and to work on the reconciliation with Jews and the state of Israel.

But besides restitution efforts, which were mainly viewed as an issue of governmental and especially foreign policy, West German society was largely unable or unwilling to talk about Nazi crimes and the murder of European Jewry. The first chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s policy was to integrate former Nazis including bureaucrats and judges into the political system and into society rather than punishing them. The building of a democratic state and market economy was the main emphasis of his policy, which was in line with the Cold War policies of the Western Allies (Herf 1997; Frei 2002). If there were feelings of guilt in the population, they were often projected onto the demon Hitler, especially since almost everybody had suffered through war, hunger, and the loss of family members. Then there was the question of how to integrate the millions of ethnic Germans who had been expelled from their former homes in central and eastern Europe. Their fate was similarly seen as a great injustice and provided another reason for Germans to feel that they too were victims.