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ОглавлениеBETWEEN “MASTERING” AND “SILENCING” THE PAST
Public Commemorations of World War II
IN MARCH 2012, a group of Germans in their forties and fifties got together in the picturesque university town of Göttingen for a two-day workshop entitled “The Children of the War Children and the Long-Term Impact of the Nazi Terror.” The meeting, organized by the little-known Association for Psychohistory and Political Psychology (Gesellschaft für Psychohistorie und Politische Psychologie), appeared to be just another inconspicuous conference on a slightly convoluted topic. Yet it turned out to be surprising in a number of ways. First, there was the attendance. The annual meeting of the association usually attracts around 30 or 40 people, mainly its core membership. This time, 170 people—the majority from the general public—registered, exceeding not only all expectations but also the logistical capacity of the organizers and their venue. People were put on waiting lists, and quite a few who decided to try their luck were turned away at the door. In the end, 130 bodies were squeezed into the conference facilities at the Göttingen observatory.
Then there were the reactions from the audience. What I had expected to be a rather cerebral exchange about the long-term impact of World War II on German society unfolded into a highly emotional event. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists delivered papers on topics like “Emotional Rubble: The Postwar Generation Overshadowed by the Trauma of War,” or “Idyllic Worlds: How the War Grandchildren Unconsciously Give Up Their Own Lives,” while members of the Kriegsenkel generation—the war grandchildren—presented their life histories. The speakers vividly sketched out what it was like to grow up in a German family who had lived through World War II. They painted a depressing picture. They showed the Kriegsenkel as a generation raised by parents who were frugal and hardworking. They portrayed parents who had rebuilt their lives from the ruins, focusing all their attention on providing financial security for their children, while being emotionally absent, unable to provide warmth or show emotion. They depicted mothers who told their children to eat everything on their plate and to stop whining about their “little” problems and unpredictable fathers who could lose their temper at any given moment when something upset their painstakingly safeguarded emotional stability and daily routines. They described children who felt responsible for their emotionally fragile parents, unable to build their independent lives, and quiet grandparents shrouded by an impenetrable veil of silence about the past. All of this together had created an atmosphere of foggy heaviness hanging over many otherwise picture-perfect German homes of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
In previous years, the waiting rooms of the psychotherapists presenting at the conference had started to fill with people who were struggling to find their path in life, in spite of the fact that they had grown up in times of peace, stability, and (mostly) prosperity. They were wrestling with emotional problems such as depression, anxiety, or a general sense of hopelessness and lack of belonging. They had difficulty separating themselves from their parents and starting their own lives. They were struggling to build committed relationships and successful careers. For many of these issues, therapists were unable to clearly identify the cause of suffering, and therapeutic interventions often failed to produce the desired results. The psychologists were starting to look for potential sources further back in the family history—all the way to the events of World War II. Could it be, the psychologists were now asking, that what their patients’ parents and grandparents had witnessed in World War II had left them damaged or even traumatized? Had the bombardment of German cities, the nights spent in air-raid shelters, the deaths of family members, and the loss of homes and belongings left much bigger psychological scars in these generations than was previously known or even suspected? Had these scars and the “emotional rubble” (Seelische Trümmer, Alberti 2010), pushed aside by the intense effort of economic reconstruction after 1945 and buried under a sense of guilt and shame about the crimes that Germans had committed, affected not only the mental health of the eyewitnesses but also the emotional well-being of their children and grandchildren? Had the survivors inadvertently and unconsciously passed down their unresolved emotional baggage, and could this be an explanation for the psychological problems of the Kriegsenkel?
The audience listened in teary silence as memories of their childhoods came back to life. Question times were dominated by expressions of relief and empathy and by listeners’ own stories. Again and again someone would stand up and, choking with emotion, say something like, “I have never ever looked at myself and my family in this way before. Now, finally, I understand why my parents were the way they were and why I have been struggling all my life. I always felt that there was something wrong with me. Now, I can see where it all came from, and that there are other people out there who are just like me. For the first time, I don’t feel alone anymore.” Each time, 130 people clapped in support.
Sunday afternoon, on the train back to Berlin, exhausted and overwhelmed by the intensity of the previous two days, I pondered on what I had just witnessed. One thing was obvious: what had made the event so emotional was that this was a new topic for the audience, one that had come as a big revelation. It offered a fresh lens through which people reconsidered not only their own lives but also those of their parents and grandparents. The memory of the war had always been there—as a constant presence in public commemorations, history lessons at school, and TV documentaries. Yet its psychological impact had somehow been blocked from view. They had not been able to grasp it. Having grown up in Germany, I intuitively understood why the conference participants were so surprised by the sudden discovery of the connection between World War II and their own emotional issues. Up until that moment, Germans (not only of this particular generation) related to the war in two distinct ways: either as a historical event that had little or no impact on their own lives or as a national and familial legacy of perpetratorship, guilt, and shame. It had never before been considered that not only had the eyewitness generation participated in or condoned the crimes of the Nazi regime but the war had also psychologically scarred them, creating lasting emotional damage that they then passed on to their children and grandchildren.
Why did it take more than sixty years before Germans started to even think about these issues? Three main factors may help explain. First, for different ideological reasons, the culture of commemoration in East and West (and later the reunited) Germany largely excluded the suffering of the non-Jewish majority population from public discourses about World War II. In the West the emphasis was on the responsibility for the Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust, while the East German regime focused on building a socialist future rather than looking back to the past. Without the stimulation of a broader public discussion, the aspect of the German losses in World War II history did not feature prominently in people’s awareness, and so they were not systematically considered.
Second, conversations between the different generations in German families tended to be dominated by silences, disjointed anecdotes, accusations, and denials. This disrupted communication left the younger generations with only sketchy knowledge about what had happened to their family during the war, and it did not allow them to understand how they may have been affected later on.
Lastly, the mainstreaming of psychological knowledge about the multigenerational impact of traumatic events is a very recent development. This knowledge is a crucial element for the construction of Kriegsenkel life histories and the understanding of the enduring emotional legacy of World War II more broadly. While they may have experienced suffering, the German eyewitness generation of World War II did not consider themselves traumatized after the war, and research on the effects on their children and grandchildren is only just starting to emerge.
The culture of commemoration of a country—the way a nation remembers, describes, and relates to its past—is relayed in public policies and political debates, memorials and museums, rituals of commemoration, and the media (Moller 2003). The construction of any national history is invariably a selective representation of the past, emphasizing certain aspects while simultaneously omitting and “silencing” (Trouillot 1995) others. Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper (2000, 7) point out that the commemoration of war in particular is often a key element used by the state “for binding its citizens into a collective national identity.” What makes the German case complicated in this regard is the fact that Nazi Germany had started World War II and was directly responsible for an enormous loss of human life worldwide. Consequently, there were no victories or heroes to celebrate (although East Germany did to a degree, as I will explain). Both German states had to find a way to break with the past and distance themselves from the actions of the Nazi regime.
The public mourning of Germany’s losses consequently (and rightly, I believe) had to take a large step back behind the consideration for the crimes committed. At times it disappeared almost entirely from public view. Journalist Sabine Bode suggested in 2006 (271) that the only dignified way to publicly remember and mourn the destruction of German cities and the loss of life was for the population to gather on the night of May 8 and stand in silence. She observed that all too often local politicians still could not find the appropriate words to say. Using anthropologist Paul Connerton’s (2008) “seven types of forgetting,” this chapter highlights the shifting and often contradictory ways in which Germans publicly talked about World War II. It traces the tension between the responsibility for the Holocaust on the one hand and the wartime suffering of the civilian population on the other.
FROM THE “DESIRE TO FORGET” TO THE SINGULARITY OF THE HOLOCAUST: THE WAR IN WEST GERMAN PUBLIC DISCOURSES BEFORE 1990
After the capitulation of the National Socialist regime in May 1945, Allied and Soviet forces occupied Germany. In 1949 two separate states were founded, the German Federal Republic (FRG) in the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), ruled by the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), in the East. Until Germany’s reunification in 1990, the two states had very different ways of coming to terms with and “mastering the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Herf 1997, 8).
The Postwar Years: Between the “Desire to Forget” and “Humiliated Silence”
From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, as it focused strongly on rebuilding the country, the West German government assumed political responsibility for the war and committed to reparations to the Jewish victims and the state of Israel. In 1945 and 1946, Allied tribunals sentenced many of the most prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the Nazi regime at the Nuremberg trials.
At the same time, public policy, commemoration, and the media also drew attention to two groups of Germans who were experiencing the consequences of the defeat: the millions of Germans expelled from Central and Eastern European countries and the approximately 1.5–2 million soldiers still held in Russian POW camps. Mass organizations representing veterans and expellees (Vertriebenenverbände) emerged as political actors in this first postwar period, influencing government policy to consider their interests (Moeller 1996). Although the government paid lip service to the great suffering inflicted by Germans, and although the Nuremberg trials made details about Nazi crimes widely known, the Jewish victims remained largely faceless in the political rhetoric and consciousness of the German people. US historian Robert G. Moeller (2005, 2006) points out that statistics and numbers representing the deportation and murder of much of the European Jewry did not inspire as much empathy as the vivid descriptions found in popular movies, memoirs, and novels. There were stories of German women fleeing from the advancing Russians and of brave German soldiers fighting at the eastern front—victimized first by the Nazis and then by the Red Army in POW camps. Moeller’s German colleague Ruth Wittlinger (2006) adds that by sentencing a few Nazi leaders, the Nuremberg trials encouraged a view of the past where the German population had been the victims of a criminal group at the top, which had led the German people astray. This view allowed the majority of the population to firmly shift the main responsibility to the political elites. Susanne Vees-Gulani (2008) found that literary texts about the first postwar years portray a population refusing to believe in or admit to the German atrocities. Over time, outright denial gave way to passivity and indifference.
With the “denazification” (1946–51), an unprecedented yet half-hearted attempt was made to rid German society of any remnants of National Socialist ideology and expel former Nazis from positions of power. There was always suspicion that it was largely a pro forma activity. It was seen as something superficially imposed by the Allied forces, who had a strong interest in returning Germany to “normality” as a bulwark against the communist Eastern bloc, rather than as a phase of true reeducation and acceptance of responsibility for past crimes. Older Germans commonly referred to the denazification documents as Persilscheine, making reference to a popular washing powder (Persil) famous for its exceptional “whitewashing” capacity and ability to produce superior “cleanliness” (Nowak 2012). Appalled that only 0.5 percent of all six million denazification proceedings resulted in a “guilty” or “very guilty” verdict, writer and publicist Ralph Giordano (1987, 90) denounced the widespread denials of the war generation’s support for Hitler as their “second guilt” (Zweite Schuld). As a teenager I often asked myself where the tens of thousands of people who had been involved in the deportation and murder of the Jews had gone. No one ever spoke of them. No one seemed to know anyone, let alone be related to anyone, who had taken part.
While Giordano condemns these silences and the desire to forget as an attempt to escape uncomfortable memories and confrontational questions, Connerton puts forward a more accepting view. He refers to early postwar Germany as an example of “prescriptive forgetting” (Connerton 2008, 61–62). Connerton argues that in order to restore cohesion to civil society and to rebuild the legitimacy of the new West German state, the Adenauer government needed to turn the persecution and punishment of convicted Nazis into a forgotten issue by the early 1950s.
It was the generation of the Kriegsenkel’s grandparents, a generation who had actively participated in the war and had generally supported the Hitler regime, that was affected by the sociopolitical environment of the late 1940s and 1950s, with its official lip service to the acceptance of responsibility for the war on the one hand and the strong desire to forget the past and one’s involvement on the other. Their unwillingness to confront the past later became an issue of intense conflict with the next generation. On a political level, there was the protest movement of 1968. On a familial level, there was tension between the war generation and their children. What makes this situation (and the transgenerational dynamic) even more complex is the fact that this unresolved relationship with the Nazi crimes was paired with what Connerton (2008, 67) calls “humiliated silence.” The Allied air raids of German cities had left as many as six hundred thousand civilians dead and more than eight hundred thousand wounded. More than five million German soldiers were killed before the shooting stopped, over half of them on the eastern front (Moeller 2005). Around twelve to fifteen million ethnic Germans either were expelled or had left their homes in Eastern Europe to escape the advancing Red Army in spring 1945. As many as two million are believed to have died from violence, starvation, and disease in the process (Naimark 2010). Connerton (2008, 68) expresses surprise that, for many of the postwar years, almost no one in Germany publicly talked about the bombardment and destruction of German cities and that “a colossal collective experience was followed by half a century of silence.” He sees the “economic miracle” and the quick reconstruction of the country as a covering up of the past. It concealed all visible signs of not only physical but also emotional destruction, an attempted effacement of painful and shameful memories. Such silencing, Connerton concludes, can be seen as a type of repression, but it may at the same time be an essential survival strategy.
Although public speeches in the postwar period mentioned to some extent the fate of the expellees and the prisoners of war, there was little focus on the mental and physical difficulties of the larger civilian population. Most families were left to their own devices to cope with fathers and grandfathers who had returned physically and psychologically damaged or to grieve for those who had not returned at all.1 Millions of Germans had to privately come to terms with the loss of their homes and livelihoods in the Eastern European countries in the wake of the German defeat. Victims of rape and other forms of violence had to deal with the loss of their physical and emotional health on their own. While hard to fathom from today’s standpoint, this solitary suffering was the norm at the time—across the globe. It was only at the end of the 1980s that psychological support started to be provided in the context of humanitarian aid, immediately treating populations traumatized by war and mass loss (Goltermann 2017).
From a moral standpoint, “humiliated silence” and a reluctance to publicly emphasize German wartime suffering were undoubtedly the only attitudes to appropriately show respect for the victims of the Nazis. From a psychological perspective, though, the picture looks different. Researchers and mental health practitioners have pointed to the importance of public recognition to help populations deal with the traumatic consequences of war, violence, and mass loss. French psychologist Erika Apfelbaum (quoted in Wajnryb 2001, 72) explains that individuals need to construct themselves in a way that links personal and collective memory. She highlights (in the context of the Holocaust) that public silencing is harmful for the individual as it delegitimizes personal history. Historian Catherine Merridale (1999, 1996) conducted interviews in countries of the former Soviet Union, where the communist regime had systematically suppressed public mention of the massive loss of human life during the Stalin era. Although the Russians she interviewed would share their stories of suffering and hardship with family and friends, they had no way of processing their losses in the context of society at large.
According to psychologist Yael Danieli (1998, 7), an individual’s identity involves a complex interplay of multiple spheres or systems, including the biological and intrapsychic; the interpersonal, familial, social, and communal; the ethnic and cultural; the religious and spiritual; and the political, national, and international. For a trauma to be integrated, it must be addressed in all the affected systems, including on the level of society. Danieli stresses the importance of public acknowledgment of trauma for the healing process. She speaks for Holocaust survivors and other victims of gross human rights violations rather than for the much more morally complex situation of a perpetrator country, such as Germany in World War II. On a strictly psychological level, the argument is still applicable. In the context of the Vietnam veterans (also at least partly considered “perpetrators”), for example, it was often pointed out that negative public opinion vis-à-vis the US engagement in the war and a lack of recognition hindered the soldiers’ psychological adaptation after their homecoming and contributed to their ongoing mental health issues (see for example Lifton 1973).
From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s: The Need to “Master the Past,” the Centrality of Holocaust Memory, and the Exclusion of Wartime Suffering
With a new generation coming of age in the 1960s, different accounts of the Third Reich and World War II appeared. Younger historians no longer attributed the war to a small group of Nazis acting alone but to a National Socialist ideology that had been widely supported by the German people. The reasons for Hitler’s rise to power, the Nazi war crimes, and the Holocaust took center stage in the public culture of commemoration. In 1969, Willy Brandt, who had fought against the Wehrmacht in the Norwegian resistance, became the first Social Democratic chancellor after 1945. His Ost-Politik heralded a new era of foreign relations with Eastern European countries and set the tone for the national memory for the next thirty years. Brandt believed it to be essential to publicly acknowledge and express remorse for the Nazi crimes. He famously fell to his knees in front of the memorial for Jews killed in the Warsaw ghetto (Vees-Gulani 2008). In political speeches, public commemorations, and history books, a new version of the past—in which German suffering and losses were the appropriate price to pay for the pain the nation had inflicted—became the dominant public narrative (Moeller 1996).
At the same time, the left-wing student movement of 1968 protested against the continuities between the Third Reich and the FRG, claiming that almost the entire bureaucratic, military, and political elite of the Nazi regime had found equivalent or better careers in the new state. Publicly, as well as at home with their families, young people demanded answers from their silent parents about their involvement in, or tacit support for, the atrocities of World War II, and they strongly identified with the victims of the Holocaust (see Jureit and Schneider 2010). Psychoanalysts Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich’s widely read book The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (1967) criticized their fellow Germans for being in denial about their collective and personal responsibility for the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. This psychological mechanism had left them incapable of mourning the loss of Hitler, whom they had supported in overwhelming numbers, and also of feeling empathy for the millions of victims. The so-called “generation of ’68” was born roughly between 1935 and 1950. In terms of age, these are the mothers and fathers of my interviewees. However, only Charlotte’s parents, whose story will be told in chapter 6, directly participated in the protest movement. Most others came from predominantly conservative middle-class families, where the parents tended to condone the grandparents’ silence and denials rather than challenge them.
By the end of the 1960s and up until today, the public focus in West Germany had clearly shifted. The dominant view of National Socialism and World War II has been one in which Germans were—if not collectively guilty—certainly collectively accountable for the war and the Holocaust. Public commemorations stress the need to remember the past and impart to the younger generations the moral responsibility to ensure that history will never repeat itself. The US TV miniseries Holocaust, broadcast in 1979, contributed to a change in public opinion. Almost half of the population over fourteen years of age watched at least part of the series. Viewers followed the struggle and suffering of the Jewish German Weiss family through the war and into the concentration camps. For the first time victims were turned into living, breathing people with individual histories instead of abstract statistics and piles of withered corpses. In the mid-1980s right-wing historians tried to juxtapose the murder of the European Jews with the mass murders under Stalin in an attempt to relativize the Holocaust in the “historians’ controversy” (Historikerstreit). They were vehemently criticized and marginalized by the vast majority of academic voices, which affirmed the historic significance and singularity of Auschwitz.2 Talking about German suffering and claiming any kind of victim status was deemed suspicious and was denounced as a denial of responsibility for the crimes committed. In his famous speech of May 8, 1985, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the liberation from the Nazi regime, then president Richard von Weizsäcker confirmed that German crimes against humanity must remain at the center of public memory into the future:
There is no such thing as the guilt or innocence of an entire nation. The vast majority of today’s population were either children then or had not been born. They cannot profess guilt of their own for crimes that they did not commit. . . . But their forefathers have left them a grave legacy. All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it. The young and old generations must and can help each other to understand why it is vital to keep alive the memories. (von Weizsäcker 1985)
This has since remained the normative framework for German national memory, into which all the other memories have to be integrated (Assmann 2006b). At the same time, acknowledging the horrors of what Germans had done and accepting moral responsibility had all but closed off the space in which it was permissible to publicly discuss German losses. While some historians do not fully agree—as some accounts of wartime suffering can be found throughout the postwar period (for example Moeller 1996, 2005; Niven 2006a; Wittlinger 2006)—publicly speaking of German victimhood was largely considered a moral taboo from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.
It is daring to label West Germany’s culture of commemoration of this time as “repressive erasure” (Connerton 2008), because the label has connotations of totalitarian regimes. Researchers have denounced the suppression of open debates about past mass losses in relation to the political purges under Stalin in the Soviet Union (Baker and Gippenreiter 1998; Merridale 1999, 2010) and to the crimes of the military junta in Chile under Pinochet (Becker and Diaz 1998). During the “Great Leap Forward” of the late 1950s and early 1960s in China, tens of millions of people starved to death because of natural catastrophes compounded by economic mismanagement and political fervor. More than fifty years on, the Chinese Communist Party still has not officially acknowledged the massive loss of human life or publicly commemorated the victims (Feuchtwang 2011). However, “repressive erasures” do not necessarily have to take violent forms but can signify the existence of a master historical narrative that people are expected to internalize and that, while highlighting some aspects of history, at the same time neglects or deliberately edits out others (Connerton 2008, 60). Over the years, a number of public scandals have underscored that the officially sanctioned version of the German past is indeed quite prescriptive. Striking the wrong chord in a public speech or choosing words carelessly can easily derail or at least tarnish political, academic, or intellectual careers. One such example was the affair around Phillip Jenniger’s controversial speech in November 1988, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass). Jenninger, then president of the German Parliament, attempted to explain the reasons behind the popular support of National Socialism. He failed to dissociate himself clearly from the ideas he outlined, calling them “fascinating,” and his monotonous voice was perceived as not carrying enough empathy for the victims. More than fifty members of parliament walked out in protest, and the ensuing political storm forced Jenninger to resign, ending his career in politics (Fischer and Lorenz 2007, 240–42).
“We Never Talked about the Destruction”: History Lessons in West German Schools in the 1970s and 1980s
A country’s culture of commemoration is not only communicated in public policies and political debates, memorials and museums. It also filters into history books and lessons at school, where the aim is to impart knowledge about historical events to the younger generation and to cultivate certain attitudes vis-à-vis their nation’s past. German studies scholar Rainer Bendick (2001, 541) explains that history books “relay patterns of perceptions and interpretation of the past, that are foundational to a society. . . . With their help, the next generation is expected to learn an understanding of history, which correlates with the self-image of the society in which they as adults will one day assume responsibilities.”
Most Kriegsenkel were of high school age in the late 1970s and 1980s, and what they learned about National Socialism, World War II, and the Holocaust largely mirrored the public narratives of the time. Many of my West German interviewees remembered their history lessons quite clearly, although they had taken place almost thirty years earlier. The dominant impression was that National Socialism and the war were talked about a lot in the Gymnasium, which, belonging to middle-class families, the majority of them had attended.3 Their teachers, especially the younger and more left-leaning ones who had received their training around the time of the protest movement of 1968, had put in great effort to teach their pupils about the widespread popular support for Hitler and about the horrors of the Holocaust. Students watched documentaries about the liberation of Auschwitz in class or visited concentration camps on school excursions. The message about the indescribable cruelty Germans were capable of hit home and left a deep impression on their developing attitudes toward their national identity. Brigitta, born in 1966, summarized her memories: “In the last few years of school, we only ever talked about the war. That was when the guilt came. For my sense of identity, it was very dark and gloomy. We were watching all these documentaries, the liberation of Auschwitz and so on. When I think back to my history lessons, those images are all I ever see.”
Many Kriegsenkel read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl in German literature class and watched documentaries about World War II or the episodes of the Holocaust miniseries on TV at home. Images of emaciated faces peering from behind barbed wire and of earthmovers pushing piles of dead bodies into mass graves are impossible to forget. Eva-Marie, born in 1967, reflected: “Every morning when I turn on the shower, I think about how the Jews were gassed, and that the Nazis experimented on them with boiling hot and freezing cold water. I think about these things very often, about the physical pain. I must have been fourteen or so when I watched the first documentaries, without any forewarning. Before that time, the world was still a good place.”
Not everyone reacted in the same way or shared the same memories of the history lessons. Some said that World War II was such a constant and repetitive topic at school that they got to a stage of being “completely fed up with it.” Others felt that although the war had been dutifully “worked through,” it was not really discussed or analyzed in depth. Their teachers were often older, of the war generation themselves, and uncomfortable with the topic. They had avoided moving beyond a dry presentation of historical facts, which failed to reach their students emotionally. Sanna, born in 1974, admitted: “History lessons at school were really boring; they did not have anything to do with me at all. You had to read those fifteen-odd pages, and you had to learn things by heart for the exams, but I can’t even recall those facts anymore now.”
A handful of people said that they could not remember that the war had been a topic at school at all, either because it had not been part of the curriculum or because they had no recollection of it. While the latter explanation is plausible, given the long time span that has passed and the unreliability of human memory, history lessons were indeed not uniform for all schools. In West Germany, responsibility for the education system lies primarily with the Länder, (the states), each deciding on its own educational policies and school curricula.4 Because the Kriegsenkel went to the Gymnasium at different times and in different parts of the country, it is quite possible that in some schools “history lessons had stopped at a time just before the war started,” as a few of them claimed.
However, while each person remembered a degree of working through the war and Holocaust at school slightly differently, some aspects of their reports closely resembled one another. The focus always lay on the reasons for Hitler’s rise to power, the factual history of World War II, and the systematic murder of six million Jews and countless other people in the concentration and extermination camps. Some teachers were more invested than others in imparting the message that the past needed to be remembered and that another Holocaust should never be allowed to happen again. This narrative always carried a moral weight and could not easily be questioned. “I always had the sense that there was no other option than to think of it [the war] as something very bad. You were quasi brainwashed to think like that. That was definitely the right thing to do, but . . .” Tom, born in 1969, summed up this sentiment, his hushed voice and uneasy look revealing his discomfort with admitting his conflicted emotions.
It went all but unnoticed that some aspects of World War II were missing from the history lessons altogether. Not one person recalled being told about the impact of World War II on the German civilian population, the bombing of German cities, or the expulsions from Eastern Europe. Before we were scheduled to meet for our first interview, Nora, born in 1959, went on the internet to look at photos of her hometown in 1945. She could not recall ever having seen images of her city in ruins before: “During Heimatkunde [local history and geography] lessons at school, we talked about rocks and things like that, but not about the destruction. Maybe they did not want to burden us kids with these things. But those photos of the destroyed city, I have the sense that I saw them for the first time last week.”
Leafing through around 50 of the 100 to 150 different history books that were used in West German schools between 1949 and 2000, historian Bodo von Borries (2004) found that World War II took up on average about twenty pages, with a separate chapter on the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust. Only one textbook used in schools in the 1970s and 1980s included some information about the bombing of German cities, and it also excluded information about the expulsions from the East and the violence inflicted by the Red Army in 1944–45. The calculations about German war casualties were “rather conservative” (Borries 2004, 403). As in other areas of society, in history books and history lessons the suffering of the German majority population took a step back to leave space for the consideration of the immeasurable pain the Germans had inflicted on their victims.
Most Kriegsenkel I interviewed firmly subscribed to the version of the past they had been inculcated in. They had deeply internalized the moral responsibility for their forebears’ crimes and commitment to the Holocaust memory. The wartime suffering of their own families and of the German population more broadly remained in the background. Even if they may have had some factual knowledge, it did not fully reach their consciousness.
“ZERO HOUR” AND THE “VICTORS OF HISTORY”: WORLD WAR II IN EAST GERMAN PUBLIC MEMORY
In East Germany, public narratives about World War II and National Socialism diverged from those of the West, and a substantially different view of the past was relayed to the population. However, while “victim” and “perpetrator” binaries were demarcated quite differently, they also ended up with a similar double phenomenon as in the early postwar period in the West: an even more pronounced exculpation from the crimes of the Nazi regime on the one hand coupled with a silencing of significant aspects of wartime suffering of the majority population on the other. Unlike in the West, however, the East German government upheld the same view of the past until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The GDR was founded in October 1949, a few months after its West German counterpart. The new government under Walter Ulbricht comprised members of the former Communist Party. Persecuted by the Nazis, they had fled to the Soviet Union before the war and were now returning from exile as the self-proclaimed “victors of history” (Danyel 1995a, 32). The new political elite understood themselves as the heirs of the communist resistance against Hitler, directly treading in the footsteps of the victims and not the perpetrators of the Nazi regime. National Socialism was interpreted as an expression of fascist class rule against which the communists had battled. The memory of those who had died in the antifascist resistance took center stage in commemorative practices (Danyel 1995b). People like Ernst Thälmann, a communist leader imprisoned by the Nazis and killed in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944, were upheld as paragons of virtue to inspire current and future generations. At the end of the induction ceremony for the Young Pioneers, the Communist youth organization, each child received a red flag symbolically soaked with the blood of the many victims of the struggle for socialism (Moeller 2005).
With a founding myth constructed around communist martyrdom and the final victory over the Nazi regime, the East German government consequently rejected all political responsibility for Hitler’s rise to power and the crimes committed in the German name. Although the East Germans in no way denied the Holocaust, the Jewish victims were often subsumed under the general term of “victims of fascism” (Danyel 1995b), and the Holocaust tended to be cited as a particularly cruel expression of fascist terror, without any distinctive significance or singularity. The end of the war was celebrated as “Stunde Null” (“Zero Hour”), the beginning of a new era with a clean slate, looking toward a brighter, socialist future. As in the West, the focus here too was on recovering economically and building a new and better society from the ruins. The gaze was firmly fixed on the future, not dwelling on the past. As in the West, people were expected to come to terms with the physical and emotional damage left by the war largely on their own.
However, as was the case in the Federal Republic immediately after the war, the general population was granted a certain measure of victimhood, portrayed here too as a group of powerless victims, in this case of “fascist seduction” (Moller 2003, 46). People were now given the chance to erase these past mistakes and to contribute to the building of the new Germany. The denazification measures were abandoned even more swiftly than in the other part of the country. The GDR saw itself as the “better Germany.” It firmly pushed the main responsibility for World War II to the West, an alleged “paradise for war criminals” where fascism had lived on beyond 1945 (Moller 2003, 54). This view safely placed the perpetrators on the other side of the wall and exonerated the East German population from much of the collective guilt and responsibility that was so prominent in the West from the late 1960s. “We really did not work through what happened. It was always the Nazis who started the war, but it was never mentioned that the Nazis might also have been your neighbors. Millions of people had been ecstatic about Hitler, but suddenly everyone was an antifascist,” Daniel, one of my East German interviewees, born in 1964, reflected.
From the beginning of the 1950s, annual ceremonies were held in Dresden, where in February 1945 American and British air raids had destroyed most of the city and had killed twenty-five thousand people. In the spirit of the Cold War, the bombing was explained as proof of the aggressiveness of the Western Allies promoting their fascist-imperialist interests. Susanne Vees-Gulani (2008) argues that by portraying bombing as a fascist act, East Germany equated the destruction of Dresden with the crimes committed under the Nazi regime and strengthened the idea of East Germans as victims.
There was a stern official silencing of all violence attributed to the Soviet Army. The soldiers of the Red Army were presented as having come to East Germany as communist heroes, friends, and liberators of the people. German expellees (Vertriebene) from the East were labeled more neutrally as “resettlers” (Umsiedler). In their speeches GDR politicians completely denied the fact that the Red Army had often forced those “resettlers” to leave their homes at the end of the war. Similarly, they did not mention the rape of German women and girls (Niven 2006b). These were not minor issues: around 4 million people had been “resettled” in East Germany after the war (Moeller 1996), and most of the estimated 1.9 million rapes were attributed to the Red Army (Radebold 2008). In my interviews with East Germans, the “communist brothers” were frequently referred to with cynicism and palpable anger.
Connerton (2008, 60) would probably label both the rejection of all responsibility for the rise and crimes of the Hitler regime and the official silencing of the violence of the Soviet Army as examples of “repressive erasures.” While the government of the GDR selected certain things to be remembered, others were edited out of the master historical narrative, as was the case in the West. Although in the Federal Republic questions of how to “master the past” (Herf 1997) continued to be the topic of public debates and the attitudes toward the Third Reich and the Holocaust changed quite radically from the late 1960s, in East Germany the interpretations of National Socialism and World War II remained stable. The decades from the mid-1950s until the collapse of the GDR in 1989 are described as a time of “calcification” (“Versteinerung”; Moller 2003, 50) of the antifascist culture of commemoration.
However, in contrast to the official culture of commemoration relayed by politicians and the state media, a kind of “counter-memory movement” (Moller 2003, 55) emerged in East German literature. Widely read books like Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of childhood, 1976) or Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner (Jakob the Liar, 1969) challenged the official party line and asked critical questions about the true relationship between the population and its support for National Socialism.5
“We Did Not Have Any Nazis Here”: History Lessons in the 1970s and 1980s, East German Style
The East German state centrally managed and controlled the education system. From 1963 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Margot Honecker, the wife of Erich Honecker—chair of the SED Central Committee and head of state—was the minister for education. School curricula were uniform across the country. All students were expected to learn the same content. Only one history book was used up to year ten across the state, and it was revised regularly every eight years (Borries 2004). Political socialization was an integral part of education and of at least equal importance as the transmission of factual knowledge.6 It is therefore not surprising that what my East German interviewees remembered from their history classes mirrored the official narrative. Students learned about the “imperialists” who had started the war, the communist resistance against Hitler, and the “liberation from fascist rule” by the “communist heroes.” Karoline, born in 1967, explained: “We were told that it had all been very terrible, but now it was over. The Russians were our friends, they had saved us, and now everything was fine. It did not impress me much, but it did have something comforting. It was good that things had turned out this way.”
Children and teenagers in the East also learned about the horrors of the Holocaust, and their teachers strongly condemned the Nazi crimes. Although they were as shocked by the images as their Western counterparts, many reported feeling distant from the crimes committed by their forebears. On the one hand, this distance arose because history was often taught only in broad and abstract ideological terms without any personal stories to which the students could relate. On the other hand, children in the GDR were brought up in the consciousness that they were the heirs of those heroic antifascist Germans, who had stood on the “right side of history.” Christiane, born in 1966, remembered: “We watched those Russian war movies, where the Germans were always the bad guys, but that had nothing to do with me of course, because I was in the East.”
Analyzing the content of school history books in both German states, Borries (2004) revealed that in the GDR the war took up around fifty pages—many more than in the West. Here, the focus was on the fight between the “imperialists” and the “socialists” and Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union. The exploitation and genocide committed against the Russian people were described in grueling detail. The main responsibility, however, it was argued, lay with the Nazi regime, the upper class, and the capitalists, and not with the German population or the common soldiers. As a consequence, my East German interviewees did not absorb the same sense of shame and responsibility in relation to the war and Holocaust. Children going to school in the East were often under the impression that all the Nazis had fled to live in the West. It did not occur to them that their grandparents might have supported the Nazi Party. The East German Kriegsenkel I met seemed to carry less collective guilt as a result. “We knew that the Germans had started the war,” Cornelia, born in 1964, said, “but the communists were the good guys of course, they were against the Nazis, and they had neither started nor continued the war, and so the question of guilt simply did not exist.” For her, and for many others who grew up on the other side of the wall, those issues only came to consciousness after 1989.
While not feeling morally responsible, Cornelia was still emotionally affected by the Holocaust. More routinely than their West German counterparts, East German schoolchildren visited concentration camps on school excursions or for working bees to learn about those who had died in the antifascist struggle, a struggle that the younger generation was enlisted to continue. Cornelia recalled how as a relatively young child she had visited the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camps and had watched documentaries about the Holocaust. As for many other teenagers, East and West, the experience was overwhelming, and the teachers did not provide any emotional support or space for discussion. Cornelia felt left alone with “all this horror and all these images.”
Yet history lessons, documentaries, and official speeches were not the only sources of information about the past. Although it was illegal, many East Germans watched West German TV programs at home and consequently had access to differing views on the history of World War II. However, I still had the impression that most of the people I spoke to at the time accepted the GDR interpretation of past events. Other research comes to different conclusions. In 1987, a group of researchers from an East German institute in Leipzig anonymously questioned around two thousand East Germans (roughly the same age as my interviewees) about their views on National Socialism and World War II. They found that some of the responses strikingly contradicted the state-sanctioned narrative promoted by the schools. The team believed that the political education of the GDR had been ineffective. Its content had not been internalized, nor did it have much credibility in the eyes of young people (Moller 2003, 85–87).
Martin, born in 1966, fits with these findings, but he was the exception in my group. History lessons at school were “too stupid, too black and white” to convince Martin’s questioning teenage mind. He did not buy the teachers’ claim that all soldiers were fascists or Nazis, because his grandfather had been with the Wehrmacht and he, as far as Martin knew, was neither. Martin also had access to other sources of historical information from an early age. His father brought home history books from the university library for him to read. These books, which were printed in the West and were not publicly available in the GDR, painted a different picture of the war, a picture that Martin found more sophisticated and more believable.7
There was one particular topic on which his peers also questioned the official version of history presented by their teachers: when it came to the image of the Soviets as friends and liberators. The vast majority of rapes and other acts of violence the Red Army committed at the end of the war had happened in the territory that later became the GDR. Knowledge about these crimes circulated among friends and family, quietly and behind closed doors. A number of East German Kriegsenkel had an awareness of what had happened to the women in their neighborhoods or families. They found the official image of the virtuous communist heroes confusing at best. Parents would strongly impart to their children that these topics had to be kept in private and should not be mentioned outside the walls of the family home.
Although in the West students could in theory have questioned the way World War II was presented in class (though no one I talked to actually did), voicing dissent was riskier in the East. The official version could not be challenged without consequences. Alfred (born in 1963) recalled that one of his friends had dared to mention that Russian soldiers had raped his grandmother and that the boy had been “taken away” by the teacher. His sister Anna (born in 1965) was absolutely certain that had she raised her hand in history class to ask “What about all that injustice the Russians have done to us?” their parents would have gotten arrested. Aspects of German wartime suffering, which did not fit into the officially sanctioned narrative, were excluded from East German history classes as much as from West German ones. As in the broader East German community, this exclusion mainly concerned topics around the violence of the Red Army and the expulsions from Eastern Europe. Other topics, like the bombing of East German cities toward the end of the war, were not as tabooed and silenced. However, the information often remained abstract and intangible. A number of my interviewees confirmed that, growing up in the East, they had no real awareness of German civilian or military casualties. Daniel remembered how around the age of twenty he visited a war memorial and was stunned by the sudden realization that in fact “a lot of German civilians had perished, and not just Wehrmacht soldiers. Suddenly it became clear that this was not just a case of the ‘bad Nazis’ and the ‘good Russians’ but that this was my own history too.”
In summary, at the time the Kriegsenkel went to school and started to read books and to watch TV in the 1970s and 1980s, what they learned about the war, National Socialism, and the Holocaust was quite uniform and prescriptive in both German states. Looking back thirty years later, people from either side of the wall said that they had largely accepted and internalized the narratives about World War II they were presented with. While different messages were relayed in terms of German perpetratorship, both parts of the country were united in that most aspects of German wartime suffering were either excluded from the curriculum altogether or marginalized to an extent that they did not leave any lasting impressions. This erasure did not encourage students to integrate aspects of German victimhood in their understanding of World War II history. Most of my interviewees, whether they were born in the East or in the West, had no awareness of that at all. This lack of knowledge explains the surprise about the discovery of the Kriegsenkel topic in recent years.
OPENING THE SPACE: THE REEMERGENCE OF GERMAN WARTIME SUFFERING IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the GDR in 1989, the era of state antifascism expired as well. From 1990 the memory culture of the newly reunified Germany continued in line with the established West German precept without much public debate.
One significant event of the 1990s was the War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition, which was touring Germany and Austria from 1995 to 1999 and then again from 2001 (Heer and Stiftung Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1997). The exhibition gave rise to heated debates because it showed that responsibility for the mass murder of the Jewish population did not simply lie with an inner circle around Hitler and the special units of the SS but that the regular soldiers of the Wehrmacht had taken an active part in these crimes. Millions visited the exhibition or read about it in the media, and many were shocked by its message. A second milestone was the debate surrounding Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Goldhagen suggested that antisemitism had been widespread among ordinary Germans and that they had killed Jews willingly, rather than under compulsion. Both of these events stressed German perpetratorship, widening its space within the broad population rather than allowing the crimes to be externalized to a small clique of Nazis.8
While the general focus and tone of official commemorations remained the same, with the beginning of the new millennium a flood of memories of German wartime suffering suddenly appeared in the media, books, movies, and TV documentaries. The main works setting this new trend include Günther Grass’s novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), which tells the story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a passenger ship carrying German refugees in 1945. Five thousand people lost their lives when a Russian submarine torpedoed the ship in the Baltic Sea. There were also Winfried G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (2001, published in English in 1999 as On the Natural History of Destruction) and Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire, 2002), both turning public attention to the carpet-bombing of German cities and its devastating effect on the population. Lastly, the anonymous diary Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin, 2003) gives a painfully laconic autobiographical account of the systematic rape of German women by Russian soldiers in occupied Berlin in 1945. In Crabwalk, Grass claims that tales of German wartime suffering had long been excluded from a mainstream commemorative culture, allowing Germans to express collective shame only for what the Nazis had done to others but leaving them no space to mourn their own losses. Aleida Assmann (2006b) argues that while the exclusion of the victim narrative was never as complete as Grass stated, the emotional intensity of these accounts and their wide social resonance across different generations were indeed unprecedented.
One major contributing factor was that with the German reunification in 1990, the Cold War era had come to a conclusion. The new, less antagonistic international political landscape allowed for a move beyond the entrenched victim-perpetrator dichotomies (Moeller 2005). Simultaneously, worldwide reconciliation movements and truth commissions in countries such as South Africa, Peru, and Chile also aimed to transcend these narrow definitions and treaded new paths in an attempt to heal past violence. Besides, it was also a time when members of the war generation were retiring from their professional careers and were starting to look back on their lives. Memories that had previously been pushed aside reemerged with unprecedented emotional intensity. Social memory, as Aleida Assmann (2006b) notes, follows biological rhythms: where one generation is superseded by the next and in the liminal phase, memories can assert themselves with great emphasis. As the last generation of eyewitnesses came closer to passing away, personal memories of wartime survival and hardship that had been confined to the space of private conversations were swept into the public sphere and mediatized on a large scale. While the appropriateness of speaking of German suffering continued to be debated among historians and intellectuals (see, for example, Diner 2003), there was a clear sense that the taboo that had surrounded the topic in previous decades had been lifted. A space had cautiously opened up, in which it had become more acceptable to publicly discuss the traumatic impact of World War II on the German majority population without immediately causing suspicion of minimizing the Holocaust.
DISCOVERING THE ENDURING PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF THE WAR: THE “WAR CHILDREN” AND THE “WAR GRANDCHILDREN” MOVEMENTS
In the early 2000s Germans first started to systematically reflect on the possible long-term impact of traumatic war experiences on the majority population. In the late 1990s psychoanalysts and psychotherapists had increasingly noticed occurrences of burnout, depression, flashbacks, panic attacks, and other anxiety disorders among their elderly patients. These people had been children at the time of World War II, and many of them were already in their sixties when they first showed (or sought help for) psychological symptoms. Many had led unremarkable lives until then and were retiring from successful professional careers. Psychoanalyst Hartmut Radebold was the first to come to the conclusion that childhood experiences of war could be the cause behind the psychological disorders among his elderly patients (Radebold 2000, 2004, 2005, 2008). They were labeled the Kriegskinder (war children) generation.
Until that time, psychotherapists did not ask their patients about the war or National Socialism at all (Ermann 2007; Heimannsberg and Schmidt 1992; Radebold 2012). Psychiatrist Philipp Kuwert, who offers therapy to German seniors suffering from war trauma, commented in 2008: “We’re only now able to examine the suffering and listen to what people here went through without being suspected of trivializing the Holocaust . . . If I had done this work 20 years ago I would probably have needed a bodyguard” (in Crossland 2008). Historians, psychologists, and other social scientists began to investigate the issue of war childhoods—often their own. The growing interest culminated in the 2005 war children convention in Frankfurt am Main. Around six hundred people attended to discuss their findings and share personal stories. The meeting marked the beginning of the Kriegskinder’s emergence as a distinctive and recognized generation (Wierling 2010). A wealth of studies on the topic emerged in the following years (for example, Ermann 2007; Grundmann, Hoffmeister, and Knoth 2009; Hondrich 2011; Janus 2006; Radebold 2000, 2004, 2005; Seegers and Reulecke 2009). The overarching claim is that, largely unnoticed until that time, the difficult experiences of World War II had a major and lasting impact on a person’s biography. These war children are the parents of my interviewees, the mothers and fathers of my generation. How growing up with them affected the generation of the Kriegsenkel—the war grandchildren—was the question raised in a subsequent wave of psychological exploration.
As mentioned in the introduction, journalists Anne-Ev Ustorf and Sabine Bode published the first popular books about the Kriegsenkel generation in 2008 and 2009. They introduce the life histories of Germans born roughly between 1955 and 1975 to parents and grandparents who experienced the war firsthand. The authors portray them in their struggles to find a clear direction in life and a sense of identity and belonging. They suffer from depression, burnout, and anxiety disorders; some feel blocked in their careers, and others have a general sense of going through life with the hand brake on. Their problems are set in direct relation to their families’ unresolved war experiences, which are implied to be at the root of these psychological issues. Ustorf’s and Bode’s books were the first to raise the topic of the transgenerational impact of World War II, and a number of newspaper articles and radio programs covered the issue while I was in Berlin. Since then a small war grandchildren movement has gained some momentum. Interested people now meet in support groups that have formed in many German cities, while websites and Facebook groups provide information and networking opportunities. A number of therapists have gathered around the scene, offering weekend workshops and individual therapy to alleviate the problems resulting from a perceived transgenerational transmission of war experiences.
GERMANY IN 2012: THE END OF ALL TABOOS?
The Germany that I encountered in 2012 was noticeably more relaxed with its history and national identity than the country I had left twenty years earlier. That summer during the UEFA European Football Championship, Berlin was drowning in a sea of German flags. They were everywhere: on T-shirts, scarves, and hats; stuck to cars, trucks, and bicycles; and painted on people’s faces. Hundreds of thousands gathered around big public screens to cheer on the national team. President Joachim Gauck said in a newspaper interview that coming generations would be less burdened by the guilt of their forefathers and that it had now become possible again to feel pride in Germany’s political achievements (Hildebrandt and Di Lorenzo 2012). Stand-up comedians no longer shied away from impersonating Hitler to mock German tidiness and obsession with rules and regulations, and a store even had a comic book entitled Hipster Hitler on display. Timur Vermes (2012) published his best-selling satirical novel Er ist wieder da (Look who’s back). It features Adolf Hitler waking up on a park bench in modern-day Berlin, his clothes still drenched with the gasoline used to burn his body in 1945. Hitler becomes a star on TV and YouTube while, to everyone’s amusement, promoting very much the same ideas as in his last incarnation. All of the above would have been unthinkable two decades ago. None of the activists of the war grandchildren scene or the authors I interviewed were criticized for bringing the topic of transgenerational transmission of war trauma into the public sphere. Nor were there any attempts to instrumentalize their views to equate the suffering of the majority population with that of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Yet there were also signs that the reluctance to publicly speak about German victimhood had not completely disappeared and that the issue of how to “correctly” talk about the war was still emotionally charged. People still chose their words carefully in public, and a deeply engrained sense of discomfort remained. Journalist Merle Hilbk called it a kind of “knee-jerk reaction” that makes Germans automatically pull away from the subject.9
In addition, while it had become more acceptable to discuss German wartime suffering, the culture of commemoration as such had not changed. In 2010, historian Ulrike Jureit and sociologist Christian Schneider found that the past and in particular the Holocaust have to be remembered according to a rigid formula that is not open for debate, which they call “prescriptive remembering” (“Normiertes Erinnern,” Jureit and Schneider 2010, 33). This way of remembering, the authors claim, does not capture the entire range and complexity of experiences during the time of National Socialism and World War II, as it still excludes certain aspects of the past. For example, it prohibits the sharing of positive memories that some older people still have of everyday life under National Socialism. Jureit and Schneider conclude that the culture of commemoration is still inflexible, with sanctions imposed on those who deviate from the narrowly defined path.
At the same time, when I returned to Berlin in summer 2013, large posters with a photo of Auschwitz and the slogan “Late. But not too late! Operation Last Chance” accompanied me on my walks through the boiling hot city. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem was offering rewards of up to 25,000 euros for information that would help track down the last surviving war criminals so they could be put on trial before their deaths.10 The posters were a stark reminder that, close to seventy years after the end of World War II, many Holocaust victims were still waiting for the murderers of their families to be brought to justice.
The Germans I met were only slowly adapting to the new openness. They still felt more comfortable sharing their family stories in private or in the safe space of a support group rather than under the scrutiny of the public eye. However, in the more diverse public culture of 2012–13, the space had opened up wide enough to enable my interviewees to look back on their lives through new eyes, and to allow for experiences of wartime suffering and trauma to be discussed and integrated into their family histories. It was the first time that many of them had looked at their families from this angle: “It would never have occurred to me that my parents and grandparents were traumatized,” one woman said in an interview with Bremen’s Weserkurier, “and that had a lot to do with shame, because they belonged to the generation of the perpetrators” (Müller 2013). While some of my interviewees mentioned the long exclusion of German suffering from public discourses in passing, it was accepted as a moral necessity without any complaints or openly voiced resentment.
It may not be the end of all taboos. However, because of the passage of time and the changed political situation of a reunited Germany and Europe, many of the silences—from “humiliated silence” and “desire to forget” to “repressive erasure” (Connerton 2008)—that have characterized the public debates in Germany at different times in the postwar years have been revoked or softened. The last members of the eyewitness generation are encouraged to overcome their “desire to forget,” to break their “humiliated silence,” and share their memories of World War II with an interested public. While some restrictions in the culture of commemoration remain, the “repressive erasure” of German wartime suffering has been lifted.
The next chapter moves to the space of the German family to explore how the intergenerational communication about the war was shaped. It will show how public silences around German victimhood were compounded by silences in the private realm.
NOTES
1. Sönke Wortmann’s 2004 movie Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) gives an accurate impression of the conflicts that arose when a father suddenly returned to his family after the war and a long imprisonment in a Russian POW camp.
2. For a brief summary of the “historians’ debate” and its different positions, see Fischer and Lorenz, 2007, 238–40.
3. Gymnasium is a form of secondary school, which students attend from the age of ten to around nineteen, and which academically prepares students for university.
4. For an overview of the West German education system, see Jürgen Baumert, Kai S. Cortina, Achim Leschinsky, and Karl Ulrich Mayer, Das Bildungswesen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Strukturen und Entwicklungen im Überblick (2003).
5. Jurek Becker’s book follows the story of Jacob Heym in the ghetto of Łódź. He lies to his fellow inmates by pretending to possess a forbidden radio, which allegedly broadcasts information about the advancing Soviet Army, helping them to keep their hopes alive. In Kindheitsmuster Christa Wolf travels back to the small town in Poland where she grew up as part of a large family during World War II. From her memories, she pieces together the everyday life of a typical German family during the war, and she deconstructs the often-repeated myth that the population did not know anything about the Holocaust.
6. For an overview of the education system of the GDR, see Hubert Hettwer, Das Bildungswesen in der DDR: Strukturelle und inhaltliche Entwicklung seit 1945 (1976).
7. Martin suspected that his father might have had connections to the East German Ministry for State Security, the Staatssicherheit (commonly known as the Stasi), which could explain his privileged access to otherwise restricted information.
8. See Fischer and Lorenz, Lexikon der ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ in Deutschland (2007, 288–90), for a brief introduction to the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition and the same source, 295–97, for a summary of the Goldhagen debate.
9. Interview with Merle Hilbk, January 22, 2013.
10. See Operation: Last Chance. Accessed November 9, 2019. http://www.operationlastchance.org.
