The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method 9780226386522

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The Sins of the Fathers

Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning A series edited by Andreas Glaeser, William Mazzarella, William Sewell, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, and Lisa Wedeen Published in collaboration with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory http://ccct.uchicago.edu

Recent books in the series The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology by Nadia Abu El-Haj Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt by Hussein Ali Agrama Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism by Andreas Glaeser The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy by Andrea Muehlebach American Value: Migrants, Money, and Meaning in El Salvador and the United States by David Pedersen The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE by William M. Reddy Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua by Danilyn Rutherford

The Sins of  the Fathers: G e r m a n y, M e m o ry, M e t h o d

Jeffrey K. Olick

The University of  Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­38649-­2 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­38652-­2 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226386522.001.0001 Library of  Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Olick,  Jeffrey K., 1964– author. Title: The sins of the fathers : Germany, memory, method / Jeffrey K. Olick. Other titles: Chicago studies in practices of meaning. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Series: Chicago studies in practices of meaning | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016032598 | ISBN 9780226386492 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226386522 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Collective memory—Germany (West)—History. | Nationalism and collective memory—Germany (West) | Guilt and culture—Germany (West) | Germany (West)—History. | Germany (West)—Politics and government—1945–1990. ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface vii Part 1  Introduction 1 Placing Memory in Germany 2 The Sociology of  Collective Memory 3 Prologues: The Origins of  West German Memory

3 36 77

P a rt 2   T h e R e l i a b l e N at i o n 4 5 6 7 8

Bonn Is Not Weimar Expiation and Explanation Germany in the West The Return of the Repressed The Reliable Nation

113 138 161 178 203

P a rt 3   T h e M o r a l N at i o n 9 10 11 12

Seeds of  Change The Grand Coalition and the Wider World Social-­Liberal Guilt The Moral Nation

213 239 259 280

P a rt 4   T h e N o r m a l N at i o n 13 14 15 16 17

West Germany’s Normal Problems The New Conservatism The Politics of  History Beyond Bitburg The Normal Nation

289 322 343 371 389

vi  Contents

Part 5  Conclusions 18 Epilogues: Berlin Is Not Bonn 19 History, Memory, and Temporality Appendix 471 References 473 Index 497

397 426

Preface

It is quite common for authors to claim in prefaces that their books have been a long time coming. Suffice it to say that no one can accuse me of exaggerating when I claim this for the present book. I first began thinking about the issues addressed here more than twenty years ago, and I have been continually preoccupied with them even when other projects took me in rather different, though rarely entirely unrelated, directions. My continued preoccupation is due to the fact that the issues I am ultimately addressing through this case study are of the most general and significant sort: What responsibilities do nations bear for their histories? How much memory, and what kind, is appropriate, particularly when the past contains so much that is profoundly regrettable? How should we stand toward such pasts, both individually and collectively? These questions take on different contours in different times and places, but they are surely among the most durable we humans face as we try and try again to figure out how to live with ourselves and one another. Trying to answer these questions is a lifelong project indeed, or at least it has been so far. This book enjoys the benefit of other recent historical and interpretive scholarship on German memory. There are, for instance, numerous works that focus intently on memory in a particular period of German history (most often the Fifties—­e.g., Moeller 2003; Brochhagen 1992; Frei 1996; Kittel 1993; and perhaps not least an earlier book of mine [Olick 2005]). There are also other studies in addition to this one that investigate the operation of memory in particular social institutions, such as business (e.g., Wiesen 2001), historiography (e.g., Berg 2003), the diplomatic corps (Conze et al. 2010), intellectuals (e.g., Moses 2009; Müller 2000), and the media (e.g., Naumann 1998). Still others

viii  Preface

have expanded our knowledge by comparing National Socialism’s legacies in West Germany to its legacies elsewhere—­usually in East Germany (Herf 1997), but often also in Austria (Art 2006; Bergmann et al. 1995) and sometimes Europe more broadly (Lebow et al. 2006; Echternkamp and Martens 2010). This book seeks to add to those excellent works with a study of official speech and what I call the field of the state. In some ways, however, this accumulated scholarship has allowed me to dare something perhaps riskier than many monographs: namely, a “reading” of a record over a full fifty years (though in this, too, there are other examples— e.g., Kielmansegg 1989; Bude 1992; Jarausch 2006). My “reading,” moreover, has been motivated by my desire to address at least three relatively distinct literatures: cultural and historical sociology, the developing field of memory studies, and the historiography of Germany. As a sociologist, for instance, I have been particularly interested in arguing for the importance of the phenomena I study—­namely, commemoration and political symbolism—­against those inclined to dismiss these practices as “epiphenomenal,” as an older vocabulary used to put it. I have also sought to enhance sociology’s commitments and capabilities as an historical enterprise, and this has led me to an emphasis on mnemonic processes, and to a somewhat unusual strategy of presenting speakers’ struggles to make and remake meaning over time in all their discursive richness. As a memory scholar, I have of course also thought about the role of the past in the present in very particular ways, which I address using Jan Assmann’s term “mnemohistory.” This perspective from memory studies, moreover, has led me to see memory as being essential to answering the questions I have raised about history and meaning-­making within sociology. Being a memory scholar also entails a nearly continuous struggle with the continuities and discontinuities between history and memory, and with the different kinds of  work involved in studying each. This is one more way in which the narrative of German speech I present differs from other historical work on these issues. To borrow from Assmann’s description of mnemohistory, I am as interested in the “actuality” as in the “factuality” of the past, though I am also interested in how each of those things feeds into the other. Given my multiple audiences, I have thus undertaken not only a broad reading but also quite a bit of theoretical and methodological reflection, which will surely interest some readers more than others. But, again, it is the fascinating story of  German memory itself and the moral issues it raises that have kept me working. All other aims aside, my main motivation has been to recount the fascinating story I have found in my “data”: the actual words spoken by a state’s

Preface  ix

political leaders over the course of that state’s history, as they struggled to make sense of their past and to specify what obligations it entailed. Like any project with a long gestation, this one has benefited from conversations with many individuals, and from presentations in many institutional contexts. The most important of the latter was a 2006 manuscript workshop at the University of Chicago’s Wilder House with, among others, the editorial board of the Chicago Studies in the Practices of Meaning. That conversation redirected much of my work, and undoubtedly saved me from numerous errors. Thanks to Andreas Glaeser, Bill Sewell, Lisa Wedeen, Andy Abbott, Karin Knorr-­Cetina, and several others for their helpful advice at and after that meeting; I am particularly proud to have this book included in this important series. The other significant institutional context that has enabled my most recent efforts to complete this book is that of the sociology department at the University of  Virginia, which has, over the past decade, been a nurturing scholarly home for me. I am grateful not only to my colleagues in the department, but to many friends around “grounds,” as well as to the administration of the college, for providing a climate that values old-­fashioned scholarship, even when it comes slowly. While there are surely many individuals I should acknowledge were my memory better, I am hesitant to try to include everyone, because of the risk of accidentally missing some among the many with whom I have discussed my work over so many years. Instead, here I would like to single out just a few crucially important individuals who affected this book most directly—­without, of course, holding them in any way accountable for any of its weaknesses. As already mentioned, Andreas Glaeser led the Chicago workshop and helped this book toward publication. I am grateful for his support and inspiration. In the realm of steadfast champion, there has been none greater for me than the wonderful Barry Schwartz—­mentor, friend, exemplar. Daniel Levy is by now one of my very oldest and closest friends; he was there at my first “job talk” in 1993 and through my entire career as a comrade-­in-­arms, and he has continuously helped me with this book and so many other things. More recently, though by now also for quite a while, my former student and now coauthor, colleague, and friend Christina Simko has read and reread the manuscript countless times, and has given me essential courage when it was desperately needed, for which I am profoundly grateful. Others whose counsel has helped this project in various of its incarnations include Guenther Roth, Priscilla Ferguson, Allan Silver, Wendell Bell, Juan Linz, Robin Wagner-­Pacifici, Robert Moeller, Krishan Kumar, Kai Erikson, Vered Vinitzky-­Seroussi, Nachman Ben-­Yehuda,

x  Preface

and Dirk Moses, among so many others. Thanks go as well to Claire Maiers and Daniel Wurzer for excellent research assistance. Last but not least, like so many others, I have benefited from the tireless support and advocacy of the inimitable Doug Mitchell, without whom American sociology would surely be a much lesser enterprise than it is, just as surely as I have set records for trying his patience. Thank you, Doug! The entire team at the University of Chicago Press has helped enormously on the long road of, as Doug puts it with a wink, “bookmaking.” Doug’s assistant, Kyle Wagner, was a great help with crucial details. Very significantly, anyone holding this book should be even more grateful than I am—­and I am extremely grateful—­to Renaldo Migaldi, whose careful and sympathetic editing not only has saved me a great deal of embarrassment, but has made your experience as the reader much more felicitous than it might have been otherwise. I am lucky to say that this short list of people to whom I am grateful for their direct influence on this book barely scratches the surface of the group of people whose work and generosity has affected me in important ways over the years. As important as scholarly and professional context has been to my work on this book, nothing would have been possible or meaningful without my wife, Bettina Winckler, and my children, Hannah and Benjamin, who have played roles that cannot be put into words. Because of my children’s complex family heritage—­half  Jewish and half German—­this is in so many ways their book, even if it was begun before they were.

* Part 1 * Introduction

Chapter 1

Placing Memory in Germany

On November 10, 1988, the West German parliament assembled for a rare special commemorative session. Fifty years earlier, Nazi thugs had systematically rampaged through the streets of German cities and towns.1 With the bogus justification that a Jew had assassinated a German official in Paris, they looted, burned, and otherwise vandalized German-­Jewish businesses, homes, and places of worship, arresting many Jews, beating and killing others. Official anti-­Semitism was certainly not new in 1938 Germany, but the events of the so-­ called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) were a portentous demonstration of the regime’s brutal hatreds and violent potential. No longer could ordinary Germans honestly dismiss National Socialist rhetoric as a mere tactic or deny its human consequences. While perhaps nothing before the Holocaust could have led one to imagine such an eventuality, in retrospect (even noting all the distortions of hindsight) Kristallnacht appears as a major moment in an historical trajectory consummated in the gas chambers.2 Fifty years later, its anniversary provided an important opportunity for West Germany to symbolize its distance from that world long past. The ninth of November in 1938 was not, of course, the only one marked in German history. November 9 was also the anniversary of the revolution of 1918, as well as that of the “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923; in 1989 it would be the 1. These events took place through the night of  November 9 and early morning of  Novem­ ber 10. November 9 is conventionally taken as the anniversary, though for mundane reasons the 1988 commemoration took place on November 10. 2. For a detailed account of these events, see Read and Fisher (1990); Gilbert (2007).

4  Chapter One

day the Berlin Wall opened. Nor was 1988 the first time the events of 1938 had been commemorated in West Germany, though it was the first time that such a commemoration was to be stamped with the import of a ceremony in the Bundestag. Indeed, the previous few years in the Federal Republic had seen a number of important debates about the meaning of the Nazi past, and this 1988 commemoration of Kristallnacht succeeded several notable fortieth anniversaries of other events and preceded a flurry of fiftieths. However singular, commemorative events are always but moments in continually unfolding stories, and the context of the 1988 Kristallnacht ceremony included ongoing controversies about the present and future role of commemoration in German politics. While the governing Christian Democrats3 had originally opposed a special commemorative session of the parliament for the occasion, East German plans for a major ceremony led the West German conservatives to acquiesce to opposition proposals. One lesson of the contentious debates of the previous years—­indeed, of the entire history of the Federal Republic—­was that the West German leadership could not appear unwilling to acknowledge the Nazi past, to say nothing of letting the East Germans seem more willing to do so. But the Christian Democrats did not go so far as to accept a proposal of the Green Party, supported by a number of Social Democrats, to invite Heinz Galinski, chairman of the Central Council of  Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland), to speak. The Christian Democratic president of the Bundestag, Philipp Jenninger, wanted very much to deliver a major address, aspiring to match Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker’s worldwide triumph three years earlier, on the fortieth anniversary of  May 8, 1945, the day of Germany’s 3. The West German political landscape was dominated by three major political groupings (technically four parties): To the right of center, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU), together frequently designated as “black”; the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) in the center (though different elements within the FDP pushed the party farther left, others farther right), frequently designated as “yellow”; and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), frequently designated “red.” In the early years of the Federal Republic, a number of other parties played marginal roles, including the German Party (DP) on the right, and the Communist Party (KPD) on the left. Since the late 1970s, and with a dramatic increase in support and preparedness to participate in governing coalitions since 1989, the Green Party has played an important role as a pacifist and environmentalist party; and the Party of  Democratic Socialism (PDS)—­the remnant of the East German Communist Party—­has played a more limited role in national government, though sometimes a more extensive role in local government in formerly East German areas.

Placing Memory in Germany  5

surrender.4 Despite the wrangling, Jenninger had every expectation of success. He was an experienced—­and previously unchallenged—­speaker about the Nazi past, was well respected as a politician and leader, and was seeking to extend rather than to question the critically acclaimed commemorative solutions von Weizsäcker had offered in 1985. The 1988 ceremony opened with a song, featuring cantor and chorus, from the Kracow Ghetto Notebook by Yiddish poet Mordechai Gebirtig, followed by the Jewish actress Ida Ehre reading the poet Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge.” Jenninger then began his address: “Today we have come together in the Bundestag because not the victims, but rather we, in whose midst the crimes occurred, must remember and give an accounting for what we did; because we Germans want to come to an understanding of our past and of its lessons for our present and future politics.” Almost immediately, the catcalls began. Jenninger pleaded that he be allowed to continue, that “this dignified moment” be allowed to take place in its planned form. As he tried desperately to continue and grew ever more flustered, however, the challenges increased. Members of the Bundestag began to leave the chamber in protest. Others remained transfixed in their seats, some covering their faces with their hands. As Jenninger pushed ahead to detail the hopes and failures of “ordinary Germans” in the 1930s, one of the most spectacular disasters in the history of German commemoration unfolded. Within hours of the ceremony,  Jenninger submitted his resignation and retreated from public life.5 Outraged cries asking how this could have happened quickly gave way to more perplexed questions about what exactly had occurred. The deputies who had stormed out of the chamber expressed their outrage, but were hard pressed to specify what had caused it. As hours turned into days and weeks, commentators reflected on the actual text of  Jenninger’s speech, and began wondering what had gone wrong. Jenninger had said nothing substantively new about German history, nothing others had not already said in other contexts, though he had addressed German motivations in an unusually direct 4. On May 8, 1985, Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker gave a speech in a commemorative ceremony marking the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war. Following shortly after the disputed visit of US President Ronald Reagan to a military cemetery at Bitburg, and in the context of contentious public discussions of the place of the Nazi past in West German memory, von Weizsäcker’s speech was hailed from all sides of the political spectrum, internationally as well as domestically. I examine that speech in a later chapter. 5. Jenninger was later appointed ambassador to Austria, and subsequently to the Holy See.

6  Chapter One

manner.6 It was members of the Greens and of the Social Democrats who left the chamber—­not conservatives, who were more commonly associated with avoiding direct attention to German perpetration (though the left was always more likely to condemn what it saw as inadequate commemoration). But even Jenninger’s own party wasted no time accepting his resignation, and did not challenge the challenge: they were eager to show that they had learned the lessons of three years earlier, when US President Ronald Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had faced severe criticism for appearing to wipe out historical differences during a wreath-­laying ceremony at a military cemetery at Bitburg.7 Within several weeks, a loose consensus emerged that although something here had gone seriously wrong, it was not necessarily Jenninger’s fault, his poor oratorical performance aside.8

The Problems of the German Past The Jenninger scandal is but one moment in the extraordinarily complex history of German public memory. Many pages from now in this book, I offer a richer description of the event itself, and venture a reading of it. Here, the anecdote serves merely to sensitize us to the difficult issue of German 6. A recording of the speech can be heard at http://www.mediaculture-­online.de/fileadmin /mp3s/jenninger_rede.mp3. Some later commentators argued that in the speech,  Jenninger had reproduced a racist vision of the world by distinguishing so clearly between “we Germans” on the one hand and “Jews” on the other. But this was, in fact, a rather ordinary distinction in the history of  West German political rhetoric, in which it was common to refer to German citizens (Bürger) in contrast to Jewish “fellow citizens” (Mitbürger). Much of the discussion focused on whether Jenninger’s portrayal of ordinary German opinion had been sufficiently ironic. Listeners and analysts claimed that it wasn’t clear when Jenninger was merely characterizing typical views, and when he was legitimating them. Others focused on what they saw as the inappropriateness of quoting Heinrich Himmler in a commemorative speech. This sense of inappropriateness to the occasion is, as I discuss later, a more convincing explanation. 7. While Reagan’s visit to Bitburg in April 1985 was intended as a sign that even the memory of enmity with Germany was a thing of the past, the protests surrounding the event demonstrated that the exact opposite was true. The lessons of Bitburg, then, seemed to be that cere­ monies meant to “lay the past to rest” were more likely to backfire than to succeed. I examine the events and contexts of the Bitburg affair below. 8. A year later, in fact, Galinski’s successor as chairman of the Central Council of  Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, delivered a speech in the Frankfurt synogogue that contained large verbatim passages from Jenninger’s speech, yet did not provoke any reaction. This was Bubis’s effort to demonstrate that the reaction to Jenninger had been exaggerated (Klotz and Weigel 2001, 1999).

Placing Memory in Germany  7

commemoration: one pitted with mixed motives, conflicting demands, and vexed themes even fifty years on. How do you speak for a nation held account­ able not only for two devastating wars in one century, but for what many con­ sider to be the worst atrocity in human history? This is the dilemma every leader of the Federal Republic of Germany has faced.9 To explain the solutions they have offered is this book’s central goal. All nations, of course, have specific parts of their collective pasts they would prefer to pass over. The catalogue of failures, injustices, and horrors committed in the name of nations can create significant problems if openly acknowledged. National identity and political legitimacy always involve a precarious balance between remembering and forgetting. But nowhere has this problem been more potent than in the Federal Republic of Germany, where a difficult past has weighed heavily in virtually every moment and aspect of political life. As other nations face historical burdens from their past, moreover, they often look to Germany as a test of what happens when a society confronts difficult memories. Germany, one might say, has become the world’s canary in the mine of  historical consciousness, and our benchmark of spoiled identity.10

9. Designating the “Federal Republic of Germany” as the subject of this book’s analysis raises a number of issues. First, the Federal Republic has not been an unchanging entity. Founded in 1949 out of the Western zones of occupation, it expanded dramatically after the opening of the Berlin Wall to include the territory of the former German Democratic Republic. In other words, the Federal Republic of Germany was synonymous with West Germany only until 1990. Second, a number of studies have called for or conducted comparative analyses of collective memory in West Germany, East Germany, and Austria, as well as elsewhere in Europe (for instance, see Herf 1997; Leggewie 2011; and Lebow, Kansteiner, and Fogu 2006). And such comparisons are indeed useful: the comparative method can help us sort out various elements in social processes, though one must be wary of drawing too many theoretical generalities from such a small number of cases. Representations of the past in the Federal Republic were, of course, often aimed directly at representations of the past elsewhere; when that is the case, I draw attention to those comparative targets. But one must be careful not to slip too easily into cynically portraying representations of the past as mere tools in international competition (for an example of this, see Wolffssohn 1995). The point, though, is that any analysis of the Federal Republic of Germany (and certainly this one) is at least implicitly comparative, even if its focus is explicitly singular. 10. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) first coined the term “spoiled identity” to describe the stigmatized life of a person with a disability. Of course, Goffman devoted a significant portion of his attention to strategies of “covering,” “passing,” and repairing such identities, some of which we will see writ large in the German discourse as well.

8  Chapter One

Specifying the German Past But why has the past been a problem for German politicians? The answer seems obvious: It is because of the Holocaust. Saying this, however, raises more questions than it answers. For instance, “Holocaust” is not an unproblematic term: it already implies an interpretation, one different in sometimes important ways from other terms such as “Shoah,” “Final Solution,” or “Geno­ cide of the European Jews.” Each of these terms—­as well as others—­has its own history and its own distinctive historical, political, and even theological implications (see, for instance, Young 1988). This book is in part an examination of the origins and operations of these and other meanings in the German discourse. Obviously, some term is necessary for expository purposes, and I will indeed mostly use “Holocaust” (capitalized as the name of an event rather than being lowercased as a metaphorical description) because it is the term most commonly used in the historical literature and in popular culture. By doing so, however, I am not explicitly endorsing any particular interpretation—­ historical, political, or theological. Mostly, I am interested in which words Germans used with what implications. “Holocaust,” as we will see, was a relative latecomer to the German discourse. This fact leads directly to another important caveat to seeing the Holocaust as the obvious problem for German politicians. As Tony Kushner puts it, Historians and others have an enormous desire to believe that the liberation of the camps in spring 1945 exposed to the world the horrors of the Holocaust. In so doing they impose later perceptions on contemporary interpretations and provide a deceptively simple chronology on what was, in reality, a prolonged and complex process which is yet to be completed. The assumption that an immediate connection was made at the time of the liberation of the camps to what is known as the horrors of the Holocaust has rarely been checked by reference to detailed evidence. Surprise is therefore expressed when the reality turns out to be somewhat different from the expected pattern (1994, 213).

Why did Germans and others in the immediate postwar period not recognize what is now taken axiomatically as the most significant quality of the Nazi system—­the extermination of the Jews? This begs the question, as Kushner points out, of  how this belief became axiomatic. To inquire into that process is in no way to imply that the conclusion is incorrect, though assuming this axiom does block off other, often legitimate, areas of inquiry. The point is simply

Placing Memory in Germany  9

to avoid assuming what contemporaries did not, and to understand why they did not. To show that the current focus on the “Final Solution” as the centerpiece of German history was not always obvious, moreover, is not necessarily to condemn those who failed to see it as such, though there is much to condemn in the self-­centered focus that prevented many Germans from acknowledging great crimes and their complicity in them (Moeller 2003). The point is merely that the problems of the German past are indeed both older and broader than “the Holocaust.” In the first place, the burdensome legacy of the Second World War includes political authoritarianism and military aggression in addition to genocide. While the Holocaust is today the obvious referent when one speaks of “the German past,” the destruction of the European Jews was only one topic among many (and often not a very important one) in discussions of “the German problem” during and after the war. In the German discourse, “causal” explanations of  National Socialism have focused substantially on factors such as delayed modernization, problematic geography, legal inadequacies, economic crisis, nihilism, “massification,” secularization, and capitalism more generally, rather than on anti-­Semitism (for detailed analyses of these explanations, see Olick 2005 and Ayçoberry 1981). Sometimes speakers have elided the issues; sometimes they have kept them distinct. The reasons for doing so are complex, dictated by changing interests, identities, circumstances, and traditions. One feature of German public memory that is especially striking in retrospect, however, is how obliquely German speakers often approached “Auschwitz” and anti-­Semitism.11 As we will see, this is partly because they used other issues to stand in for the Holocaust. But it is also partly because the problems of the 11. A related point is a central feature of Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Execu­ tioners (1997), which garnered significant German and international notice. Goldhagen claimed, among other things, that the historical and social scientific literatures on National Socialism had paid insufficient attention to the role of anti-­Semitic ideology. Whatever the merits and deficits of  Goldhagen’s argument (and it has both), I find much more interesting the ways in which German politicians seemed to have avoided mentioning anti-­Semitism and the Holocaust directly. Demonstrating and explaining this avoidance is one of my central tasks here. See also Frank Stern (1992, 285–­86): “In looking at the various political declarations by parties, their predecessor organizations, committees and working groups in this early phase of postwar development [mainly 1945–­49], it is striking that, aside from some general statements against racism and in support of restitution, there is hardly any mention of crimes against the Jewish people, and the conclusions which should be drawn from this.”

10  Chapter One

Nazi past extend widely beyond industrial genocide and are often understood, more and less legitimately, in other terms.12 In the second place, in many popular as well as scholarly accounts, National Socialism and the Holocaust are seen as the end results of a long development running from Bismarck, if not earlier, along a preset historical track to the gates of Auschwitz.13 This kind of story, of course, risks misunderstanding the contingencies of history, the crucial turning points through which other outcomes were always possible. At very least, however, the questions of the German past are older than National Socialism, going back to the First World War and earlier. There has never been an American, British, or French question in the same way as there has long been a “German question.” “Germany?” Goethe and Schiller asked in Xenien as long ago as 1796 (and as writers on Germany have been quoting ever since). “But where does it lie? I don’t know where to find the country” (1833, 109). The enigma of German historical identity has rarely been easier in the years since then. Whatever special problems memory of the Nazi period has raised, they thus rest on an already problematic foun­ dation of national history and collective identity.14 “The Holocaust” symbolizes much, but not all, from the German past that troubles its present. As for whether the Holocaust is the “worst” atrocity in human history: This kind of claim makes sense from neither a social-­scientific nor a moral standpoint. From the first perspective, all events are unique; they are also “comparable” in the technical sense that we can only understand them by identifying what they do and do not share with other historical moments. And morally, can we really 12. A number of recent works have argued that the focus on memory of 1933–­45 has obscured our understanding of other mnemonic residues in German identity (see especially Confino 1997; Koshar 1998; and Wolfrum 1999). There is, of course, a difference between empirical arguments that other pasts besides National Socialism are significant parts of German histori­ cal consciousness, and normative arguments that other pasts should be significant. 13. One of the most famous versions of this sort of argument about the teleology of German history was Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht (1967), which spawned the so-­called “Fi­ scher Controversy.” While many Germans were willing to accept responsibility for the Second World War, conservative and other historians rejected Fischer’s charge of German responsibility for the First World War and the connections his work implied between nineteenth-­century militarism and National Socialism (see Moses 1975). 14. For an account that emphasizes the responsiveness of German identity to economic factors, see James (1989). For reflections on the idea of a German “special path” (Sonderweg), see Berger (1997) and Blackbourn and Eley (1984). A classical statement of the Sonderweg thesis is in Plessner (1998); see also Dahrendorf (1967).

Placing Memory in Germany  11

say there are any definitive criteria for measuring the suffering of one person or group against that of another? Mine is always worse than yours. Whether or not one accepts these arguments, however, does not bear on the question of how claims of uniqueness or comparative judgments of nature or degree work in political discourse—­which is my central topic here. When, where, and why do claims of uniqueness or relative horror emerge? Who advocates and who resists them? How are the claims discursively organized? On this last point, it is interesting to note that claims about the uniqueness of the Holocaust (which imply noncomparability) often go hand in hand with claims that the Holocaust is the “worst.” Can the Holocaust simultaneously be noncomparable and worse? Under what circumstances do such claims make sense? None of this, of course, is to discount concerns that efforts to deny the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust have often been part of arguments to avoid responsibility for remembering it. Comparison properly serves the task of understanding, but—­as we will see—­it can also improperly serve the goal of relativization (see Maier 1988). Placing Germany in Memory The question about which aspects of the past have been a problem for German politicians, however, leaves a deeper question unexamined: Why would politicians want to talk about the past in the first place? Why do national leaders use the past as a way to legitimate what they do? When, how, and why does historical imagery legitimate identity and policy? When and where are political leaders expected or even required to give an account of the past? Answering these questions is a particularly important prerequisite for understanding what happens when the past is more obviously toxic than useful, when the “normal” rules of commemoration—­whatever they may be—­do not seem to apply, as has certainly been the case in Germany since 1945. And lately it seems to have become the case in many other places as well (Olick 2007). Because the problems of the German past are simultaneously contemporary and historical, specific and general, so too must be our approach to them. We know, for instance, that many different social groups—­maybe even all social groups—­define and legitimate their collective identities and activities by telling stories of various kinds (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Ricoeur 1984; Wolin 1989; Bruner 1990; Carr 1991). But they have done so in different ways at different times and places. Before outlining the tasks and theses of the book, therefore, it is worth spending a few pages developing some historical perspective on, and general theory about, these issues.

12  Chapter One

Memory and Identity Storytelling about communal pasts appears to be an important feature of collective life generally. This is because communities, particularly those too large for every individual within them to interact with every other individual, are, as one well-­known formulation provocatively puts it, “imagined” (Anderson 2006). But here, “imagined” does not take its conventional sense of bogus or wishful (imaginary). Rather, to call a community “imagined” in this way is to refer to how it is cultural rather than natural: the cohesion of a group is a matter of collective imagining, of  how the group understands itself, rather than the direct expression of biology, geography, or some other feature of nature. And this is where historical narration plays its crucial role. The legitimacy of institutions is often based on their capacity to sustain what the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1986) has called “naturalizing analogies.” Our sense of collective identity, that is, depends in part on our belief that the identity in question is inevitable—­that it is a feature of the environment rather than a contingent human product, which seems to us so much more mutable and insecure. So we employ rhetorics that reflect our desire for permanence and security. Equipped with such an analogical base, Douglas writes, institutions appear as “part of the order of the universe and so are ready to stand as the grounds of argument” (1986, 52).15 One particularly potent form of naturalizing analogy is the organic metaphor of the social “body,” a style of “reasoning” that the Nazis promulgated, though by no means were they the first, or, unfortunately, the last. More common—­and in many ways more versatile—­than directly biological analogies are historical ones.16 Storytelling about collective pasts serves the same naturalizing purpose as organic metaphor because it places present arrangements at the end of a long process of development, making them just as unavoidable as

15. As another theorist put it, somewhat more dramatically, “People shoot each other every day over the question of labels. And yet, the very people who do so tend to deny that the issue is complex or puzzling or indeed anything but self-­evident” (Wallerstein 1987, 71). This sense of self-­evidence, however, is made and remade by generations of people through intentional and unintentional actions that contribute to collective imagination. It is not simply given, though previous solutions do constrain subsequent ones. 16. Organic metaphors, moreover, are historical as well. Bodies have lives; they are born and die, from “natural” or “unnatural” causes.

Placing Memory in Germany  13

natural facts.17 Although identity is a matter of shared interests at a particular time, that sharing depends in large part on a sense of common fate over time: interests always involve an understanding of the past and a projection of the future, and this is exactly what shared communal narratives provide (Gross 2000; Koselleck 1985). As one well-­known work puts it, “Communities . . . have a history—­in an important sense are constituted by their past—­and for this reason we can speak of a real community as a ‘community of memory,’ one that does not forget its past. In order not to forget the past, a community is involved in retelling its story, its constitutive narrative” (Bellah et al. 1989, 153). In the words of another prominent theorist, “Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (Hall 1996, 213). This is just another way of saying that identities are projects and practices that individuals and groups undertake, rather than essential and unchanging properties they possess. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre concludes, “all attempts to elucidate the notion of . . . identity independently of and in isolation from the notions of narrative . . . are [therefore] bound to fail” (1984, 218). All identities, personal and collective, are thus made in large part by telling and retelling stories. However, stories about the collective past are often even more compelling than this indicates, because they not only define our identities in relation to the past, but place us in the moral debt of previous gen­ erations. Not only does an historical narrative tell us that who we are is not a matter of present circumstance or personal choice; it tells us that we owe allegiance to that identity because it is an expensive gift paid for with the blood, sweat, and tears of preceding generations. Robert Bellah and his colleagues have thus written, “The stories that make up a tradition contain conceptions of character, of what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such a character” (1985, 153). Who “we” are depends on who “we” were, then, not 17. Despite the reference to Douglas, who is known as an anthropological functionalist, pointing out the connection between memory and identity does not necessarily imply or require a functionalist logic: historical narrations are not explained by the need for identity, nor are changes in the form or contents of such narrations explicable solely in terms of changes in those needs, though these conditions are not unrelated. One of the central arguments of the analysis that follows is that historical narrations have multiple sources, reflect divergent interests, have varying and unpredictable effects, sometimes lead and form identities while other times following and expressing them, and so on. They have, in other words, what cultural sociologists call a “relative autonomy” (e.g., Alexander 1990) which of course is not to say that they are completely divorced from their wider contexts.

14  Chapter One

only because we see ourselves as continuous with previous generations, but because the substance of that continuity provides us with moral lessons (though not necessarily those intended by the earlier generations). Storytelling about the past is thus not merely something communities do; it is, in important ways, what they are. Rather than being a mechanism that underwrites cohesion, storytelling about the past “per-­forms” the group by “re-­ member-­ing” it (this is one reason why storytelling is so often highly ritualized). This explains why Germany’s difficult past makes for Germany’s difficult pres­ ent: How do you generate legitimacy and identity when historical narrative—­a normal and seemingly necessary source of national identity—­raises more questions than it answers? Recognizing the nearly universal role of storytelling in human societies is clearly the beginning of understanding how societies hold together and, by the same token, how they fall apart, as well as why leaders invest so heavily in such narrative work. Nevertheless, we need to be careful not to treat this phenomenon—­collective storytelling—­as itself lacking a history. For not only do the stories change over time; storytelling itself changes as well (Le Goff 1992; Leroi-­Gourhan 1993; Matsuda 1996; Kern 2003). In order to understand the unique challenges Germany has faced and the ways in which it has shaped discourse elsewhere, it is thus important to place the German story within its historical context. For the apparent requirement that contemporary leaders address the past even when it is not a source of pride is the result of a set of developments long in the making. There are, of course, many aspects to the history of memory, and many determinants of the current forms that memory takes. Nevertheless, for my present purpose—­namely that of understanding the work contemporary politicians do to frame the past—­those forms connected with the rise of the nation-­state are most directly relevant. Memory and the Nation In the modern period, the stories with which we motivate and legitimate our collective activities often appear as particular kinds of stories, namely “histories”: ostensibly veridical narratives about events in the past (real or imagined), whose legacies shape, are claimed to shape, or are hoped to shape contemporary identity. And nation-­states—­or at least their advocates or representatives—­ are among the major purveyors of such “historical” narratives.18 According 18. The nineteenth-­century French historian Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” is widely considered the classical statement of this insight. On the one hand, Renan

Placing Memory in Germany  15

to contemporary theories of nationalism (Smith 1986; Deutsch 1966; Gellner 1983; Niethammer 1994; Koselleck 1985), accelerating changes resulting from industrialization and urbanization, increased capacities for abstract thought accompanying the spread of  literacy, the rise of empirical sciences, and the basic technology of print since the Middle Ages all contributed to a decline of religious worldviews and of traditional forms of authority, which depended on the uniformity of the past and on the potential immediacy of Final  Judgment. The problem with this existential and institutional decline, these theories point out, is that church eschatology—­the name for the doctrine of immediate or at least potentially immediate Final Judgment—­had provided security to individuals and principles of legitimacy for political authority. Since there was no real future, there was also no real past, and no doubt about one’s ultimate fate. But what could take the place of these older certainties that gave meaning and form to life? And would what took their place be up to the challenges? The answer was national identity and its actual or hoped-­for guardian: the nation-­state. According to Benedict Anderson (2006), the spread of print literacy and of capitalist commerce, combined with the decline of the religious worldview, led to the rise of  “historicizing” national identities. Using terms from the literary critic Walter Benjamin, Anderson argues that print capitalism created an “empty, homogeneous time,” a time that was everywhere the same, creating felt communities of fate across wide territories (2006, 22, 24). The transformation of temporality and the associated rise of interest in the past, according to Anderson, thus made it possible “to think the nation.” Spread through newspapers, novels, and schoolbooks, common cultures developed among people who would never meet face-­to-­face (Anderson 2006). Within these common cultures, shared stories of the past—­but stories that were general enough to appeal to the diverse experiences of everyone within a “national” territory—­were especially important. As Anthony Smith puts it, nationalism thus became “a surrogate religion which aims to overcome the sense of futility engendered by the removal of any vision of an existence after death, by linking individuals to persisting communities whose generations form indissoluble links in a chain of memories and identities” (1986, 176). The modern state, which derived its legitimacy from its claim to embody the nation, thus took over a much more writes, “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of  ] nationality” (Bhabha 1990, 11). On the other hand, he adds, “The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion . . . A heroic past, great men, glory . . . this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea.”

16  Chapter One

substantial responsibility for collective meanings than its predecessors had borne, and depended much more directly for its success upon doing so. Indeed, nation-­states in the nineteenth century sponsored a previously unimaginable variety of efforts to promote a sense of  historical continuity. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm has argued in a landmark study of what he called “invented tradition,” particularly after 1870, in conjunction with the emergence of mass politics, post-­Enlightenment political leaders “rediscovered the importance of irrational elements in the maintenance of the social fabric and the social order” (1983, 268). Many commentators therefore advocated the construction of new “civil religions.” With this goal of expanding moral commitments to the nation, successful leaders sought to imbue educational institutions with nationalistic content, to expand public ceremony, and to mass-­ produce public monuments. Nation-­states thus not only invented traditions to reassure their populations in times of rampant change; they invented “tradition” itself—­in contrast to the more automatic “custom”—­as the self-­conscious ideological commitment to pastness. These efforts produced the contrast Anderson has pointed out between “the objective modernity of nations in the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists” (2006, 5). Nationalist leaders often saw belief in the ancientness of identities as their deepest well of power and legitimacy. The universal “naturalizing analogies” and “constitutive narratives” discussed above thus took on a unique form—­and a particular urgency—­in European modernity. At their height in the nineteenth century, European states supported a new kind of memory—­a homogeneous memory of the nation—­at the same time as this new kind of memory made possible a new kind of state. At this point, the past became a central occupation and preoccupation for the state, not only providing substance for shared allegiance to it but legitimating the “empty, homogeneous time” of the state over other, less “progressive” temporalities. In this so-­called Age of Historicism, professional custodians of the past thus sought to ground identity through “objective” accounts of “the way it actually was,” as Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum for historians put it, while states and societies produced a wide variety of inquiries into and representations of the common past. In the nineteenth century, professional history worked in concert with the state to produce legitimating and motivating national identities, taking over many of the mnemonic functions previously performed by the priesthood. Not only did professional history supply collectivities with models from their pasts, but by narrating the past in terms of particular collectivities, such as German history or French history, it supported the idea that a single identity was paramount and unifying.

Placing Memory in Germany  17

Crisis of the Nation But history went through a decisive shift by the end of the nineteenth century. Since then, both nationalism and history have been in a fairly constant—­yet nonetheless varied—­state of crisis, if indeed it could really be argued that either had ever been in any other state. The nation-­state’s hope for man-­made foundations that could support the weight of existential insecurity in complexifying society was part of a developmental process already underway, a slippery slope entered upon with the first real challenge to the inviolability of natural law and the unity of individual and communal memory in oral cultures.19 From the Middle Ages on, Western society had become too complex to support one monolithic principle of  legitimation. Indeed, from the First World War on, the possibility of  “constitutive nar­ ratives”—­assertions of Bellah et al. notwithstanding—­has been under duress. As Benjamin put it in the account on which Anderson’s theory of nationalism was based, “Never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power” (1968, 84). The cataclysm of 1914–­18, in Benjamin’s account, left people not only without the conditions for telling stories but without communicable experiences to tell at all. According to many later theorists, the Holocaust produced an even more decisive “crisis of representation” in Western cultures. Saul Friedländer writes, “We are dealing with an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational categories, an ‘event at the limits’ ” (1992, 3). There is also an oft-­quoted remark of Theodor Adorno’s (2003) that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; doing so would in some way be to make it beautiful, no matter how melancholic the form. By extension, many have portrayed the Holocaust as challenging the validity of any totalizing view of  history. What unifying meaning is to be found there, or in its wake? Which of the great “metanarratives” of  Western civilization—­be they of progress or decline—­can contain such a horrendous set of events and experiences? How can one even begin to speak about such things, especially as a representative of the perpetrators’ nation? These sentiments have only increased in the contemporary era, in which our awareness of history’s complexity, as 19. By putting it this way—­by employing a “slippery slope” argument—­I do not mean to im­ ply historical inevitability. Rather, the point is merely to identify a trajectory, a form of  “path-­ dependency” (Mahoney 2000), making sense of a process that could have been derailed by countervalent tendencies that either lost out or never arose.

18  Chapter One

well as of the damage done in the name of nations, has proliferated, not least because of new commercial, communicative, and transnational formations. Germany and the Politics  of  Regret History’s challenges to German identity may thus be unique and powerful, but trouble with history, the foregoing makes clear, is part of the challenge of modern society more generally. “The past must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present,” Friedrich Nietzsche warned (1983, 62). But we also have George Santayana’s now hackneyed apothegm: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”(2011, 172).20 The crisis of memory that European societies have been experiencing has been taking place since at least the late nineteenth century, and arguably since the Renaissance. Our sense of progress has increased, and with it our sense of distance from the past; at the same time, we turn more and more to history for orientation. In the contemporary period, it seems, we are torn between being overwhelmed by the past and being hungry for more. The past is simultaneously our main source of identity and a “foreign country,” lost to us forever (Lowenthal 1985). And this situation has only gotten worse since the Holocaust, which for many observers has introduced or at least exacerbated a postmodern condition in which no received wisdom is beyond skepticism, and no “truth claim” is uncontested.21 We might quibble, of course, with the particular dating. The developmental pathways of contemporary justice norms, and of what I have elsewhere (Olick 2007) called “the politics of regret,” are indeed long and complex, and their history has been transformed through contingent events. Since at least 1945, I have argued in an earlier book (Olick 2007), and certainly since 1989, the question of how to deal with difficult pasts has clearly become a central issue on public agendas around the world. In recent years, many individuals and groups have demanded redress for perceived contemporary and historical wrongs against them. In the process, governments and societal elites have been forced to acknowledge collective historical misdeeds. The result has been a 20. “Who controls the past controls the future,” George Orwell wrote in the same vein (2003, 35). During the Historians’ Dispute of 1985–­86, Michael Stürmer, an historian and adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, remarked similarly that “in a land without history, whoever supplies memory, shapes concepts, and interprets the past will win the future” (quoted in Maier 1988, 44). 21. Paradoxically, though, “the Holocaust” is said to have shattered our faith in progress and knowledge, but is simultaneously held up as the ultimate solid line that relativists may not cross, lest they become deniers.

Placing Memory in Germany  19

proliferation of apologies and other acknowledgments of regret (e.g., Celermajer 2009; Lind 2008; Nobles 2008). Since 1989 we have seen an exponential expansion in such discussions, and in the pursuit of novel legal mechanisms for redress, reparations, and other forms of “transitional justice” (e.g., Kritz 1995; Trouillot 2000; Olick 2003; Teitel 2000; Hinton 2011; Hayner 2002). For better or worse, the contemporary political landscape thus appears to have entered a new period, or at least level, of political introspection (Lübbe 2002). Where earlier we celebrated our collective pasts and looked to them for models, today we appear to regret much of our remembered past, displaying an ever-­ growing willingness, even eagerness, to apologize and disavow. Ours is a guilty age, pervaded by a sense that we have much to atone for. This guilt, again, is not entirely new: Nietzsche already characterized the spread of Christian norms of regret culminating in the nineteenth century as a triumph of “slave morality”—­a worldview in which noble action is hindered by the resentments of history’s losers. More positively, we speak of a distinctive post-­Nuremberg ethos, and cite the Nuremberg tribunals as a landmark in the history of universal human rights, a notion that directs our attention to the legacies of historical injustice. But it does appear as if we have entered a new era for legitimacy, for memory, and for the relationship between them. Such developments are indeed quite understandable in light of new structural realities, or at least with the recognition of previously unacknowledged ones. More than ever, for instance, memory now seems to overflow the “container” of the nation-­state through processes of migration, multiplication, and dissent.22 Not everyone was a part, or a responsible part, of the nation, for instance, when the difficult history took place; alternate histories or perspectives 22. In an overview of scholarship on memory, Astrid Erll (2011) has identified three waves of “memory studies.” The first took place in the interwar period in the work of the sociolo­gist Maurice Halbwachs (1925), the art historian Aby Warburg (2008), and the psychologist Fred­ rick Bartlett (1995 [1932]), among others, each of whom independently theorized memory as a social or collective, rather than entirely individual, faculty. The second wave was exemplified by Pierre Nora’s (1984–­92) theory about the role of  what he called “lieux de mémoire” in national identities, as well as by the investigation of what Nora called “the memory-­nation nexus” more generally. The third wave, which has emerged in the last ten years, has included work by Erll herself, influenced in part by postcolonial theory, and work by scholars like Michael Rothberg (2009), who focuses on migration as a challenge to the clarity of methodological nationalism. It also includes the arguments of Assmann and Conrad (2010) and of Levy and Sznaider (2006) that memory of the Holocaust is an example of a new “global” or “cosmopolitan” memory. Taken together, this new scholarship is intent on showing how memory in the contemporary period transcends the “container” of the nation-­state.

20  Chapter One

on history demand equal or even greater attention than the story of the nation; and any unifying story must now begin from a recognition of difference rather than from a myth of common descent. To refuse to provide such acknowledgment can appear as an endorsement of earlier atrocities. Whatever the many aspects of these developments, however, it should be clear that the German challenges this book describes are a product of the contingent process just described, as well as a particularly powerful source of its latest transformations. Indeed, much of the vocabulary for the politics of regret is, for obvious reasons, German, or at least has originated in the context of German memory. How are we to evaluate the lessons of the German experience? For whom are they lessons? What kind of  lessons are they? And in what sense are lessons really possible? These are questions every leader of the Federal Republic has been required to answer, and it is this book’s task to understand how they have done so. They have also become questions for the world at large, not least because of what happened in Germany and how subsequent leaders, there and elsewhere, have responded to it. In this way, the history of German memory has been both a model of and a model for our times.23

T h e O rga n i z at i o n o f O f f i c i a l G e r m a n M e m o ry The discourse of memory in Germany has of course been a many and varied enterprise, comprising a multiplicity of voices in numerous different contexts. Politicians, journalists, artists, intellectuals, clergy, teachers, soldiers, and “ordinary” people alike have produced, received, and evaluated images of the Nazi past. In doing so, they have also at least implicitly drawn on and expressed theories about what role the past—­conceptualized as history, memory, tradition, heritage, culture, or otherwise—­should play in contemporary life.

23. For many years, the term Modell Deutschland, or model Germany, referred to the exem­ plary successes of the West German welfare state’s neocorporatist policies. West German institutional structures appeared as a model for other Western European states facing similar problems. As we will see, this idea was particularly dear to West German politicians in the 1970s, because it fit with their efforts to characterize West Germany as a “normal” state facing “normal” problems (see especially Markovits 1982). A new sense of Modell Deutschland has emerged in discussions of how to confront difficult pasts. Indeed, even Germany takes Germany as its model, claiming that it knew how to deal with the communist past after 1989 from its experiences of dealing with the Nazi past before 1989. For more on the mirror-­versus-­lamp view of collective memory, see Schwartz (2000).

Placing Memory in Germany  21

As we will see, there are distinct stakes, patterns, and predilections in different social fields. But despite awareness about the changing connection between memory and the nation, and despite the importance (which I outline in the next chapter) of recognizing how political memory is always in dialogue with other forms of memory, the purpose of this study is to understand how historical narration and imagery shape the work contemporary states do to legitimate themselves. This book will thus focus on “official” representations of the Nazi past in the Federal Republic of Germany, which have varied widely from leader to leader, occasion to occasion, and period to period. What have Germany’s leaders said about the Nazi past?24 How have they characterized it? What terms have they used? Under what circumstances have they confronted difficult implications of the past, and when—­and how—­have they sought to minimize or avoid them? Which solutions have been offered on which occasions and in what con­ texts, and how have these solutions changed over time? The pages that follow are the story of the official part of the German discourse about the Nazi past, which I treat as a problem of “collective memory,” a rather broad term that seems to have captured many people’s imaginations, both inside and outside of academia.25 Unfortunately, we don’t even have recourse here to the charge that public commentators have misused or overused a precise operational concept, for even among social scientists, the term merely sensitizes us to a wide range of problems.26 What parts of their pasts do different societies commemorate? What roles do these commemorations play in politics, and what roles does politics play in commemorations? How do personal memories (of  leaders and of ordinary people) shape and constrain official accounts, and how do official accounts shape and constrain personal ones? These are very general questions for the sociology of collective memory, the methodological and conceptual challenges of which I address in the next chapter. In regard to the German experience, however, my basic scientific goal 24. A list of chancellors and presidents of the Federal Republic of Germany appears in an appendix at the end of this book. 25. “Social memory studies” has emerged over the last few years as a vibrant yet relatively disorganized field of study. For reviews of the varieties of research on social memory, see Olick and Robbins (1998), Zelizer (1995), Hutton (1993), Irwin-­Zarecka (2007), and Schwartz (2000). See also footnote 22 above. 26. This distinction between operational and sensitizing concepts comes from Herbert Blumer (1969, 153–­82). Blumer saw “operational” concepts as delimiting fixed and measurable phenomena, and “sensitizing” concepts as guiding evolving fields of purview and being modes of perceiving general areas of social process.

22  Chapter One

is to explain why that nation’s leaders said what they said about the Nazi past, and why what they said changed over time. Before I develop a strategy for analyzing official or state-­sponsored memory, it may help to preview the various solutions to the problem of German memory that are present in the German discourse, all of which involve assumptions about the nature of the past being commemorated and about the importance of commemoration in politics. Roughly speaking, we can divide the discourse into three broad positions, which include evaluations of the German past as well as usually more implicit theories of the place of the past in present politics. These kinds of assessments appear again and again throughout the history of the Federal Republic, both in politics and other fields, though with different inflections at different times and in different places. My goal, again, is to understand how, when, and where such assessments develop. History, as we will see, is inevitably more complex than this preview suggests. 1. One position is what I call the “rule of  law” argument. Advocates of  this position argued that the Federal Republic of  Germany did all it could, perhaps even more than could have been expected, with the legacy of the Nazi past. Early leaders of the Federal Republic, from this perspective, were right not to force ordinary Germans to focus too much on their own historical culpability, since doing so would have alienated wide segments of the population and thus undermined support for the fledgling democracy. Institutional reform, rather than symbolic gesture, was the appropriate way to prove that the Federal Republic was a worthy member of the “community of nations.” Such reform included consistent Western orientation, aimed to allay fears that Germany would be an unreliable partner; acceptance of the legal burdens of the Third Reich, intended to establish West Germany’s right to represent the entire German nation; solid protection of individual and human rights, which in several cases went substantially beyond the constitutional guarantees of other Western democracies; a massive system of restitution to many (but not all) victims of the Third Reich; a huge and unprecedented series of payments to Israel (called an indemnity, for the costs to Israel of absorbing European refugees); and “sober” prosecution of selected individuals when the evidence was clear and the rights of the defendants could be protected, as the rule of  law demanded.27 All of these measures were seen—­both by advocates at the 27. This last point, about the “sober” nature of criminal prosecutions, is a contention of this position, not my own characterization. Indeed, there is an extensive critical literature attacking

Placing Memory in Germany  23

time and by commentators afterwards—­to have been major achievements of the West German government’s reorientation, and a vindication of early policies. Advocates of this position have praised the clarity of the government’s moral vision (and especially that of its first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer) by pointing to the fact that West German public opinion was consistently opposed to significant acceptance of responsibility for the past (see especially Merritt and Merritt 1970; Merritt 1995; and Moeller 2003).28 “Rule of  law” arguments have always figured prominently in official governmental narratives, though they were challenged by numerous fac­ tions in the 1950s, mainly by the New Left in the late Sixties and early Seventies, and by neoconservative “relativists” in the 1980s and following unification. This has also been a common view—­though frequently expressed in softer tones than other positions—­from middle-­of-­the-­road commentators over many years.29 Following this position, perpetual mem­ ory of the past is not an appropriate response to, or resource for, contem­ porary challenges as long as initial institutional residues have been dealt with. A little bit of memory, in this view, goes a long way. Symbolic gesture and ritual acknowledgment may be called for, but politics (even symbolic politics) is about the present and future, not about the past. 2. A second major position is summed up in the term “second guilt.” “Second guilt” is a Talmudic concept for what happens when an individual fails to expiate a misdeed. Advocates of this position have argued that the morally essential confrontation with the past has been condemnably absent from the history of  West Germany. Multiple failures to confront individual culpability and collective responsibility, according to this view, undermined West Germany’s purportedly democratic values and burdened subsequent generations with a legacy that has not been “worked through,” thus leaving Germany open to a “return of the repressed.” Ver­ sions of this position include a number of different accusations, among them the contention that the replacement of any serious antifascism with the government on exactly this point (see especially Brochhagen 1994 and Friedrich 2007). There is also significant controversy about how to characterize the reparations effort (see especially Pross 1988 and Goschler 1992, 2005). 28. Useful primary data are presented in the yearbooks of the Allensbach Institute for Pub­ lic Opinion Research (Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach). See also Noelle-­Neumann (1993). 29. Examples of this perspective include works by Grosser (1977), Steinbach (1981), Weber and Steinbach (1984), and Lübbe (1983).

24  Chapter One

a Cold War antitotalitarianism blurred distinctions between Nazis and the Soviet Union, thus implicitly justifying Hitler’s anti-­Bolshevism and vindicating the role of the German army (whose desperate fighting on the Eastern front in 1944–­45 gave time and space for the “Final Solution”); and the argument that the lackluster denazification of German politics and society, reintegration of former Nazis in all levels of government, and failure to pursue and prosecute war criminals provided a shaky legal and moral foundation for the second German democracy. Following a Marxist-­ inspired “fascism” theory, many advocates of this position have viewed the relationship between the Nazi period and the Federal Republic as one of continuity rather than the claimed “caesura” that supposedly marked 1945 as a new “zero hour” of German history.30 While this position was a key feature of many New Left arguments in the late Sixties and early Seventies, it was a recurrent view throughout the history of the Federal Republic.31 Here, memory is both an obligation and a resource, an enduring trauma and guide for future action. Indeed, such historical insight, it is sometimes claimed, prepares Germany even better than other nations, which have not faced history in the same way, for moral challenges in the present and the future.32 3. A third general argument—­the “relativism” approach—­begins from the position that the overall behavior of Germany during the Nazi period was essentially no different from that of many other nations in history. The Second World War was simply the latest and most brutal installment in a “European Civil War” (Europäischer Bürgerkrieg) which had been carried out across centuries. From this perspective, the systematic destruction of the Jews could be described as a kind of “industrial accident” (Betriebsunfall ) 30. As we will see, popular tropes included “Nullstunde (zero hour),” “Schlussstrich (final line),” and “caesura,” all indicating a decisive break between old and new. Usually, these terms refer to 1945, though sometimes to 1949, and sometimes even to 1955 (the end of the occupation). Asserting such a break, and locating it on one date or another is, of course, a loaded political emblem. For debates about periodization, see Broszat (1990). 31. Famous works in this tradition include Jaspers (1965), Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich (1975), Arendt (2003), Améry (1998), Hochhuth (1964), Haug (1987), many speeches by Gün­ ter Grass, and Giordano (1987) (whence the term “second guilt”). A more recent example is Schwann (1997). 32. A more recent version of this arrogant claim can be seen in the controversial poem by Nobel Prize-­winning writer Günter Grass, “Was Gesagt werden Muss” (What Must Be Said), which implied that Grass’s and Germany’s historical experience with memory made it uniquely able to judge Israel (Grass 2012).

Placing Memory in Germany  25

of modern civilization. Consequently, any and all demands that Germany “master” (bewältigen) or “work through” (aufarbeiten) the past have been nothing more than attempts to hold German sovereignty in escrow.33 Re­ quirements for a careful treatment of  Jewish issues, for prosecution of war criminals on the German side without equal attention to such Allied acts as the bombing of Dresden, and for worried observation of Germany’s military or of periodic outbreaks of ultra-­right-­wing violence were all nothing more than pure power politics by symbolic means, and as such were to be rejected. While this view has had its proponents throughout the Federal Republic’s history, these have usually remained marginal voices, or have gained attention only momentarily in specific contexts. A purportedly newly virulent strain of this position—­now often at the center rather than the periphery of discourse—­in both academic historiography and national politics beginning in the 1980s (and gaining steam after unification) concerned advocates of the other theories, particularly the “second guilt” position.34 “Relativists” are in a difficult situation with regard to the role of memory: they acknowledge, even celebrate, the power memory has to shape identity, but are therefore particularly concerned not to give “undue” weight to difficult pasts. In an age of declining legitimacy, challenged policy, and fissiparous solidarities, advocates of this position believe, memory must be positive to serve identity properly. These rubrics, of course, are merely composite summaries based on numer­ ous different arguments in numerous different contexts. Particular advocates—­ be they politicians, public commentators, or ordinary people—­have selected some elements from a position and excluded others, have frequently adopted elements from more than one, or taken one position in one context and another in a different context. Often formulated polemically, moreover, the arguments share overgeneralization as a common feature, and anecdote as a favored rhetorical principle. These positions, additionally, did not form a static structure 33. In a major controversy in late 1998, the writer Martin Walser referred to the Holocaust as a “moral cudgel” (Moralkeule; Klotz and Weigel 2001). In 1981, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt declared that West German foreign policy should no longer be “held hostage” to Auschwitz. These are only two examples of the many that are reported in the narrative that follows. 34. Charges against the “relativizing” position formed the core of the so-­called Historians’ Dispute of 1985–­86, as well as of recent debates about whether Germany can be an “unself-­ conscious” nation (a view expressed most prominently by Schwilk and Schacht, 1995).

26  Chapter One

of choices that speakers recombined but never really developed; while versions of each were part of the discourse throughout the history of the Federal Republic, the order of events and reflection on them, as we will see, mattered a great deal. Memory and the State More than just to preview the pages to come, my immediate purpose in identifying these positions here is to define and motivate the analytical approach to follow. Indeed, these summaries reveal an important and challenging feature of most discourse on German memory: Debates about German memory always involve both descriptive and evaluative elements, asking simultaneously how Germany dealt with the legacies of the Nazi past and whether these were the right choices. The discourse of German memory is, in this way, always simultaneously a discourse on previous German memory and one on the German past. As I will demonstrate in the following chapter, this is because every image of the past is always a reaction to earlier images of that past. This is one of the basic insights from recent work on collective memory on which I draw, and which this book seeks to develop. But how is the social scientist, rather than the moral philosopher or politi­ cal commentator, to approach such questions? Social-­scientific analysis of morally charged matters is, of course, always challenging. But the way description and evaluation have combined in German public discourse is particularly problematic. In Germany, as in similar discourses elsewhere, evaluation has often preceded description, and the description has rarely been more than sketchy, reproducing common myths about the record of German memory. Commentators have frequently offered broad generalizations about entire epochs and entire societies. These generalizations certainly have their uses, but they do not help the careful analyst make much sense of the historical record’s vast variety.35 Nor do they underwrite an historically accurate basis for contemporary evaluations. Time and again, for instance, commentators on the left (though not only on the left) referred to a “repression” of the past in the Fifties, and commentators

35. A new wave of  historiography focusing on the Fifties has begun to remedy this situation. Important works on particular memory policy issues in the fifties include Brochhagen (1994), Frei (1996), Diehl (2009), Hughes (1999), Herf (1997), and Stern (1992). An important survey of memory in the Bundestag throughout the history of the Federal Republic is Dubiel (1999).

Placing Memory in Germany  27

on the right referred to a national “self-­flagellation” in the Sixties.36 Terms such as “repression” and “self-­flagellation,” among many others, are obviously useful political weapons, the normal coin of public commentary. And yet, in fact, Konrad Adenauer (Christian Democratic chancellor from 1949 to 1963) spoke volumes more than did Willy Brandt (Social Democratic chancellor from 1969 to 1974) about the Nazi past. At the very least, therefore, we need to parse such characterizations on the basis of systematic empirical investigation. Doing so, of course, is much more than a quantitative affair. The historian Manfred Kittel (1993), for instance, was widely criticized (and rightly, I believe) for his attempt to refute the “second guilt” thesis by adducing numerous instances when the Nazi past was mentioned in the 1950s. Kittel maintains that there was no “silence.” Technically this is true. But just as silence can speak volumes, speaking volumes can also be a silence of sorts.37 One of this study’s unique challenges, therefore, is to disentangle the representation of an historical reality, the representation of an earlier representation of that reality, and the evaluative elements involved in each, to say nothing of our own stance toward those representations. This is first and foremost an empirical and scientific task, not a polemical one. Recognizing this, however, does not preclude pointing out untruths or contradictions when they appear. Indeed, such occurrences are often the heart of the matter. Focusing on official memory in these ways, again, does not imply that governmental memory is the only, or only important, kind of memory. As we will see, the very boundaries between official and other kinds of memory can be rather fluid, and have changed significantly over time. This book’s methodological approach is meant to capture this fluidity: How do images of the past affect what the German state does? How does memory—­of leaders, ordinary people, or institutions—­shape and constrain the governmental agenda? What is distinctive about the memory that the government offers, in contrast to the arts, academia, journalism, and public discourse? What are its implications? States govern memory, govern with it, and are governed by it. How are these processes related? How do they change? The focus on official memory neither ignores other types of memory nor treats them as unrelated. Nevertheless, as we will see, the problems of official or governmental memory are of a particular

36. One especially egregious polemic refers to Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“mastering the past”) as a “nose ring” (Mohler 1991). 37. Debates such as this, of course, often dissolve into semantic argument over such questions of “silence” versus “repression” (see Kittel 1993).

28  Chapter One

and, I will argue, particularly interesting kind, perhaps especially in an age that has seen a decline in the unique salience of the state. My major empirical goal is thus to provide a thorough descriptive account of the historical record of state-­sponsored or “official” memory. Given this, the substantive chapters can be read as a narrative history of German memory as well as a sociology of German memory or a theory of the politics of regret (outlines of which were presented above). My rigorous and sometimes exhaustive focus on actual words in actual contexts is a reaction to polemical arguments in German public debates, whose seriousness of purpose is often betrayed by casual historical method. My empirical effort, it is important to note, is not opposed to moral and political argument. It merely responds to the historical imprecision and generalization that is so often the hallmark of those kinds of engagement. My point is not to take a position in the discourse—­at least not from the beginning—­but to trace the different ways in which German leaders have constructed the issues in different moments and different contexts, and for different purposes. That said, my narrative presentation of the German discourse will also frequently include a sort of ideology critique. Again, this means pointing out contradictions, elisions, and evasions alongside alternate possibilities. Inevitably, my satisfaction or dissatisfaction with various solutions will come through. But I intend this to be the result of my historical description, not the reason for it. In the conclusion I explore the normative question of  what one could reasonably expect from political speech in the name of Germany after National Socialism and, by extension, after collective atrocities elsewhere. Lack of clarity about what is possible or desirable in face of the unspeakable, however, does not pre­ clude identifying deficits in what has been said. In light of the decline in the nation-­state’s singular authority noted above, such an inquiry as this into official national memory might seem rather old-­ fashioned: as already mentioned, the landscape of memory and authority has become, in the words of Michael Rothberg (2009), “multidirectional”—­ responding to the claims and counterclaims of subordinated groups, to the complex flows of migration and multiple identities, and, as theorists of cos­ mopolitanism (Beck 2006; Calhoun 2007, 2012; Levy and Sznaider 2005) have argued, transcending the nation-­state altogether in favor of global frameworks. Nevertheless, noting the decline of singular authority does not mean that the nation-­state’s authority has disappeared altogether, or that it no longer remains among the most important, or even is the most important, of the possible frameworks. Untangling the complexity of “official” memory is thus part and parcel of understanding where, when, why, and how these transformations

Placing Memory in Germany  29

have happened. They have happened at least in part because of the challenges of confronting a past like that of Germany.

T h e C e n t r a l i t y o f C o l l e c t i v e G u i lt My fundamental historical claim in this book will be that much of the state-­ sponsored memory in the Federal Republic of Germany has been organized as an effort to deny collective guilt, albeit in different ways at different times and in different contexts.38 This is, however, a rather complex claim. The very idea of collective guilt, after all, is conceptually ambiguous and historically problematic. One is never really sure what it is, such that it must be refuted. Offi­ cial refutations of collective guilt, moreover, can be responses to genuine perceptions in the population, to actual domestic and international accusations, or merely to the fear of such accusations (which in turn may indicate that the perception does exist in the population). How, then, should we understand this loaded issue? Varieties of Guilt First, guilt is not a simple concept. In one of the most important statements in the “guilt debate” (Schulddebatte) that took place in Germany between 1945 and 1947, for instance, the philosopher Karl Jaspers (1965 [1946]) distinguished among criminal, moral, political, and metaphysical guilt, each of which implicated different “perpetrators” and entailed different responsibilities.39 Less theoretically, denazification procedures imposed by the occupation 38. In an outstanding study of administrative approaches to the legacies of the Nazi past in the 1950s, Norbert Frei (1996) has advanced a similar thesis. Frei argues, moreover, that the administrative defense against collective guilt in the 1950s set the stage for a reaction in the 1960s. I wholeheartedly agree with Frei’s characterization of West German memory as highly path-­dependent (I explain this concept in chapter 2). But whereas Frei argues that the 1960s produced a repudiation of the repudiation of collective guilt, I argue that while different approaches taken after the 1960s and into the 1990s represented a decisive shift, collective guilt was still the organizing principle, if in a different way. Nevertheless, I have drawn much intellectual sustenance from the work of Frei and others who have responded to the same historio­ graphical lacunae as I have to produce important new knowledge about the early Federal Republic (see also Brochhagen 1994; Herf 1997; Moeller 2003; and Marcuse 2001). 39.  Jaspers’s book (1965 [1946]) has often been hailed on the left as generalizing the burden of guilt beyond the narrow strictures of criminal guilt. By the same token, as Anson Rabinbach (1988) points out, spreading German guilt over criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical

30  Chapter One

authorities also legally differentiated kinds or degrees of guilt, ranging from major guilt down through opportunism to innocence. Even our conventional vocabulary distinguishes between sins of omission and sins of commission, between primary and contributory acts, or between genuine evil and mere opportunism. Moreover, there is a difference between a subjective “feeling” of guilt, which is a matter of conscience and self-­reproach, and an objective determination of guilt, which is a matter of  law or social stigmatization. Interestingly, one does not even have to have committed an act to feel guilty about it; one can feel guilty for a wish, or for what one has witnessed or survived. By the same token, committing an objectively chargeable offense does not necessarily produce a feeling of guilt.40 Clearly, there are many different kinds of guilt. Second, what can it mean to employ at the collective level a concept that in most common usages refers to an individual condition? An individual can feel guilty for what he or she has done, or even for what those around him or her have done. But in what sense can a collectivity “feel” guilty? We may judge an entire system corrupt, but do we want thereby to equate the actions of every participant in such a system? Does collective guilt mean that every individual in a society is guilty, or does it mean that the collectivity as such bears guilt? In what ways can a collectivity do this? And what kind of guilt can a collectivity carry? In this way, the problem of collective guilt is synonymous with the problem of collectivity per se: What can it mean to ascribe guilt to a collectivity rather than to a collection of individuals? What is a collectivity, such that it could be guilty? Can it be guilty? The moral history of Western collective guilt is, of course, at least as old as the Hebrew bible. The story of  Sodom and Gomorrah raises the question of whether the presence of a few exceptional individuals suffices to prevent collective judgment. Indeed, there were such individuals in Germany, including political conspirators and personal rescuers as well as others who resisted passively, adopted an attitude of “internal exile,” or went into actual exile. Does being German mean being guilty, regardless of how one behaved individually? There have been both global and more intermediate solutions, the latter including  juridically designating particular organizations—­such as the SS (Schutzstaffel, the “protection squadron” centrally responsible for carrying concepts makes it clear that only a narrow portion of possible guilt is in fact juridically punishable (see Olick 2007). 40. The demand that an acknowledgment of subjective guilt will accompany an objective determination of guilt—­as when we expect a convict to admit or “allocute” to the crimes when he can no longer evade punishment—­is a relatively modern development (see Brooks 2000).

Placing Memory in Germany  31

out the extermination of the Jews)—­criminal, and all members of such organizations guilty merely by the fact of their membership. But even such intermediate judgments as this go against the grain of moral sentiment. In the Bitburg affair, for instance, Chancellor Helmut Kohl argued that the Waffen-­SS (a military division of the SS) soldiers buried there—­whose existence, as we will see, was the putative obstacle to a visit by US President Ronald Reagan—­were mere boys of eighteen or nineteen. We may rightly reject this political equivocation, but even here, one must reluctantly admit, blanket judgment rankles the moral sense. The issue becomes even more complex when one notices the confusion of “collective guilt”—­whereby everyone alive at the time of a political atrocity is guilty “by association”—­and “hereditary guilt,” whereby subsequent generations carry the stigma of their forebears. Indeed, the problem of  hereditary rather than collective guilt is raised by the well known passage from Exo­ dus (20:5) from which I have drawn my title: “For I the Lord thy God am a  jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and the fourth generation of them that hate me.” On the other hand, to choose just one example, we have Ezekiel 18:20: “Only the one who sins shall die. The son shall not be charged with the guilt of  his father, nor shall the father be charged with the guilt of his son. The virtuous man’s virtue shall be his own, and the wicked man’s wickedness shall be his.” As we will see, issues of the aggregate guilt of individuals, collective guilt, and hereditary guilt are rarely differentiated in the defensive German discourse. Of course, this lack of differentiation can be a powerful rhetorical tool.41 Politically, we should note, it is quite problematic for liberal Western democracies to apply collectivistic principles in such matters (Branscomber and Doosje 2004). Despite the fact that the passage from Exodus is better known, the passage from Ezekiel better fits modern Western law. Indeed, a common argument against German collective guilt is that collectivistic thinking—­as represented by the passage from Exodus—­posed the greatest threat to the rule of law and liberalism generally; collectivism bound National Socialism and communism alike as enemies of the West. Of course, the flip side of this idea is that to think liberally—­to embrace individualism—­is to lose some of the emotive appeal of collective identity. This is the dilemma of the West: collective obligation versus individual freedom. To argue against collective guilt is thus to risk 41. Opponents of difficult memory, for instance, often respond to notions of collective re­ sponsibility and other more defensible constructs with arguments against accusations of collective guilt that were never levied.

32  Chapter One

bringing the principle of collectivity (in this case, national identity) into disrepute. As new forms of trans-­and postnationalism have emerged in Germany and elsewhere, the left has therefore responded by seeking guilt without iden­ tity; in contrast, the right looks for identity without guilt. Neither, of course, adequately escapes this fundamental tension of modern legitimation. Thus, though the Schuldfrage (question of guilt) may be spoken with a German accent, it is clearly one of the defining issues of our age. The Politics of Collective Guilt Such philosophical questions about collective guilt as these, of course, are a mere background to the more mundane realities of political rhetoric in actual historical contexts. On the one hand, German leaders—­particularly in the first years after the Second World War—­often had good reason to concern themselves with the delegitimating effects of collective guilt. Indeed, numerous implied and actual accusations—­of varying philosophical coherence—­of collective guilt were levied against Germany, and German politicians saw themselves required to answer. Such accusations included the plan written towards the end of the war by US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau supposedly hypothesizing a warlike German soul, and proposing that the only way to ensure that Germany would never again threaten the world was to “pastoralize” it, and a position known as “Vansittartism,” named after the British propagandist Robert Vansittart, which ascribed an innate belligerence to the so-­called “Hun.” Other accusations were perceived in the Allies’ unwillingness to work during the war with German opposition, and thereby to recognize an “other Germany”; the agreement of  Roosevelt and Churchill at the Casablanca Conference of 1943 to accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender”; the original occupation statute—­JCS (   Joint Chiefs of Staff   ) 1067—­which stated that “Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation”; the judgment of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal that mere membership in certain organizations constituted “guilt by association”; reeducation programs for the defeated German population, including forced tours through concentration camps where signs read, “These Atrocities: Your Fault” (Diese Schandtaten: Eure Schuld  );42 and a number of important 42. A number of recent works have argued that the display of horrifying photographs from concentration camps, often accompanied by accusatory slogans, were the clearest and most effective tool of a collective guilt policy (see Brink 1998; Assmann and Frevert 1999; and Barnow 2008). For a study of the wider impact of Holocaust photographs, see Zelizer (2001).

Placing Memory in Germany  33

state­ments by and debates among leading intellectuals both in exile during the war and in Germany after 1945. There was, too, the standard representation in American and British popular culture of all Germans as Nazis. On the other hand, the Western Allies quickly modified their troubled “denazification” programs—­a quagmire from the very beginning, according to many commentators (Herz 1948; Fürstenau 1969; Niethammer 1982; Olick 2005)—­as well as any implications that West Germans were not valued partners in the defense of the West. There is even an infamous “declaration of the innocence” (Unschulderklärung) signed by US President Eisenhower during negotiations for West German remilitarization, stating that ordinary soldiers in the Wehrmacht had been   just that—­ordinary soldiers. (Of course, as we will see later, Eisenhower would not go so far as to issue a similar declaration for members of the Waffen-­SS, though what he would not offer, Adenauer did in his place.) The Western Allies, moreover, consistently went along with German efforts to obtain early releases for convicted Nazis (see in particular Brochhagen 1994).43 As late as 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did express a general distrust of German motives; and a 1958 statement by the French writer François Mauriac—­that he liked Germany so much that he was glad there were two of them—­was widely cited in commentary. But, while the memory of Germany’s Nazi past has certainly shaped policy toward the Federal Republic, there has really been very little in the way of serious collective guilt theory or practice in international public discourse. The notion, as we have already seen, does not stand up well to philosophical, theological, juridical, or political scrutiny. To claim that state-­sponsored memory in the Federal Republic of Germany is organized as an effort to refute collective guilt is thus neither to advocate ac­ cusations of it nor even to claim that they were all that common, at least not after the early 1950s. I do not find the concept of collective guilt defensible politically or philosophically; nor was the accusation made nearly as frequently as it was denied. But this does not mean that the specter of such accusations—­be they memories of early formulations, or mere projections of the discourse—­ cannot have served as powerful bugaboos, thus shaping the discourse.44 The

43. The Allies also provided no significant objections to the reintegration of various complicit personnel into the new government, at least not much after the summer of 1945 (see especially Frei 1996). 44. As Aleida Assmann puts it, “From the perspective of some historians, the collective guilt thesis is more a fantasy construct than an historical fact. From the perspective of mnemohistory

34  Chapter One

burden of proving this claim—­that the effort to deny collective guilt organized the West German discourse—­rests on the many pages that follow.

Summary Why are some pasts recalled and others not? Why are the pasts that are recalled presented as they are? Where and when are different pasts recalled in different ways? What are the connections between “ordinary” memory at the individual level and “official” memory at the collective level? What roles do memories—­of ordinary people, of leaders, and of collectivities—­play in the definition, self-­understanding, and accomplishments of the state? What exactly do we mean when we are talking about “memory” in these diverse ways? The answers, I hope, will help us build some general theory, though one of the messages I will repeat is that the generality of such answers obtains within history, not outside of it. Memory and the state—­and the relations between them—­are, as we have seen, particular historical products rather than permanent and ideal organizational frames of   human experience. It will take some rather abstract pages to make clear why these are important questions and why I answer them as I do. The questions, I believe, are intuitively interesting, but it is perhaps less clear what tools we need to answer them. The next chapter therefore seeks to define the terms for and to motivate the “sociology of collective memory” for which I intend this study to be a model, and to draw connections between the sociology of collective memory and the development of   work on a cultural theory of the state. I have already tried to show how this effort to understand the story of German memory contributes to our understanding of what I have called the “politics of regret,” and of the contemporary state as apologetic. I will return to these broader themes in the conclusion. The main body of this book, however, is an historical narrative of “official” German memory, one aimed at answering the questions posed by the sociology of collective memory. As we will see in the next chapter, there is good reason from the sociology of collective memory to expect that early periods in discourses are relatively more important for their subsequent development. For this reason, as already mentioned, I devoted an earlier book (Olick 2005) to the immediate postwar period of 1945–­49 as well as to the precursors of those discussions, which took place during the war. There I tried to lay the [see chapter 2 for a definition of this term], the distance between a construct and a fact narrows” (Assmann and Frevert 1999, 138).

Placing Memory in Germany  35

groundwork—­which I will summarize at the beginning of the present historical analysis, in the section titled “Prologues”—­for showing how early responses in those years provided major resources and constraints for the governmental memory of the Federal Republic of Germany, which officially began in 1949. Following this summary of my earlier work, I present the history of official memory in three main sections, one for each of three epochs: what I call “the reliable nation,” “the moral nation,” and “the normal nation.” Each of these periods, I argue, confronts the problem of collective guilt, though in different ways. Before developing analytical and theoretical conclusions, I provide a postscript—­“Epilogues” (  plural to match the prologues)—­on official memory after 1989. The conclusions then present findings for the sociology of collective memory, which I seek to show is of   paradigmatic importance for histori­ cal sociology more generally. The immediate task, however, is to understand why I ask the kinds of   questions I ask, and why I structure my answers as I do.

Chapter 2

The Sociology of Collective Memory

Commemoration, “images of the past,” and “public memories”—­or whatever else one may call the retrospective matters at issue in this book—­are not the usual stuff of historical or social scientific analysis. Many historians, for in­ stance, are wary of paying too much attention to memory, which shares with history a reference to the past, but has different aims and employs different standards. History, according to this argument, strives for truth and accuracy, while memory is to be judged for its usefulness and authenticity; best not to mix the two. Sociologists and political scientists, by the same token, often see symbols and meanings—­about the past or about anything else—­as mere re­ flections or indexes of other, purportedly more important, phenomena; in such a view, memory, like culture more generally, is irrelevant or at least of secondary importance. In neither history nor social science are memory or images of the past conventionally seen as central constitutive features of social life and poli­t­ ical processes—­in other words, as where the action is. In response to historians wary of memory, however, one might argue that the differences between history and memory are overstated (Hutton 1993), particularly since the archival materials on which historians draw are not nec­ essarily more reliable than eyewitness recollections. Archives, moreover, often systematically bias towards the perceptions of  literate elites and in other ways as well. And historians cannot claim that their guild has not engaged in politi­ cal identity building of various kinds (Iggers 1983; Novick 1988; Berger and Lorenz 2010), as the discussion of invented tradition in the previous chapter has shown. History’s professional claim is that professional history faces epis­ temological and methodological demands that other forms of apprehending

The Sociology of Collective Memory  37

the past do not; historians, according to their disciplinary credo, are first and foremost interested in getting the narrative right, in telling history “as it actu­ ally happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). Well and good, but it is possible to draw the line too starkly, closing off not only different sources of data (for in­ stance, recollections or testimony), but important matters for historical analy­ sis itself.1 In the first place, methodological distinctions may be important; but sub­ stantively, we now recognize, the lines between history and memory, interest and identity, have their costs. As Yosef  Yerushalmi has put it, “A historiogra­ phy that does not aspire to be memorable is in peril of becoming a rampant growth” (1996, 101). Moreover, commemorations or recollections about his­ torical events can themselves be events worth studying historically. Historical approaches can thus help us “get it right” about commemorations as events as much as they help us “get it right” about the events being commemorated. To be sure, this is not all that is at stake when historians consider memory. But this is an area whose long-­standing and complex epistemological concerns should not be allowed to distract from easy agreement when it can be had. Whether or not one seeks to maintain a strong distinction (epistemological or otherwise) between history and memory, then, one can write a history of com­ memoration just as well as one can write histories of other phenomena. The chapters that follow do this insofar as they tell the story of  the commemoration of the National Socialist past in Germany: Who said what, when? This is part of avoiding the anecdote and polemic that constitutes so much of the public discourse that is the object of this study, and of gaining the necessary analytical perspective on it. In the second place, in response to social scientists who treat memory and symbolism more generally as epiphenomenal, one could argue that a social sci­ ence conducted purely in terms of the analysis of interests and social structures begs the question of where these interests and structures come from in the first place, and how and why they change. If  political language and symbols are irrel­ evant, as one prominent political scientist (Edelman 1977, 1) writes, one should rightly wonder why we spend so much energy on them. To be sure, powerful actors certainly do often conceive of symbols as effective tools for achieving in­ strumental goals, and it can be illuminating to ask what an actor is trying to ac­ complish through a particular symbol or statement. Views on the past, moreover, 1. For historians’ discomfort with memory and memory studies, see Berliner (2005), who points out that many historians were already declaring an interest in memory to be passé from the very moment of its efflorescence in the early 1980s.

38  Chapter Two

do vary significantly with generational and other social structural divisions, and images of the past can be indexes of social structure and markers of differ­ ence. To investigate such matters is to study the political economy of commemora­ tion, and the chapters that follow do this as well, insofar as they ask who was trying to accomplish what for what reasons, and how visions of the past marked differences among groups in the history of German commemoration. This is part of understanding why people say what they do, when they do. As we saw in the previous chapter, however, the constitutive, rather than merely indicative, role of memory in social life has become more and more ob­ vious in recent discussions. People and groups of many different sorts clearly spend great time and energy representing the past, and such representations have often occasioned significant controversies. More and more, individuals and groups see the past as a terrain on which to struggle not only for their interests and for the resources that often flow from doing so successfully, but for the very identities that underwrite and organize those interests in the first place. People continue to be willing to die in the name of supposedly ancient identities, and refuse to see these identities as made or remade in the present or as matters of mere calculation. To take these identities as a starting point, in this view, is thus to assume what actually needs to be explained. Despite disciplinary orthodoxies, then, historians and social scientists have become increasingly interested in varieties of memory and nonprofessional presentations of the past in their own right. Images of the past, from this per­ spective, are not merely inferior productions to be tested and corrected by professional historians; nor are they merely tools to some end, or emanations of social structure to be explained away by critical social scientists. Images of the past and commemorations are indeed events shaped by interests and opportunities, and thus can be studied with the tools of history and politi­ cal economy. Stopping there, however, misses why political actors invest so heavily in commemorative as opposed to other kinds of practices in the first place, and leads to an impoverished view of action as rational, of interests as stable, and of the state as a mere arbiter of these interests rather than as a cru­ cible of identities. Recognizing this is the starting point for a cultural sociology of retrospection—­an enterprise I seek to define in the pages that follow, and one that guides the narrative to come.

I n t e l l e c t ua l F r a m e wo r k s Like sociology in general, a sociology of retrospection is concerned with how what we say and do, as individuals and together, is shaped by a not often ob­

The Sociology of Collective Memory  39

vious and always changing combination of traditions, fantasies, interests, and opportunities. One problem, however, has been finding useful concepts that do not deny important distinctions among kinds of retrospection, whether these distinctions are epistemological, institutional, or substantive. Intellectual frameworks and their attendant concepts have proliferated in recent years. In France, for instance, the so-­called history of mentalities has pursued a “collective psychology” approach to cultural history. Its aim—­which it for­ mulates in distinction to the high-­mindedness of intellectual history and the economic and demographic foci of social history—­is to grasp “the imaginary and collective perceptions of human activities as they vary from one histori­ cal period to another” (Chartier 1988, 27–­30). Commemoration and historical imagery, in this approach, are, as Lucien Goldman (1976, 17; also quoted in Chartier 1988, 32) put it, parts of “the whole complex of ideas, aspirations, and feelings which links together the members of a social group,” and are thus important topics for investigation.2 In Germany, many historians and social scientists have revived an older philosophical concept of “historical consciousness” (Geschichtsbewusstsein) to guide analysis ( Jeismann 1987; Rüsen 2001; see also Lutz 2000). In some versions—­particularly those steeped in Hegelian abstractions about historical spirits and cultural essences unfolding in history—­“historical consciousness” is nearly synonymous with collective identity per se. In other versions, “his­ torical consciousness” refers more narrowly to the production of, and debate over, images of the past in political processes (see also Lukacs 1985). Here “historical consciousness” is often linked to the label “the politics of history” (Geschichtspolitik), which indicates both the role of  history in politics and the role of politics in history (see, for example, Wolfrum 1999). Yet another concept is labeled with the awkward yet insightful term “mne­ mohistory.” “Unlike history proper,” Jan Assmann writes, “mnemohistory is concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remem­ bered.” Or, as Assmann puts it further, mnemohistory is interested more in the “actuality” than in the “factuality” of the past (1997, 8–­9). Mnemohistory thus calls for a theory of cultural transmission, one that helps us understand his­ tory not as “one damned thing after another,” as variously attributed to Win­ ston Churchill and Arnold Toynbee, nor as a series of objective stages, but as an active process of meaning-­making through time—­“the ongoing work of reconstructive imagination.” Indeed, Assmann claims, “It is only through 2. For the origins of contemporary memory studies in the history of mentalities, see espe­ cially Confino (1997).

40  Chapter Two

mnemohistorical reflection that history . . . becomes aware of its own function as a form of remembering” (1997, 14). As we will see, this concept is particu­ larly helpful because it highlights the temporal unfolding, rather than static structure, of the past. Other terms include “political myth” (Tudor 1972), “tradition” (Shils 1981), “public history” (Benson, Brier, and Rosenzweig 1986), “oral history” (Perks and Thomson, eds. 1998), and “heritage” (Lowenthal 1998), among others. Each of these terms has its own inflection on the issues, and several label distinct scholarly literatures. Yet despite this array of different concepts and traditions—­all useful in their ways—­the overwhelming majority of dis­ cussion in recent years has proceeded under the rubric of “collective mem­ ory.” Together with “mentality,” “historical consciousness,” “mnemohistory” and other terms, “collective memory”—­or, alternatively, collective or social remembering—­has directed our attention to issues at the heart of contempo­ rary political and social life, including the foundations of group allegiance and the ways in which we make sense of collective experience in time. But it has done so, I think, in particularly salutary ways, perhaps paradoxically because of its very breadth and imprecision. 3 What is Collective Memory? Memory, our common sense tells us, is a fundamentally individual phenom­ enon. What could be more individual than remembering, which we seem to do in the solitary world of our own heads as much as in conversation with others? Even when we “reminisce,” we often experience this as a process of offering up to the external world the images of the past locked away in the recesses of our own minds. We can remember by ourselves in the dark at night, as we drive alone along the highway, or as we half-­listen to a conversation about some­ thing else. By the same token, lesions of the brain—­caused perhaps by Alzhei­ mer’s disease or physical injury—­are surely internal rather than social defects 3. While many authors using other terms have adopted “collective memory” as a more gen­ eral term or label for an area of concern, others have objected that collective memory’s concep­ tual contribution is not positive. Gedi and Elam (1996, 30), for instance, call its use “an act of intrusion . . . forcing itself  like a molten rock into an earlier formation . . . unavoidably obliterat­ ing fine distinctions.” As we will see, I agree with the charge that collective memory overtotalizes a variety of retrospective products, practices, and processes. Nevertheless, as a sensitizing rather than operational concept it raises, I believe, useful questions when taken as a starting point, rather than an endpoint, for inquiry.

The Sociology of Collective Memory  41

preventing us as individuals from remembering. Memory—­and, by extension, forgetting—­thus seems not  just fundamentally individual, but quintessentially so, as primal and lonely as pain. What can we possibly mean, then, when we refer to social or collective memory? For the better part of a century, and with increasing urgency since the late 1970s, numerous scholars and public commentators have employed the term “collective memory” in a wide variety of different—­sometimes more, some­ times less precise—­ways. In general, the term is meant to designate a kind of retrospection that cannot be reduced to either individual apprehensions of the past or historical determinations of its factuality. Indeed, in his seminal works on the concept, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992 [1925], 1980 [1950]) distinguished “collective memory” explicitly from both individual memory and history. In the first place, Halbwachs argued, memory is a matter of how minds work together in society—­how their operations are not simply mediated, but are structured by social arrangements: “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories . . .” (Halbwachs 1992, 38). Halbwachs argued that it is impossible for individuals to remember in any coherent and persistent fashion outside of their group contexts; these are the necessary “social frameworks” of memory.4 Groups provide us the stimulus or opportunity to recall, they shape the ways in which we do so, and they often provide the materials. Following this argument, then—­which in so many ways has underwritten the contempo­ rary field of memory studies (Olick, Vinitzky-­Seroussi, and Levy 2011)—­the very distinction between the individual and social components of remember­ ing ceases to make absolute sense. Halbwaches wrote: “There is no point in seeking where . . . [memories] are preserved in my brain or in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled by me externally, and the groups of  which I am a part at any given time give me the means to recon­ struct them” (1992, 38). All individual remembering, Halbwachs thus argued, takes place with social materials, within social contexts, and in response to social cues. Even when we do it alone, we do so as social beings with reference to our social identities.5 In the second place, however, if all individual memory is socially framed by groups, groups themselves also share publicly articulated images of collective 4. See also Irwin-­Zarecka (2007) for connections to Goffmanian frame theory. 5. To be sure, Halbwachs was not the first or only theorist to “discover” the social dimen­ sions of memory. For a history of such insights, see Olick, Vinitzky-­Seroussi, and Levy (2011).

42  Chapter Two

pasts. For this reason, Halbwachs distinguished between “autobiographical memory” and “historical memory.” The former concerns the events of one’s own life that one remembers because one has experienced them directly. The latter refers to residues of events by virtue of which groups claim a continuous identity through time. “Historical memory” of the Civil War, for instance, is part of what it means to be an American, and is part of the collective narrative of the United States. But nobody still has “autobiographical memory” of the event. This view Halbwachs owed to his great mentor, Émile Durkheim, who had developed a sociological approach to what he called “collective repre­ sentations,” symbols or meanings that are properties of the group whether or not any particular individual or even particular number of individuals shares them. Whereas survey researchers may conclude that a particular image or event not remembered by many people is no longer a part of the collective memory, for a true Durkheimian culture is not reducible to what is in people’s heads. Representations themselves, from this analytical perspective, are not to be evaluated merely in terms of their origins, resonance, or distribution in any particular population. Collective memory, in this sense, has a life of its own, though this need not be as metaphysical as it sounds. Work emphasizing the genuinely collective nature of social memory has demonstrated that there are long-­term structures to what societies remember or commemorate that are stubbornly impervious to the efforts of individuals to escape them. Powerful institutions, moreover, clearly support some histories more than others, pro­ vide narrative patterns and exemplars of how individuals can and should re­ member, and stimulate public memory in ways and for reasons that have little to do with the individual or aggregate neurological records. Without such a collectivist perspective, after all, it is difficult to provide good explanations of mytho­logy, tradition, and heritage, among other long-­term symbolic patterns. Durkheimian approaches, such as that of Halbwachs, are often wrongly accused of conceptualizing society in disembodied terms, as an entity exist­ ing in and of itself, over and above the individuals who comprise it. Another misinterpretation of Durkheimian sociology can be an assumption that these societies—­constituted by collective representations which individuals may or may not share—­are unitary. Such approaches to collective memory, for in­ stance, can lead us to attribute one collective memory or set of memories to entire, well-­bounded societies. Indeed, many contemporary political discus­ sions about cultural heritage share such assumptions. Commemoration of cer­ tain historical events is essential to our sense of national unity, the argument goes; without substantial consensus on the past, social solidarity is in danger. There is either a “deep structure” or a stored-­up legacy of shared culture which

The Sociology of Collective Memory  43

binds us together; without its pervasive influence, commentators worry, there is no “us” to bind. For his part, however, Halbwachs always characterized collective memory as plural, showing that shared memories can be effective markers of social dif­ ferentiation. He also focused on publicly available commemorative symbols, rituals, and technologies that bound groups together and underwrote their collective purposes. Indeed, a great deal of the work Halbwachs inspired has focused on these public activities and products. Some would say it has done so to the neglect of other dimensions, like the private or interactional (Klein 2000). As much as that might be the case, it is not necessary or even appropri­ ate to see the interactional and the structural as exclusive categories; doing so would be contrary to Halbwachs’s basic insight. Against the charge of treat­ ing collective memory as a singular entity, moreover, he always emphasized that the individual is shaped by the intersection of multiple group identities. The best solution to conceptual confusion in the field, I believe, is to ac­ knowledge that the term “collective memory” can identify a wide variety of ret­ rospective activities and products: collective representations (publicly available symbols, meanings, narratives and rituals), deep cultural structures (generative systems of rules or patterns for producing representations), social frameworks (groups and patterns of interaction), and culturally and socially framed indi­ vidual memories. The kinds of questions one asks when looking at collective representations as collective representations are, after all, distinct from those one asks when looking at the individual reception of such representations or at their production. Cognitive storage processes, moreover, are pretty obviously different from official storytelling. The question is not whether individual or collective memories are primary a priori, but how different retrospective prod­ ucts and practices at a variety of  levels mix in the flux of  history, whether that history is unfolding at the level of the person, the family, the group, or the nation. In this view, then, collective memory really refers to a wide variety of mne­ monic products and practices, often quite different from one another. The products include stories, rituals, books, statues, presentations, speeches, im­ ages, pictures, records, historical studies, and surveys; the practices include reminiscence, recall, representation, commemoration, celebration, regret, re­ nunciation, disavowal, denial, rationalization, excuse, and acknowledgment. Mnemonic practices—­though they occur in an infinity of contexts and through a shifting multiplicity of media—­are always simultaneously individual and so­ cial. And no matter how concrete mnemonic products may be, they gain their reality only by being used, interpreted, and reproduced or changed. To focus

44  Chapter Two

on collective memory as a variety of products and practices is thus to reframe the antagonism between individualist and collectivist approaches to memory more productively as a matter of moments in a dynamic process. And, fol­ lowing Assmann, this dynamic process is a central way in which groups es­ tablish and maintain their identities. These, to me, are the real messages of Halbwachs’s diverse insights, and of the extensive varieties of work they have inspired.6 There is no need to pick one or the other process or practice and declare it to be the authentic meaning of “collective memory.” Three Principles for the Analysis of Collective Memory The foregoing excursus on Halbwachs and the origins of the collective mem­ ory concept are perhaps of  mostly intellectual-­historical interest, and returning to this locus classicus is not intended to distract from the extensive progress of the field since Halbwachs (for surveys, see Olick, Vinitzky-­Seroussi, and Levy 2011; Erll 2011; Misztal 2003; Cubitt 2007). Nevertheless, it is a helpful way to derive some concrete principles about what to look for in the landscape of Ger­ man memory, and about how to treat the materials we find there. First, despite the penchant of many politicians, commentators, and scho­l­ ars for invoking the collective memory of an entire society, collective memory is far from monolithic. Collective remembering, the following story will show, is a highly complex process involving many different people, practices, materials, and themes. One need be careful, therefore, not to presume at the outset that every society has one collective memory, or that it is obvious and unproblem­ atic how (and which) public memories will be produced. My focus on “of­ ficial” or state-­sponsored memory responds to this possible error—­though, to be sure, it risks others. The main point, however, is that it is important to 6. The principal alternative to the language of collective memory is that of “cultural mem­ ory,” advocated most prominently by Jan and Aleida Assmann. In particular, “cultural memory” is meant to be more precise than “collective memory,” differentiating between the deep reservoir of symbols and meanings constituting the cultural “archive” of a society and “communicative memory,” which is the stories handed down within the space of three generations. My prefer­ ence for “collective memory” is a default to the term’s historical success rather than a specific objection to the Assmanns’ alternative, though a number of critiques (e.g., Welzer 2008) have argued that the distinction between cultural and communicative memory is difficult to make in practice. In my view, “collective memory” must include the entire range of phenomena ad­ dressed under the rubrics of both cultural and communicative memory, and the analytical dis­ tinction the Assmanns have made is indeed helpful, as is in particular Aleida Assmann’s theo­ rization of the differences between “canon” and “archive” (Assmann 2008; see also Erll 2011a).

The Sociology of Collective Memory  45

remember the different demands made on participants in different discursive fields, such as politics, journalism, religion, or the arts, and to appreciate sub­ tleties of context and inflection. Doing so, of course, makes it difficult to judge a whole epoch or a whole society. But this should not be seen as a loss. Second, the concept of collective memory often encourages us to see mem­ ory either as the authentic residue of the past or as an entirely malleable con­ struction in the present.7 “Traditionalist” models, for instance, assimilate col­ lective memory to heritage, patrimony, national character, and the like, and view collective memory as a bedrock for the continuity of  identities (e.g., Shils 1981). They often ask how collective memory shapes or constrains contempo­ rary action. In contrast, “presentist” models assimilate collective memory to manipulation and deception, mere tools in the arsenal of power (e.g., Hob­ sbawm and Ranger 1983; Foucault 1977). They see memory as highly variable, ask how contemporary interests shape which images of the past are deployed in contemporary contexts, and often seek to use professional history to un­ mask such efforts at manipulation and misuse. Neither of these views, however, is a particularly insightful way to under­ stand the complexities of remembering, which is always a fluid negotiation be­ tween the desires of the present and the legacies of the past. It is important to remember that the discourse of German memory—­or of any other memory—­is no static structure, but an ongoing dialogue (more on this below). What parts past and present,8 history and memory, respectively play in this dialogue—­and how they are related—­is as much an empirical question as it is a theoretical one.9 And third—­though this may be just another way of stating the first two principles—­we must remember that memory is a process and not a thing, a faculty rather than a place. Collective memory is something—­or, rather, many things—­that we do, not something—­or many things—­that we have. We there­ fore need analytical tools sensitive to its varieties, contradictions, and dyna­ mism. This book thus aims not only to offer a systematic history of German memory, but to contribute to the development of the sociology of collective 7. For articulation of and response to this analytical matrix, see especially Schwartz (2000) and Schudson (1989). 8. Putting it this way is not meant to neglect the future dimension. See Kumar (1978), Ko­ selleck (1985), Gross (2000), and Bell (2004). 9. As Barry Schwartz puts it, “Sharp opposition between history and collective memory has been our Achilles heel, causing us to assert unwillingly, and often despite ourselves, that what is not historical must be ‘invented’ or ‘constructed’—­which transforms collective memory study into a kind of cynical muckraking” (Schwartz, personal communication).

46  Chapter Two

remembering: How are representations of and activities concerning the past organized socially and culturally? When and why do they change (though we must remember that they are always at least somewhat in flux)? To think in terms of mnemonic practices and products is a first step. But we will need to inquire further into the questions of the mechanisms of mediation between past and present, of collective memory’s continuities and transformations, and of the proper ways to grasp these analytically. How can we begin to untangle the diverse processes, products, and practices through which societies con­ front and represent aspects of their past?

Approaching the Political C u lt u r e o f t h e S ta t e This book, of course, is not the first to take seriously the role of symbols and meanings—­in this case symbols and meanings about the past—­in political le­ gitimation.10 A vibrant tradition of research on “political culture” has done much to advance our understanding of how political symbols and meanings 10. The related concepts of  legitimacy and legitimation have a long and multifaceted history in social science. The most important reference for these terms, of course, is to Max Weber, who famously identified three ideal types of legitimacy (traditional, legal-­rational, and charismatic), and who defined it in terms of perceptions of legitimacy in a population, rather than in terms of conformity to any particular philosophical principle (though, to be sure, whether or not a particular regime adhered or not to any particular philosophical principle could be a factor in whether a population held that regime to be legitimate). Weber’s definition of  legitimacy, and of the work leaders do to produce it (legitimation), has been revised in various ways over the last century. One of the most significant such revisions is that of Dornbush and Scott (1975), who distinguished between legitimacy and propriety as aspects of legitimacy more generally. Many other scholars have explored the work that organizations of all kinds—­including states as well as business and other entities—­do to secure their legitimacy, particularly because organizations considered legitimate can avoid the steep costs of operating without it (an insight that also goes back to Weber, who distinguished between power and authority). For reviews of these ideas, see Suchman (1995),  Johnson, Dowd, and Ridgeway (2006), and Tyler (2006), among others. More recently, cultural sociologists and others have developed novel frameworks for understanding the related concept of  justification. See especially Boltanski and Thevenaut (1991). Another key referent for discussions of legitimation is Jürgen Habermas’s work on the so-­called legitimation crisis of  Western democracies, the result of the the welfare state’s failure to keep up with increas­ ing demand in times of economic downturn. Indeed, some commentators—­not least Habermas himself—­have seen the turn to memory as an effort to compensate for the supposed shortfall in legitimacy (see also Torpey 2003).

The Sociology of Collective Memory  47

(about the past or about anything else) are both produced and received, and of what kinds of institutions and policies they underwrite. Indeed, scholars of collective memory have often drawn on these resources in designing their ana­ lytical strategies. Nevertheless, like a number of other recent works, my inves­ tigation here is guided by Clifford Geertz’s still relevant observation that many social-­scientific approaches to culture “go directly from source analysis to consequence analysis without ever seriously examining ideologies as systems of interworking meanings, placing particular symbols side by side in such a way that the first are derivations of the second. The connection is not thereby explained but merely educed” (1973, 207).11 In contrast, again, the goal is to take symbols and meanings seriously in their own right, not only as mirrors of truth, markers of identity, or tools of power. Cultural Production Consider research that asks how political symbols and meanings (including memories) are produced. A first question here is: Which political actors have the power to impose their favored symbols? Political actors often fight hard over particular symbols and the right to place them in public—­harder than one might expect, given the frequent lack of apparent material stakes. As a result, contests over political symbols provide a very good index of who is powerful and who is not (often, that is the point!), as well as of the way in which political institutions work in relation to each other. A second question that research on the production of political culture often asks is: What are political actors trying to accomplish with the symbols they offer? There are two major answers. As just noted, the struggle to instill a particular set of symbols or meanings may not really be about those symbols and meanings at all.12 More importantly, however, political actors may use symbols to accomplish a manifest goal. For these rea­ sons, a dominant strain of political culture research is a sort of “propaganda”

11. Important statements of a new approach to political culture are in Baker (1990) and Hunt (1984). If one can name a classical text for this new turn in political culture analysis, it would be Geertz (1973). Reviews of the new tradition of political culture research include Berezin (1994) and the essays in Gautier and Weil (1994). See also Somers (1995). 12. For instance, one might plausibly argue that the National Rifle Association in the United States is merely a “condensation symbol” for a set of concerns and identities that far transcend the issue of gun control.

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model, in which political symbols and meanings are tools that states use to manipulate the masses.13 For all its insights, there are several problems with an approach that focuses exclusively on the production of political culture. In the first place, as already pointed out, there is a difference between the manifest and latent qualities of political cultural meanings. A symbolic contest may appear to be about the set of meanings at stake when it is really about something else for which the par­ ticular set of symbols is merely a carrier. Decoding intentions is thus a trickier enterprise than it might appear, especially since actors themselves may not know exactly why they are so attached to particular symbols. In the second place, as already discussed, by assuming that symbols are instruments for ful­ filling interests, production approaches often neglect the question of where interests come from in the first place. Actors representing particular identities favor particular symbols and meanings, or use them to attain the interests of those identities. But the symbols thus supported and deployed also play a role in constituting those identities. In this light, the common-­sense distinction between interests and identities, and concomitantly between “symbolic” and “real” politics, is not really so clear after all. In the third place, all the attention in the world to who has the power to propagate their favored symbols and why they want to do so tells us little about whether these symbols and meanings have any effect on anyone. Culture theo­ rists are fond of saying that symbols are “polysemic”: their meanings are never permanently fixed, never entirely reducible to the intentions of their creators, always potentially multiple. People will read into them on the basis of their own life experiences, often in ways the symbols’ producers cannot predict or control. This assumes, of course, that “ordinary people”—­whoever those might be—­are paying attention to them at all. Symbols, moreover, are never entirely original, but are themselves readings of older productions; every in­ tended meaning, as a result, involves a particular reading of earlier meanings and is but one link in a chain. Effects are thus never entirely straightforward or immediate; often, they work in complex ways through time. 13. Work of this sort employs concepts such as “the political uses of language” (Edelman 1971) and “the invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), as well as older concepts of “propaganda” (Ellul 1965; Goodin 1980). Political culture analysis in this mode often becomes a form of debunking. Showing the effects symbols are intended to achieve or the recent origins of particular traditions is, in part, an effort to neutralize their power. For more on this characteri­ zation, see Olick and Robbins (1998) and Hutton (1993). On the limits of a propaganda model, see Krebs and Jackson (2007).

The Sociology of Collective Memory  49

Cultural Reception Indeed, this third objection to the production paradigm—­the unpredictability of effects—­is a major impetus for research on the reception of political culture. Here there have been two major lines of inquiry. The first asks about how political culture works on the minds of those who receive it. Political culture research in this mode becomes a kind of political psychology; the power of political culture is reflected in the degree to which it shapes what people think. In turn, the political culture of a society is the aggregate pattern of all atti­ tudes and beliefs in the population.14 The second line of inquiry—­what might be called a “counterculture” paradigm—­reacts to the production approach’s implication that ordinary people are uncritical objects of elite manipulation. It highlights the controversial nature of culture, demonstrating how people interpret official symbols in unpredictable ways and produce meanings that have nothing to do with the official intentions. This model is explicitly anti-­ elitist, arguing for the autonomy of popular cultures from elite manipulation.15 As with the production approach, there are several problems with the re­ ception approach. In the first place, the political psychology version reduces culture to a purely subjective category, to what is in people’s heads. And, as one critic puts it, “If political culture can be reduced to the distribution of attitudes among a given population, wherein lies the need for a distinct con­ ceptual framework and line of inquiry?” (Dittmer 1977).16 In the second place, while a focus on the autonomy of vibrant popular cultures recuperates voices 14. Indeed, this is the definition of political culture offered by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba in their field-­defining book The Civic Culture (1989). See also their reflections in The Civic Culture Revisited (1980). For a critical analysis of this history, see Wedeen 2002. 15. The major source for this approach, of course, is Michel Foucault, particularly his Lan­ guage, Counter-­Memory, Practice (1977). For an extension of this approach within so-­called British cultural studies, see Johnson et al. (1983). The characterization applies as well to work in the oral history tradition. See especially Passerini (1992),Thompson (2000), and Leydesdorff et al. (2005). Other cultural studies of popular memory include Lipsitz (1990) and Samuel (1994). For a particularly judicious study of the ways in which ordinary people transform official sym­ bolism, see Bodnar (1992). 16. A similar problem arises with the concept of public opinion: Is public opinion merely the sum of every individual’s opinion about public matters, or does public opinion take on proper­ ties that transcend this mere aggregative calculus? We know, for instance, that public opinion has emergent properties, like a tendency under some circumstances to polarize and under others to concentrate more than attitude surveys predict. Here I am talking about phenomena like the “madness of crowds” or “community standards.”

50  Chapter Two

that are lost with the conventional focus on high politics, this approach fre­ quently overvalorizes popular cultures as “authentic,” throwing out the baby of the state’s power to shape culture with the bathwater of completely manipu­ lable masses. But while the powers of the state to produce meanings and set the parameters for identities vary over time and are never absolute, in the modern period the state is almost always a leading force in shaping identities, even—­ perhaps especially—­when ordinary people reject its offerings. The counter­ culture approach thus risks underestimating the power of dominant culture.17 This is one reason why I center my analysis on “official” or “state-­sponsored” memory: to benefit from the advances of political culture theory, but for the analysis of the state itself.18 Beyond Structuralism Both production and reception approaches to political culture thus minimize the cultural character of the state, sharing an image of the state as unitary and rational, and of popular culture as the world of ideology. In contrast, here I presume neither that the state is a unitary and rational actor, nor that the effects of cultural meanings flow only from above to below. States as well as societies are ideological. States do much more than regulate who gets what, when, and how, as one famous definition puts it (Lasswell 1958). States are about who we are as much as what we get. Political meanings and symbols are always simul­ taneously tools for achieving purposes, expressions of existing identities, and defining frameworks for future interests and future identities. Political culture understood in this way is thus the process of producing these identities, in­ terests, and meanings in time, rather than being a mere static expression or product of them. As a result, at the limit there is no sustainable conceptual dis­ tinction between “symbolic” politics and “real” politics. “Political symbols,” 17. Reacting to political culture analyses that turn away from the state, Victoria Bonnell argues in her study of Soviet political posters under Lenin and Stalin that “official ideology mattered . . . it contributed to the definition of new social identities and helped to create new modes of thought and action. . . . Official words and images should not be dismissed as having little to do with the ‘real’ and important developments taking place in other spheres, such as the economy or politics. . . . Official ideology must not be treated as epiphenomenal” (1997, 13). William Sewell  Jr. writes, “Authoritative cultural action, launched from the centers of power, has the effect of turning what otherwise might be a babble of cultural voices into a semiotically and politically ordered field of differences. Such action creates a map of the ‘culture’ and its variants, one that tells people where they and their practices fit in the official scheme of things” (1999, 56). 18. An important collection of essays with a similar agenda is Steinmetz (1999).

The Sociology of Collective Memory  51

a prominent theorist in this tradition has thus written, are “the ends of power itself ” (Hunt 1984). Seeking to grasp political symbols as “the ends of power itself ” without reducing them to by-­products of their production or reception, of course, has its pitfalls, chief among which—­as we have already seen—­is the temptation to hypothesize an autonomous realm of culture (or collective memory) “in and of itself.” This is the hallmark of cultural “structuralism,” which derives in part from Durkheim’s claim that culture is a social fact “sui generis” and which treats cultures as “systems” of symbols and meanings analytically independent of their actual use in social life.19 There is, in other words, a “deep structure” that can be discerned behind the welter of political symbols just as there is a grammar behind any particular linguistic statement. Speech, in this view, is merely the application of grammar in a situation, and new utterances are merely new combinations of preexisting linguistic elements. By analogy, politi­ cal symbolism is merely the application of the deep cultural system of mean­ ings, a combination of available terms according to preset rules. On the one hand, there are obvious advantages to seeing culture in this way. At last, it seems, we are really talking about culture, rather than merely about who produced it and what it made anybody do or not do. On the other hand, structuralist approaches are widely—­and, I believe, with good reason—­ criticized for treating cultures as internally consistent (as if there is one basic structure), ahistorical (as if that structure remains the same until it is altered or replaced), and external (as if cultural structures are generative of action but not generated by it, or only generated by it after the fact). But, as we have already seen, we cannot assume that cultures are unitary; to do so would be to impose a cohesion and consensus that simply can never exist, even in small groups.

19. Structuralist analysis is not solely the province of exotic French intellectuals. The American sociologist Robert Wuthnow, for instance, defends structuralism as part of a mul­ tidimensional approach. “The structural level of analysis . . . pays relatively little attention to the individual or the problem of meaning. Its emphasis is on the objectified social presence of cultural forms. Symbols—­utterances, acts, objects, and events—­are assumed to exist in some ways independent of their creators and to take forms not entirely determined by the needs of individuals. . . . The elements of culture are arranged in relation to each other, forming identifi­ able patterns. Understanding the structure of culture, therefore, requires paying attention to the configurations, categories, boundaries, and connections among cultural elements themselves” (Wuthnow 1987, 332). In recent years,  Jeffrey Alexander (2003) as well has pursued a structural­ ist analytical strategy as part of  his neofunctionalist cultural sociology, including an essay on the cultural legacies of the Holocaust.

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Moreover, it should also be clear not only that cultures are constantly changing, but that culture itself is a matter of flux. Culture is an ongoing dia­ logue rather than a static structure. Finally, to see cultures merely as generative systems is to engage in the same kind of forgetting that Marx identified at the heart of commodities: forgetting that we ourselves created the value that seems to inhere in objects alien to us. In contrast to structuralism, therefore, I argue that culture is best understood as meaning-­making—­all connotation and use—­ rather than as meaning—­all denotation and form.20 It is the meaning-­making of Germany’s political leaders that interests me here—­empirically, theoreti­ cally, and ultimately morally. In the pages that follow, therefore, I treat culture not as something we have but as something we do, taking place in time rather than existing outside of it. The guiding principle for my sociology of collective memory—­and of political culture more broadly—­is that people do things with words, but not always in circumstances or with materials of their own choosing.21 In the process, they change the meanings of those words, sometimes more, sometimes less. Any explanation of why leaders speak the way they do—­about the past or about any­ thing else—­is thus a question of  how culture works as a process in time, and of the (changing) roles that (changing) symbols and (changing) meanings play in political legitimation; it is not an attempt to hypothesize an autonomous realm of culture or collective memory “in and of itself.”22 20. For a kindred argument, see Weeden 2002. 21. If this formulation sounds familiar, this is because it combines two more famous sepa­ rate observations. The first comes from the leading figure of so-­called speech-­act theory in analyti­cal philosophy,  John Austen, who wrote that “men do things with words” in order to demonstrate that words are important acts because humans act through words (1975). The sec­ ond, perhaps more famous, comes from Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which Marx wrote that “men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted” (1988). 22. In this argument I have been much influenced by so-­called practice theories, particu­ larly in anthropology (e.g., Ortner 1984) and political science (e.g., Wedeen 2002), which have important similarities to, as well as differences from, the Geertzian approach. Many practice theorists are indebted to Geertz for underwriting their recognition that political symbolism is important, and for moving us beyond the political-­psychological understanding of political cul­ ture. As noted above, Geertz calls our attention to culture as a system of interworking meanings sui generis, which is an advance over approaches that reduce culture to production or reception. Nevertheless, practice theorists argue, Geertz ends up treating culture as a text, ontologically distinct from action. In the process, he turns interpretation into an act of aesthetic virtuosity, thus moving it beyond the realm of verifiability, overemphasizing its coherence, and reducing its

The Sociology of Collective Memory  53

Clearly, the political-­culture analysis of collective memory just outlined works in somewhat different ways than do other prominent strategies. Many historians, for instance, conventionally look behind the scenes and try to un­ cover which interests, assumptions, and intrigues motivated historical actors. Many sociologists, by the same token, are often more interested in the broader contexts of action, engaging in public opinion research, generational analysis, or even collective psychoanalysis.23 All of these strategies inform the account I offer in what follows, which draws on biographical,  journalistic, and archival resources as well as demographic, public opinion, and voting data (though no single study can pay sufficient attention to all these factors). But this excursion into the theory of political culture shows why the story I tell of official memory in Germany is concerned with public statement more than with backstage ma­ neuver, with impact more than with intent, and with long-­term development as much as with short-­term determination. To explain sociologically why what has been said about the past was said demands looking not only at what in­ dividuals want to say, but at what they can and cannot say—­at how what they say is not a simple matter either of intention (their own) or of compulsion (by circumstance), but something that fits into longer patterns and wider contexts.

effects on action to mimesis. As Wedeen (2002, 715–­16) argues, “Geertz’s definition of a ‘system of symbols’ was one that insisted upon coherence—­on a reified, frozen system of meaning, rather than on what symbols do . . . In his ‘signification system’ there is no agency, only an intelligible, seamlessly coherent script or master narrative that actors follow in particular ‘cultures.’ ” For more on the practice-­theoretic response to Geertz, see Ortner (1999). On transformations in political culture theory, see Bonnell, Hunt, and White (1999); Hunt (1989); Swidler (2001); and Steinmetz (1999). 23. Of course, these structures of analytical choices are reproduced within history and soci­ ology as well. Historiography, for instance, is conventionally divided between “intentionalists” and “functionalists.” “Intentionalists” supposedly ask what powerful actors are trying to ac­ complish and why. Intentionalist explanations, obviously, place great emphasis on the powers of “great men,” seeing historical outcomes as more or less contingent on the wills and capabilities of important individuals. “Functionalists,” on the other hand, are more interested in the broader structural contexts of action, engaging in demographic, economic, and social structural analysis. In debates about the Third Reich,  just to pick an example close to our theme, “intentionalists” emphasize the role of “Hitler and his henchmen” and often ponder counterfactuals such as what would have happened if  Hitler had been assassinated. “Functionalists” often refer to Germany’s “delayed modernization,” or the obduracy of Prussian militarism. Sociologists as well, as we have just seen, choose between production and reception analyses. There are, moreover, numer­ ous historians and social scientists who work hard to take a middle road between the analytical poles or to construct multidimensional explanations.

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A n a ly t i c a l C o n s t r u c t s The purpose of the foregoing pages has been to justify my attention to official or state-­sponsored memory and to motivate my “process and practice” ap­ proach. These pages have been intentionally general, for my purpose has been not only to frame the present project but thereby to provide resources that will be transposable to other studies, thus advancing a general research agenda. Before proceeding, however, it is important for me to discuss how I bring these conceptual themes to bear concretely. In other words, what explanatory prob­ lems in the landscape of German political culture does a practice approach to collective memory help solve, and how? And what additive value does such an approach provide to the many extant studies of this German story? Field First, as we have already seen, I seek to avoid the temptation to speak of one unified collective memory in German society. For this purpose, I have found the sociological concept of “field” quite helpful. “Field” considerations both define my choice of materials and raise specific explanatory challenges. I have already discussed my reasons for focusing on official or state-­sponsored mem­ ory, which derive from my concern that the advances of political culture theory be applied to the state itself, as well as from the more mundane fact that among the huge number of works on German memory, very few have focused on po­ litical rhetoric directly and systematically (though exceptions include Kittel 1993; Herf 1997; Dubiel 1999; and Baumgärtner 2001). 24 My choice to study the “official” political field thus answers both sociological and historical needs. But raising the issue of “field” here is not just a matter of defining the topic for this book; sociological attention to the question of field addresses

24. The most important “data” for this study are speeches and statements made by leading office holders in the Federal Republic from 1949 to 1989 (a more varied approach is taken to materials from the preceding and subsequent years). Most of these are available in two ma­ jor places: the Bulletin des Presse-­und-­Informationsamtes der Bundesregierung (Bulletin of the Press and Information Agency of the Federal Government) and the Stenographisches Be­ richt des deutschen Bundestages (Stenographic Report of the German Bundestag). Additional sources, including newspapers, memoirs, and archival materials, appear in the reference list at the end of the book. While speeches and statements are my primary focus, I draw on many other sources of  information as well: primary and secondary, symbolic and survey, spoken and written, front-­stage and backstage. Unless otherwise noted, translations of primary sources are my own.

The Sociology of Collective Memory  55

substantive questions as well. Social scientists have used the concept of field in both common-­sense and highly theorized ways. The basic metaphor refers to a place where a battle or sporting contest occurs. By extension, it can be used to refer to a particular segment of society, such as politics or the arts—­that is, to particular institutional locations. Indeed, scholars of collective memory have developed such ideas at length to indicate that there are many different kinds of social memory (Bodnar 1992; Schudson 1992), including family memory, group memory, historical memory, cultural memory, official memory, domi­ nant memory, and folk memory—­depending on who is remembering, and for what purpose. There are many collective or social memories—­partly because they are produced in different fields, and partly because there are multiple con­ tenders within particular fields.25 While scholars of social memory have long argued for the importance of differentiating and specifying the institutional origins of images of the past, the approach I pursue here thus emphasizes that it is important to treat these institutional locations not as permanent and uni­ versal categories, but as ongoing products of the practices that go on within and among them. According to Pierre Bourdieu—­the sociological theorist of field par ex­ cellence—­the internal structure and operation of a particular field is never completely fixed (1992). Indeed, insofar as a field is a place of struggle, its very nature and its rules of operation are always either reproduced or changed, and therefore cannot be taken for granted. One major object and result of the struggle, moreover, is not just the internal structure of the field, but the very boundaries of the field itself—­its borders with and relations to other fields. As Bourdieu and Wacquant put it, “The question of the limits of the field is a very difficult one, if only because it is always at stake in the field itself, and therefore admits of no a priori answer. . . . Thus the boundaries of the field can only be determined by an empirical investigation” (1992, 100). So, while we may talk about official memory or vernacular memory, historical memory or literary memory, public memory or private memory, we need to keep in mind not only 25. Another principle for differentiating kinds of memory is to do so by medium. Different media—­including speech, memoir, photography, film, and monuments—­have presented various kinds of collective memory in their different forms. It is important to note that field and medium are analytically distinct concepts: different fields employ different media in different ways. For instance, one would not expect a politician to use song as a way of representing the past, though others working in other fields might do so. Some media are exclusive to certain fields, while some are used in different ways by people in different fields. A politician can appear in a parade while a novelist is unlikely to do so, but both can give speeches (see Olick 2007, ch. 5).

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that these categories and the institutions with which they are associated are ever shifting, but that the struggle over memory within them may in fact play a role in their configurations, both internal and external. An approach to social memory that is responsive to field theory thus sen­ sitizes us to the facts that different fields produce different kinds of pasts ac­ cording to different rules, that remembering is a different practice in diffe­rent fields, and that different kinds of remembering are involved in constituting and reconstituting the boundaries among fields.26 Following Geertz (1980), I begin from the recognition that states are fields of identity as much as, if not more than, they are fields of governance (or at least that governance, following Foucault, is about much more than administration). This is why governments are involved with memory in the first place. These issues will be clearer with just a few preliminary remarks about the organization of mnemonic fields in Germany. Virtually all fields within (and transcending) German society produced images of the Nazi period, often very different from each other. Politicians produced images of the past, as did art­ ists, novelists, historians, commentators, communities, schools, architects, journalists, families, individuals, and so on.27 Sometimes there seemed to be a division of  labor among the producers in different fields, sometimes merely a different form of expression, and sometimes an outright contradiction. There are, of course, things that could or would be said in one field and not another. For instance, a German novelist is freer to accept collective guilt than a politi­ cian is: they have different constituencies, among other things. An opposition critic can be less careful or more provocative than a governing officeholder can. And, the rules of international commemoration are rather different from those of barroom nostalgia. In the history of  West Germany (and elsewhere), there were clear distinctions between what could be said in public and in pri­ vate, both across fields and within them. Indeed, a standard argument about reparations payments and other policies in the 1950s is that the state took on a 26. There is a growing literature in sociology on varieties of social boundaries, material and symbolic (see especially Lamont 1992; Lamont and Molnár 2002; and Lamont and Fournier, eds., 1992). 27. Indeed, much of the recent empirical work on German memory has focused mainly on particular fields. Some of these include Wiesen (2001) (industry); Dudek (1995) (pedagogy); Frei (1996) (personnel); Kaes (1989), Rentschler (1984), and Santner (1990) (film); Conze et al. (2010) (the diplomatic corps); Moses (2009) and Müller (2000) (intellectuals); Berg (2004) (historiography); Eisfeld (2013) (political science); Young (1993), Reichel (1995), and Lurz (1987) (monuments); Marcuse (2001) (concentration camps); Naumann (1998), Schornstheimer (1989), and Kühnl (1966) (media).

The Sociology of Collective Memory  57

burden of memory that individuals would not. Official regret, in other words, provided a kind of private exculpation: If everyone is guilty, then no one is; if the state atones, individuals do not have to. In many ways, this division of labor reversed itself in later decades. Not only the content but the form of memory changed over time. For in­ stance, in West German history as elsewhere, there was a clear professionaliza­ tion of commemoration within different fields. So while the social organization of commemoration was rather diffuse in the 1950s—­with much interpenetra­ tion and blurring of boundaries across fields—­as time went on, different fields developed rather elaborate apparatuses for producing and controlling their memory work. Organizations of many kinds took official positions on the past and became increasingly organized in their production of representations. The ghostwriting of political speeches, for instance, became a much more elaborate enterprise over the course of time: In the 1950s, Federal President Theodor Heuss wrote many of his own most important speeches, and indeed frequently improvised his remarks (Baumgärtner 2001); since the 1990s, in contrast, a national leader does not even attend interviews without “talking points” pre­ pared by a staff of advisors. On this basis of field theory, in fact, we should expect to find a growing routinization and specialization of mnemonic practices as time goes on, both because fields—­unless radically reconstructed—­tend to become more inter­ nally organized over time, and because the boundaries between fields tend to become more fixed. This is one reason why strong changes in the internal structure and external configuration of fields (as in the 1960s in Germany) necessarily involved changes in mnemonic practices within different fields (though the directions of causality, as we will see, can vary). This will be part of my explanation of official German memory, which has indeed become rou­ tinized over the last sixty years, though marked by some significant ruptures. While the general trajectory towards routinization may be lamentable, the point is that it is not entirely caused by the moral turpitude of its purveyors (as some critics would have it). Indeed, what requires explanation is the continued contentiousness of commemoration, not its decline. Calling attention to the relations and boundaries between fields does not mean that only a total picture of all mnemonic practices and products is worthwhile (to say nothing of it being possible). It merely means that the analysis of official memory needs to be nested in the context of other kinds of memory and political processes more generally. Again, to focus on official or state-­sponsored memory is not to ignore or rule out attention to memory produced elsewhere. Rather, it is to inquire into the specific nature and results

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of mnemonic practices and products in the field of the state, as well as into the ways mnemonic practices in the field of the state contribute to the definition and boundaries of  the state. The point is not  just to identify what is special and different about “official memory” as a particular set of practices and products; struggle over official memory, the following chapters show, was an arena (one among many) for defining the proper role for the West German state as such. What kinds of mnemonic activity does the state consider its obligation? How does the sense of those obligations change over time? To frame official or state-­ sponsored memory in terms of field is thus to designate it as a moving target. Dialogue Second, as we have already seen, I seek to avoid the choice between treat­ ing collective memory either as an unchanging generative structure or as a malleable and derivative product. In this effort I have been inspired not only by social-­scientific theories of “practice” and by Assmann’s description of “mnemohistory,” but by related literary theories centered on the concept of “dialogue.” “Dialogue,” of course, is a synonym for “conversation” or “discussion,” and even this ordinary meaning helps us avoid the temptation to treat collective memory as static and tangible. First, conversations exist in and through time and have a certain ephemeral quality; if you do not know where a statement fits into the temporal sequence, you are unlikely to be able to interpret it. And second, conversations are by definition addressive; otherwise they would be monologues, not dialogues. To see mnemonic practices and products as mo­ ments in a dialogue is therefore to see collective memory as both organized and organizing, responsive to the past and addressing the present, and thus in no way a static thing in and of itself. As with “field,” these observations about dialogue also have a highly theo­ rized version, specifically in the work of a group of Russian literary critics—­ known as the Bakhtin circle28—­dating from around the 1930s and rediscovered 28. There is a long-­standing debate about the authorship of the so-­called Bakhtin texts. Some of the key texts appeared under the names of Bakhtin’s colleagues Medvedev and Vo­ loshinov. Because of Bakhtin’s problems with Soviet censors, there is dispute over which texts Bakhtin wrote and which he merely influenced. For an introduction and survey of “dialogical” theory, see Morson and Emerson (1990). Key primary texts include Speech Genres and Other Essays (1986), The Dialogical Imagination (1981), and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984),

The Sociology of Collective Memory  59

by contemporary literary theorists in the 1970s and 1980s (Todorov 1984; Mor­ son and Emerson 1990). Bakhtin and his colleagues were responding to two trends in the aesthetic theory of their era: literary formalism, which viewed genres as ideal, transcendental categories of which specific texts were mere examples; and Marxist “stylistics,” which reduced literature (and speech gen­ erally) to emanations of social structural conditions outside of language. The problem with formalism, according to Bakhtin, is that it removes the temporal dimension because what matters to formalists are variations of a permanent form rather than the historical development of the form. The problem with Marxist stylistics, in contrast, is that its advocates see utterances as formally random, wholly determined by their material circumstances and the exigencies of the moment. In contrast to these options, Bakhtin and his circle developed a “sociologi­ cal poetics,” an effort to appreciate literature and speech more generally as neither completely historical nor completely structural. For this reason, the theorists of sociological poetics developed a refined idea of genre to identify kinds of utterances, but understood these genres as practical rather than ideal types, defined by the “object, the goal, and the situation of the utterance” (Bakhtin quoted in Todorov 1984, 84). In this light, genres are “historical ac­ cretions,” the results of “a continuous and generative process implemented in the social-­verbal interaction of speakers” (Voloshinov 1986, 98). All utterances, in this view, take place within unique historical situations while at the same time containing “memory traces” of earlier usages—­meaning not that any ut­ terance can be decoded to reveal earlier usages, but that the specificity of every term is the product of a long historical development. The point is not merely that we have to pay attention to both the moment and the history leading up to the moment, but that we have to avoid reifying the very distinction between them. In the same way that practice approaches help overcome the divide between individualist and collectivist views, sociologi­ cal poetics thus helps overcome the divide between structural and historical approaches. Speech, according to Bakhtin, is structured, but it is structured within history, not outside of it. Bakhtin’s solution to the false dichoto­ mies of form and content, structure and history, was to call for an analysis of genres, both as they unfold “prosaically” in particular contexts and as they all published under Bakhtin’s name; The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics (1991), attributed to Bakhtin and Medvedev; and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1986), attributed to Voloshinov.

60  Chapter Two

are developed over the span of “great time.” Without attending to “great time,” according to Bakhtin, the historicity of the basic terms of any dialogue is underemphasized; without attending to prosaic circumstances, the terms of dialogues seem inevitable, the product of accumulated history rather than something contingent on specific historical moments. Bakhtin’s answer to the contradiction between structural determination and historical contingency was thus that historical trajectories are “constitutive.” But their influence is also “unfinalizable.” Every utterance is “a link in a chain of speech commu­ nion,” yet is responsive to its moment (1986, 93). Put in more sociological terms, memory is path-­dependent, but path-­ dependence is never path-­determination. The term “path-­dependence” refers to the ways in which historical events occur sequentially so that early moments open later opportunities and close others; it is an answer to explanations that assume a predetermined relationship between prior conditions and subse­ quent events. There are always numerous roads from past to future, and the different roads taken can lead in different directions. In the case of German memory, and of commemoration more generally, this means not only that the event being remembered shapes a particular representation of the past, but that all the intervening representations of the event shape it as well. Of course, the fact that commemoration—­or any other social process, for that matter—­is path-­dependent does not mean it is only path-­dependent: the original event and the present context also play a role. The point here is not to explicate the intricacies of  Bakhtinian theory or to demonstrate credentials as some kind of faithful Bakhtinian, but to discover useful organizational principles for the work that follows. And even this brief exploration of “dialogism” has provided just that. Indeed, the narrative and analysis in the remainder of the book is organized in terms of the two aspects of dialogue Bakhtin theorizes. The first I call “profile”—­an interpolation of Bakhtin’s prosaic analysis—­and I use it to guide my division of German mem­ ory into epochs. The second is “genre”—­Bakhtin’s own way of highlighting “great time”—­and I use it to call attention to thematic trajectories, which come together in different ways in different periods and provide the materials out of which profiles are constructed. Attending simultaneously to profile and genre is, I argue, a powerful way to appreciate the dialogical qualities of collective re­ membering: its simultaneous addressivity and historicity.29 29. There are numerous similarities, as well as differences, between this Bhaktinian distinc­ tion between prosaic and great time and Jan and Aleida Assmann’s distinction between com­ municative and cultural memory (discussed already in a previous note). Assmann (2006) defines

The Sociology of Collective Memory  61

Profile As will become clear in the body of this book’s narrative, the meaning of any particular image of the past or mnemonic practice is not available outside of its contemporary moment; to treat it as such would be to see representation as a logical rather than a social process, all denotation rather than connotation, unproblematically transposable from one context to another. But even symbols or images that remain ostensibly the same over time may in fact change quite a bit in their import, range of reference, applicability, comprehensibility, and ap­ propriateness. The very act of remembering is thus as unique as the situation in which it is taking place, and the images or objects produced by it not only are impossible to interpret outside of this present context, but are part of the context’s definition.30 communicative memory as the memory that takes place in everyday life within a time horizon of no more than three generations (or what was known as the saeculum—­a presumed lifetime); communicative memory, according to Assmann (2006, 128), “offers no fixed point which would bind it to the ever expanding past in the passing of time,” and corresponds to what the oral historian aims to recover in his or her research. In contrast, cultural memory occurs “once we remove ourselves from the area of everyday communication and enter into the area of objectiv­ ized culture.” In contrast to communicative memory, cultural memory is thus “characterized by its distance from the everyday.” Unlike Halbwachs, who distinguished between the short term as the context of memory and the long term as the context of history, Assmann’s main theoretical contribution thus lies in his demonstration that the long term is as much a form of memory as the short term. Seeing the greatest possible similarity between these frameworks, one could say that cultural memory corresponds to great time, while communicative memory corresponds to the prosaic. To make this analogy, of course, one would have to take the saeculum of communicative mem­ ory—­an age—­as being rather shorter than Assmann does: namely, about a decade or two, the length of a political regime. In this light, communicative memory deals with the contemporary issues that arise at a particular point in political discourse, while cultural memory indicates the longer-­term identities that develop through these shorter-­term temporal contexts. To be sure, I have found the Bakhtinian language more useful because it avoids the temptation to which Ass­ mann’s framework sometimes succumbs in its effort to draw a sharp conceptual distinction—­ namely, to view communicative memory as having no fixed points at all and cultural memory as involving completely fixed points. Here, I am interested in the fixity within fluidity and the fluidity within fixity, the ways in which the long term and the short term interpenetrate in such a way that makes ultimate distinctions between them impossible at the limit. In the conclusion to this book, I develop this tension on the metaphor of a gyroscope, a mechanism for continuously mediating between the vector from the past and gravitational forces of the present. 30. Indeed, an authentic Bakhtinian would argue that it is impossible to separate meanings and their contexts; to do so would be to engage in a dangerous abstraction.

62  Chapter Two

The central message of the political culture concept outlined above is that the pathways of interest, exigency, and identity are always inextricable at the limit. If, as I have argued above, politics is about much more than who gets what, where, when, and how, we cannot proceed from the premise that sym­ bols (and historical images as particularly prominent symbols) are merely tools in the struggle for resources (and thus expressions of exogenously constituted interests) or emblems of preexisting identities. In other words, we lose some­ thing when we treat political culture as entirely soluble into discrete elements. Interests and identities, the production of culture and its reception, are not separate essences; they are interpretive perspectives on an indissoluble total situation. I thus introduce the concept of legitimation profile to describe the unique contours—­more and less smooth—­of political meaning-­making in any period of time. Profiles comprise diverse meaning elements, including im­ ages of the past, identitarian claims, rhetorical styles, attributions of present responsibility, policy characterizations, types of heroes, styles, sense of inside and outside, moral and practical purposes, and procedures. The notion of profile captures the impossibility of apprehending these meanings as discrete elements, and the necessity of viewing them as wholes greater than the sums of their parts. This is the mundane sense of a profile: an outline visible only as a whole. In this way, profile looks out from the political field to see it as part of a wider cultural moment. Most important, to see meaning-­making as forming different profiles in dif­ ferent periods helps us avoid taking the organization of meaning-­making as a generative structure; profile implies manifest rather than subterranean quali­ ties.31 This notion of legitimation is part of understanding, again, the ways in which states govern memory, govern with memory, and are governed by mem­ ory. These processes are the heart of the meaning-­making that constitutes and reconstitutes identities as well as power. Appreciating the generalized and irreducible character of epochal profiles makes clear why periods are so often represented through a small number of powerful “condensation symbols” or emblems.32 Indeed, photographs work 31. Social movement theorists have often employed the concept of  “frame” to emphasize this irreducibility of interpretative wholes to their symbolic elements (Benford and Snow 2000). Frequently, however, the notion of frames or framing implies a monolithic cognitive structure, and new frames often replace old ones in these accounts willy-­nilly. In contrast, I intend the concept of profile to indicate more emergence and fluidity than does the concept of frame, with particular emphasis on the path-­dependency of profile change. 32. On condensation symbols, see especially Burke (1973 and 1989).

The Sociology of Collective Memory  63

particularly well in this regard.33 According to my analysis, there were three major legitimation profiles—­captured by three corresponding photographic emblems—­in the political culture of the West German state from 1949 to 1989. In each, images of the past34 are essential, though in different ways at different times. (As we will see, each of these profiles favors a different solution to the problem of the past outlined in the previous chapter. The “reliable nation” favors the rule-­of-­law argument, the “moral nation” favors the second-­guilt argument, and the “normal nation” favors the relativism argument.) 1. First, the “reliable nation” spanned the period from the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 into the grand coalition of the mid-­to late 1960s. During this period, the Nazi past was constructed as a bounded aberra­ tion from the true course of German history. The rhetorical style of  leaders talking about that period was thus defensive, exculpatory, and repres­ sive. The problem was identified as a faulty constitution and an unstable first German democracy. These problems had been “solved” with the (albeit provisional) founding of the Federal Republic. Mostly, though not exclusively, following a “rule of  law” argument, West Germany’s leaders therefore claimed that their state and society were reliable; they sought to demonstrate this with the legal gesture of reparations to Israel and the political insistence on Western integration and human rights while they resisted and criticized various forms of “denazification,” political cleans­ ing, and legal prosecution. During this period, images of the past formed a central, though circum­ scribed, node in the political culture. On the basis of this profile, there was a purported reorientation of other aspects of political culture, a redesign of institutional controls and priorities, and a redirection of policy. The changes were dramatic at the same time as they were minimal: the rheto­ ric of caesura belied numerous restorations (see Herf 1997). The profile of the reliable nation is embodied strikingly in an image from the founding of the Republic. On September 21, 1949, a formal cer­ emony took place at which the Allied High Commissioners were to hand over the Occupation Statute, and at which newly elected Chancellor Kon­ rad Adenauer was to introduce his cabinet. Adenauer and the cabinet 33. For a compelling account of photography as a uniquely important medium for the col­ lective memory of the Holocaust, see Zelizer (2001). For a broader theory of iconicity, see Alex­ ander, Bartmanski, and Giesen (2011). 34. I am using “image” in its broadest sense, not restricted to the visual.

64  Chapter Two

were expected to wait at the edge of the carpet on which the three high commissioners (Sir Brian Robertson, André François-­Poncet, and John J. McCloy) stood, thus indicating Adenauer’s subordination. Instead, Adenauer stepped directly onto the carpet, demonstrating his unwilling­ ness to acquiesce in the definition of  his position as subordinate. The past was not to be a limitation on his government, which claimed a decisive ideological and institutional break with the Nazis as well as with older traditions of Central European antipathy towards the West. This literally strident posture—­Adenauer strode forward onto the carpet—­came to be known as “carpet politics” (Teppichpolitik), and characterized Adenauer’s work and rhetoric until the Occupation Statute was lifted in May 1955 and throughout his entire chancellorship. 2. Second, the “moral nation” began with the Social Democrats’ assump­ tion of (at first shared) governmental responsibility in the grand coalition of 1966–­69 (though there were earlier threads), and reached its epitome under Chancellor Willy Brandt’s social-­liberal coalition of 1969–­74. In this period, the Nazi past was seen as an essential feature of German his­ tory, one whose structural as well as cultural manifestations had not been totally expurgated. In this period, leaders drew a generalized respon­ sibility to the world as a whole as the legacy of Germany’s crimes. The historical rhetoric in this period was generalizing and diffuse, and pointed to long-­term social-­structural patterns. During this period, however, the complexities of memory were minimized as the political culture was stamped by generational demands and the politics of reform. The past (or at least its rejection) was a motivating background and a frequent topic but not, seemingly, the focus in and of itself. A new generation called col­ lective guilt to the fore, but that was at least in part because they did not see themselves as part of the community of guilt; guilt was mandatory, but it hit only the older generation personally, while for the new generation its meaning was purely political. There were elements here of the “second guilt” thesis, and sometimes even a perverse sort of pride in repentance that resulted in condescension to others who had not learned the lessons of the past.35 The central image of the moral nation—­seen as both positive and negative—­was the dramatic photograph of  Willy Brandt kneeling at the 35. This term, “pride in repentence” (Sühnestolz), was later used sarcastically to reject the attitude that supposedly lay behind it. A famous articulation of the notion is to be found in Al­ bert Camus’s novel The Fall: “The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.”

The Sociology of Collective Memory  65

Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. This gesture combined Germany’s distinct historical debts—­to Jews, to Poland, and to peace in general—­in an effort to advance a progressive program of reform, both domestically and inter­ nationally. For supporters, who seemed to be in the majority, this image indicated an appropriate distancing from the denials and stridency of the Adenauer era. For later conservative critics, it embodied everything wrong with the so-­called politics of sixty-­eight: Germany on its knees. Whether positively or negatively assessed, however, this image crystallized for many the “spirit of the age” or, in my terms, the profile of the era—­including a generalized sense of responsibility; a new attitude towards old structures, ideas, and allegiances; and a progressive policy agenda. 3. The “normal nation” began after Helmut Schmidt took power in 1975 and—­despite important changes when Helmut Kohl’s Christian Demo­ crats came into power in 1982—­continued and intensified through the 1980s. In this period, the Nazi past was viewed as one historical epoch among many in a long and venerable German history. The rhetorical style of  historical discussion was relativizing, normalizing, and revision­ ist, as it became the vogue to compare Germany’s burdens with those of other countries. In this period, the neoconservative leadership worked for changes in historical consciousness as part of a program of cultural reform aimed at enhancing legitimacy through identity. Perhaps the central moment of this period was the Bitburg affair, already mentioned in the previous chapter. In order to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Chancellor Helmut Kohl invited American President Ronald Reagan to participate in a ceremony of reconciliation over the graves at the military cemetery at Bitburg. Opposi­ tion to the visit and its implication that it was time to lay history to rest reached crisis proportions, however, when it was revealed that forty-­nine soldiers of the Waffen-­SS (an organization declared criminal at Nurem­ berg) were also buried at Bitburg. But the ceremony was very important to neoconservative supporters of Kohl, who had recently fought hard for the deployment of American midrange nuclear missiles on German soil as well as to ordinary Germans who had always wanted to see their lost fathers, sons, and brothers as normal patriotic soldiers. The image of German and American generals of the Second World War shaking hands at a German military cemetery while Kohl and Reagan stood behind them thus symbolized for many a long-­hoped-­for new status for West Germany—­one in which this loyal partner was to be given “proper” respect and “proportionate” power, without regard to this terrible yet

Characterization of the Nazi years

Bounded period: extrahistorical

Long-­term trend: embedded and continuous German experience

Historical epoch among many others in a longer history

Epoch

The reliable nation

The moral nation

The normal nation

T a b l e 1   Legitimation profiles by epoch

Relativizing, normal­ izing, revisionist; comparative historiography

Generalizing, social, structural, diffuse; fascism theory

Essential

Universal

Defensive, exculpatory, repressive; totalitarian theory

Historiographical style

Aberrational

Evaluation of the Nazi years

Political morality; broad social reform; radical democracy; universal rapprochement

Fidelity to the Alliance commensurate with state’s power; steadfast opposition to totali­ tarianism and Germany’s division; normalcy

None

Reliability; Western in­ tegration; human rights; militant democracy

Lessons of the past

Peace with Eastern neighbors; aban­ donment of former territories; world peace; reunification of force

Restitution to and special relation with Israel; reintegration of German victims

Debts

The Sociology of Collective Memory  67

distant past in which, according to Kohl, the lines between perpetrator and victim were blurred and no longer relevant. In sum, to present the epochs of  West German history as legitimation pro­ files is not merely to engage in conventional periodization, which often fo­ cuses on transitions and exogenous sources of transformation. Rather, doing so calls specific attention to the ways in which, following Geertz’s formulation, meanings “interwork” in different ways at different times, and does so without overemphasizing their coherence. One good illustration of the explanatory usefulness of the term “ legitimation profile,” which I will examine in greater detail later, is the speech Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker gave on the fortieth anniversary of Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945 (which I have already noted in passing). Much of von Weizsäcker’s speech—­widely hailed as a decisive break with previous commemorative habit—­was thematically sim­ ilar or even verbally identical to a speech given ten years earlier by Federal President Walter Scheel on the thirtieth anniversary of May 8, 1945. Scheel’s speech, however, had received no significant notice: the issues were simply not as salient in 1975 as they had become by 1985. Following Bakhtin, meaning and con­text are ultimately irreducible. Genre Attending to the addressivity of collective memory within irreducible profiles, of course, should not lead us to treat these profiles as “systems” or structures outside of history. Again, Geertz did refer to systems of “interworking mean­ ings” (1973, 207), and I have explored the dangers of structuralism in develop­ ing a practice approach to political culture. In contrast, a dialogical approach does two things. First, it calls our attention to how the terms that come to­ gether in unique ways at different points in time respond as much to their past as to their present. Second, it understands “interworking” as a process in time, rather than as an abstract relation. Like other sociological approaches to cul­ ture, the dialogical approach recognizes the ways in which speakers draw on the key tools (Swidler 1986) or tropes (Burke 1969) available in their immedi­ ate milieu. In contrast, however, the pages that follow show how these tools or tropes are organized into genres in and through particular occasions over time. Indeed, the commemorative tropes at issue are how leaders try to make sense of collective identities in time. As already discussed, genres are mechanisms for preserving the histori­ cal accretion of dialogue. This does not mean that they record all previous

68  Chapter Two

utterances and yield them up to the speaker right before the moment of speech so he or she can respond explicitly to whatever the last statement was. Rather, genres are a form of cultural memory, carriers of ways of seeing and the traces of all previous utterances of a particular sort. Just as we do not have a cogni­ tive transcript of the history of a conversation when we are well into it, but still speak in such a way that our statements would not be comprehensible to someone unaware that they are part of an ongoing conversation, genres mark our place in dialogues. Recognizing this calls our attention to the ways in which any utterance fits into a chain of previous utterances. Here we move to the heart of the political-­cultural analysis of collective mem­ ory. A central argument of this study is that official memory varies in systematic ways from context to context, but not merely because of the momentary exigen­ cies that arise there or because of differences in field. As Karlyn Campbell and Kathleen Jamieson put it in their study of the American presidency, discourses on different occasions and in different settings “can be viewed as genres defined by their pragmatic ends and typified by their substantive, stylistic, and strate­ gic similarities” (1990, 9)—­a point similar to the one made by Bakhtin about genres being defined by “the object, the goal, and the situation of the utterance.” This is indeed a perspicuous claim for the German context, where a number of distinct genres have structured official memory over the course of the last fifty years.36 The organization of speech in and through genres works in at least two dif­ ferent ways. First, speakers and speechwriters are often well aware of what has been said on earlier versions of an occasion; indeed, professional speechwrit­ ers often turn to their files when preparing a new speech, while more casual speakers either use their memory of earlier or analogous situations or make 36. In a recent survey of the culture sociology literature,  Jason Kaufman (2004) has identified varieties of what he calls “endogenous explanation” in cultural sociology, an explanatory strat­ egy that seeks to account for cultural products and outcomes not in terms of noncultural factors like social structure or rationality, but in terms of culture itself. In some kinds of endogenous explanation, cultural structures cause cultural performances (and indeed the latter are often reduced to instantiations of the former). In another kind of endogenous explanation, one kind of culture, for instance an image, causes changes in another kind of culture, for instance an identity or commitment. Finally, culture can also be seen as self-­organizing. Indeed, despite Kaufman’s classification of my previously published work as a version of the second kind of endogeneity, I see my genre approach as a version of the third: that is, self-­organization. But I do not make a strong claim about—­in fact I resist the very distinction between—­what counts as endogenous and exogenous to culture; this distinction too, I am trying to show, is also self-­generated in the course of social practice. I return to Kaufman’s argument in the body of the conclusion below.

The Sociology of Collective Memory  69

their own inquiries into expectations. But second, Bakhtin makes the point that speech is not shaped only, or even mainly, through such direct influence. Rather, earlier moments and later ones are connected by what he calls “genre contact”—­the sharing of a common “way of seeing” between texts: “A genre possesses its own organic logic,” Bakhtin writes, “which can to a certain extent be understood and creatively assimilated on the basis of a few generic models, even fragments” (1984, 157). Throughout the narrative that follows, we will find that occasions and topics provide conventions and terms for speakers in these different moments, and thus are themselves carriers of memory: they remember what kind of speech is appropriate to the substance and form of the particular moment. Genres are thus not  just schemes that we as analysts use to classify speech; they are constitutive principles for the production of speech in the first place. To be sure, the link between occasions and genres is not one-­to-­one: some occasions are single-­genre ones (for instance, one does not usually discuss budgetary issues when laying a wreath at a cemetery), while others are woven of several genres, often in a topic-­by-­topic fashion (for instance, when in an inauguration address a speaker turns from theme to theme). Other occasions, of course, are more completely dedicated to one particular thematic task. Campbell and Jamieson’s (1990) point, nevertheless, is well taken: speech on any given occasion is indeed structured by conventions or expectations that in­ here not in the overall historical moment—­the epochal profile—­but in specific requirements of the immediate occasion, whether explicitly stated, modeled, or merely intuited by subsequent speakers—­and indeed by listeners. The re­ quirements of particular occasions can be very different from each other, and thus can produce very different kinds of speech. But they work as memory traces, carried by genre. The only way we know what is appropriate to the oc­ casion is in reference to the longer history of the occasion. And the tropes we deploy on the new occasions always bear the history of their earlier deploy­ ments in earlier contexts, whether or not we are aware of those traces explicitly. It is in this way that, as Bakhtin put it, genres are the “drive belts connecting the history of society to the history of  language.” In the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, memory of the Nazi past has occurred in an enormous number of different contexts and on a diverse set of occasions. Some occasions have been about other issues, and references to the Nazi past have appeared in passing or to justify or explain something else. Some have been about many issues, one being the Nazi past and its pro­per commemoration. Some are specifically addressed to the problem of commemo­ ration. Other occasions are about some other past. But they all provide threads

70  Chapter Two

of dialogue in which subsequent statements are responses as much to earlier statements on similar occasions as to the pressures of the present, and in this way they constitute and are constituted by genres of commemoration. For instance, like the leaders of any modern government, Germany’s leaders participated in ordinary occasions of state: anniversaries, transitions, adminis­ trative debates, and the like. These include inaugural and farewell addresses; broad policy debates (at the beginning of every new governing period, the chan­ cellor delivers a Regierungserklärung [government declaration] outlining the spirit and policy directions for the coming period; additionally, the annual budget debate increasingly became a forum for very general discussion about governmental policy); statements on foreign affairs, on the signing of treaties, and on administrative initiatives; and Christmas and New Year’s statements, among many others. On such occasions, numerous images of the Nazi past ap­ pear, usually for the purpose of distinguishing present policies and institutions from those of the past. In the years immediately following the founding of the new state, such state­ ments obviously had to confront practical administrative problems remaining from the war—­including the rebuilding of infrastructure, redistribution of the burdens of  war damages, integration of ethnic expellees, reintegration of  former Nazis, establishment of  legal principles for war criminals, and reestablishment of democracy and authority—­as well as the more ordinary work of governing, which included formulating policy, making law, and running the business of the state. Later, references to the past on such occasions were more general and forward-­looking. Because such occasions are very general, of course, they often include elements also found on other more specific occasions. Images of the National Socialist past can also be found on more explic­ itly past-­oriented occasions. These include, for instance, Holocaust-­related events like commemorative visits to concentration camps, events addressing relations with Israel and Jewish groups, confrontations with anti-­Semitism, Kristallnacht anniversaries and the like. Other events are more about the war than the Holocaust, or about National Socialism more generally. These in­ clude war or political anniversaries (e.g., January 30, 1933, September 1, 1939, or May 8, 1945), Memorial Day commemorations, celebrations of the return of prisoners of war, events commemorating the expulsion from the eastern ter­ ritories, or merely events sponsored by expellee groups, warranting an address by a political leader. One particularly important topic of commemoration—­ mentioned in other contexts as well as on its own—­is the July 20, 1944, assas­ sination and coup attempt.

Resigned acceptance (often reluctant) Burden (unjust) Pride in repentance

Anger Accusations Resignation

Pride Self-­knowledge Equality Normalcy Similarity

Expiation

Exculpation

Identity

“We didn’t know” “We stood in solidarity” “We were outraged” Regret Denial “We were victims too” “Not heroes” Injustice Devastation Betrayal Misuse Self-­righteous victors Unsullied “Nevertheless worthwhile” Misunderstood “The other Germany” “History with all its highs and lows”

Memorial Day January 30, 1933 May 8, 1945 POWs Heimatvertriebene (expellees) 1848 anniversaries / Hambacherfest Commemoration of  historical figures Celebration of  BRD anniversaries Military

Victimhood/suffering

German traditions

Guilt

Competence Reliability Sobriety Rule of  law

Legitimation Management Governance

Infrastructure Law End of the postwar period Foreign policy Terrorism Social market economy

Regierungserklärungen Inauguration and farewell addresses Treaty ceremonies Policy statements Criminal justice / statute of limitations Equalization of burdens policies Reparations events Concentration camp visits Israel visits Ostpolitik Kristallnacht Criminal  justice Anti-­Semitic vandalism

Posture

Administration

Task

Themes

Occasions (examples)

T a b l e 2   Genres, occasions, and themes

72  Chapter Two

Yet other occasions assert or acknowledge German traditions that have—­ or are claimed to have—­nothing to do with National Socialism, though they are often posed as evidence of an “other” or “older” Germany that either was unsullied by National Socialism or proves that Germany is not to be identified so closely with it—­and in this way, they are about National Socialism as well. These include anniversaries of such events as the failed revolution of 1848, or of  important dates referring to uncompromised German heroes (e.g., Goethe), recognitions of the (unsuccessful) liberal tradition, and references to Germa­ ny’s long history—­as well as consecration of new traditions, and occasions such as anniversaries of the Federal Republic and celebrations of the Basic Law, though such events are also part of broader occasions of state. In and through these diverse occasions, distinct genres of speech emerge, responding to the different challenges. For instance, as already mentioned, and particularly in the early years of the Federal Republic, the Nazi past left numer­ ous challenges for administration, such as ending denazification, legislating social support for widows and orphans, rebuilding destroyed housing stock, and determining how to compensate unequal losses. In later years, new chal­ lenges emerged, such as responding to terrorism without appearing repres­ sive like the Nazis, as well as management of a foreign policy apparently con­ strained by concerns about the German past. These concerns form principal topics for the ordinary occasions of state, though they also appear elsewhere. When discussing such administrative legacies of the past—­in the process char­ acterizing the legacies of the past as administrative—­the posture taken was one of responsible management, though a key theme was also often the amount of time that had passed. Common, for instance, was the repeated trope of “the end of the postwar period,” and the terms “finally” and “no longer.”37 Another major theme in German memory is what I call German guilt, which serves the task of expiation—­gestures of which certainly take place in a wide variety of discursive contexts, but most prominently on explicitly com­ memorative occasions, particularly those associated with the Jews, though also on those regarding Poland or other targets of  Nazi aggression. Such occasions demand solemnity and an apparent degree of humility, and call for tropes and gestures that express this. At the same time, they proscribe too much attention to the German experience except as exculpation (“we didn’t know”; “we knew, but there was nothing we could do about it”; “some of my best friends were 37. A particularly powerful example of the use of this last term was when, on a 1980 visit to Saudi Arabia, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was quoted as saying that West German foreign policy could “no longer be held hostage to Auschwitz.”

The Sociology of Collective Memory  73

Jewish”). The most important feature of expiation is recognition of victims (thus a prime opportunity for philo-­Semitism) and a promise to the future. While expiation of guilt has occurred in all epochs of the Federal Republic, it took on a particularly prominent—­and indeed particularly sanctimonious—­ role in the period of the moral nation. A third genre is what I call German victimhood, and is most closely associ­ ated with the task of exculpation (though assertions of German victimhood are not the only exculpatory tropes, nor are victimhood occasions the only times when exculpatory rhetoric appears). The sense of German victimhood, of course, has changed over time. In the early years of the Federal Republic the existential dimensions were primary, including concerns over lost family mem­ bers, damaged pride, expulsion from German territory, material devastation, the “unjust” persecution of “war condemnees,” and the suffering of prisoners of war languishing in Soviet captivity—­as well as a sense that Germans had been politically abused, first by the Nazis and then by the victors, particularly at Potsdam. Here we will see a particular noteworthy equation by Germans of their own status with that of the Jews under the Nazis. In the middle years of the Republic, the object of the German sense of victimhood was framed in humanitarian terms: families unjustly divided by the Cold War, the result of the victors’ failure to take German national interests into account. In the eight­ ies the main suffering was political, in the sense that German sovereignty was perceived to be perpetually handicapped. Some images of German suffering were of limited duration—­like that of the POWs—­while others were regular parts of the political liturgy—­like memorial day and Heimattag (homeland day, celebrating the regional identities of ethnic German expellees). An additional organizing genre in West German history involves the effort to identify and acknowledge legitimate German traditions, both old and new. This genre includes those symbols, images, and tropes that are used most often to provide a sense of legitimacy by developing new traditions, by reclaiming suppressed traditions, or by claiming that the taint of some discredited tradi­ tion has actually been unfair. Such occasions and themes are used to under­ write a more prideful identity, though they can also sometimes be adapted for the purposes of exculpation. Examples include the anniversaries of the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler, as well as previously ignored anni­ versaries of moments in the failed history of German liberalism. Here a sense of German victimhood is connected to a pride in German identity: There was a democratic tradition, but it was corrupted by a small group of mad­ men in an unusual historical moment. The Nazi period is a very short period of  years in a long German history. The German soldiers were  just ordinary

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patriots defending their fatherland. The point here is to wash out the taint of complicity from German traditions, and to legitimate contemporary identity. In the Fifties, legitimation was primarily exculpatory and was subordinate to administrative problems; in the eighties it was largely relativizing and took a leading role. Perhaps the clearest example of the power of genre is Jenninger’s Kris­ tallnacht speech, with which we began. As I will argue later in this book, I see Jenninger’s error to be a matter not of what he said, but of the connection be­ tween what he said and the genre of the occasion. Kristallnacht is clearly a guilt occasion, and it requires gestures of atonement, expiation, and acknowledg­ ment. Instead,  Jenninger’s speech—­portions of which he had given without problems in other contexts—­drew on tropes and themes from the German victimhood genre. He focused on German perpetrators rather than on Jewish victims. He was concerned with what Germans had thought about at the time. In other words, he employed the wrong genre for the occasion. The Memory of Memory The main point here is that any commemorative statement, any image of the past, is part of an ongoing trajectory of commemoration and imagery. A fortieth-­anniversary speech, for instance, marks not only the event being com­ memorated, but the history of previous commemorations of that event. In or­ der to understand a fortieth anniversary speech, therefore, one must look not only at the event being commemorated and at the profile of which the com­ memoration will be a part, but at the speeches given on the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries. I refer to this as the memory of memory: in addition to memory of the historical event being marked, images of the past always contain within them (explicitly or not) memory of earlier such markings. Memory of memory, it is important to note, is not just focused on the ex­ traordinary. One prominent strategy of political culture analysis—­especially in Germany—­has been to focus on commemorative scandals: moments in which a representation of the past generates controversy. Much of the literature on German memory, for instance, consists of individual studies focused on par­ ticular moments, such as Bitburg, the Jenninger “affair,” or the showing of the American television miniseries Holocaust, to name just a few. Some ambitious works address every major scandal of a particular sort,—­for instance every time a question about anti-­Semitism has arisen, or every moment that has ad­ dressed how to handle former Nazis (e.g., Bergmann 1992). Scandals, affairs, and debates are clearly important moments for crystalliz­

The Sociology of Collective Memory  75

ing positions and revealing tendencies; as performative events, scandals have unique and uniquely important ritual qualities. Much of the narrative that fol­ lows will indeed focus on such charged moments, but attention to genre means looking in between such moments as well—­looking at the ordinary, mundane, unnoticed articulations and images, as well as at the spectacular. It is impor­ tant not only to avoid seeing spectacular events as occurring outside of a con­ tinuum of other events, spectacular and mundane, but also to avoid writing the history of events as following willy-­nilly one after the other. To adopt such an ap­proach would be to miss the window that memory opens on history as an “ongoing work of reconstructive imagination,” to use Jan Assmann’s definition of the contribution of “mnemohistory,” discussed earlier (1997, 14). As we will see, it is often as difficult to account for a statement without reference to earlier statements on similar occasions as it is to jump into the middle of a conversation. Theorizing genre calls our attention to the long-­term trajectories of political speech, countering the tendency to see commemora­ tive texts as being wholly constituted either by the history to which they refer or by the present context in which they are produced. Genres, like collective memory more generally, thus reflexively mediate between past and present. To miss this—­to treat collective memory as either an independent or dependent variable, as the cause or result of social processes rather than a social process (or variety of processes) itself—­is to miss what is so compelling about remem­ bering, and what leads us to study it in the first place.

Summary The narrative presentation of the history of German memory that follows is thus organized according to dialogical principles—­that is, as the intersection of genre and profile. The narrative is organized chronologically by epoch, but epochal profiles are woven—­in the events as well as in the analysis—­out of the threads of genres. I endeavor to describe the ways in which images and utter­ ances are structured by profiles—­which place memory in wider contexts—­and by genres—­which connect utterances to their origins and developmental trajec­ tories on particular occasions. Where Brandt’s kneeling in Warsaw is part of the profile of the moral nation, for example, it was also a response (through many intermediate links) to Adenauer’s carpet politics, whether or not Brandt or his contemporary observers saw it that way. There is indeed a risk of  imposing too much narrative coherence on such a story, but we do live in a world of stories, and to some extent we try to live in such a way as to make the story a good one. I will evaluate the risks and benefits of such an approach in the conclusion.

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Dialogical analysis, moreover, should not be misunderstood as a mere in­ terpretive tool, designed to uncover the unique richness of situations or the historical origins of symbols. Dialogism is also a powerful tool for theory. My central sociological argument, built on dialogical observations, is thus that memory is path-­dependent but not unyieldingly so, shaped by the past but not completely so, and responsive to the present but not directly so. The value of these statements, however, can only be determined empirically.

Chapter 3

Prologues: The Origins of West German Memory

While the history of memory in West Germany officially began with the in­ auguration of the new state in 1949, the foregoing theoretical and substantive discussions make clear that every dialogue is woven of discursive threads that precede its official beginnings. In this chapter, therefore, I present numerous prologues to West German memory. As already noted, these are matters I have addressed in much greater detail in a previous volume (Olick 2005).

Transitions and Choices From the perspective of political theory, all newly democratic regimes face a choice at their outset: how to deal with the legacies of their predecessors’ mis­ deeds. What is to be done with the leaders of the previous regime and their supporters, and what is to be done to rectify their injustices? How much at­ tention should be devoted to memory of the previous regime, and when and where can it be laid to rest? Different solutions, research has shown, depend on a variety of factors, such as the nature of the transition (e.g., peaceful or violent), its timing (e.g., early or late in a wave of transitions), the popularity of the previous regime, and the status of its victims, among other things (e.g., Offe 1996; Elster 2004; Huntington 1993; Kritz 1995). Political scientists studying what has come to be known as “transitional justice” investigate the factors that make various solutions more or less likely (e.g., Hayner 2002; Teitel 2000; Mi­ now 1999); philosophers compare their virtues (e.g., Griswold 2007; Shriver 1998); and historians and commentators judge the rationality and wisdom of the new leaders who make the choices (e.g., Schwann 1997; Lübbe 1983).

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Indeed, exactly this understanding has often framed debate about the be­ ginnings of the Federal Republic of Germany. Many commentators over the years, for instance, have characterized the Federal Republic’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, as having faced a stark choice between “justice” and “legiti­ macy”; either Adenauer’s new government could have pursued, prosecuted, and excluded those who had supported and profited from National Social­ ism, or—­as he is largely seen to have done—­he could recruit former Nazis and their supporters as productive citizens of the new state. As already mentioned in chapter 1, many on the left have long criticized Adenauer’s approach—­which included an early end to denazification, broad amnesties for those already punished and for those not yet convicted, demands for early release of con­ demned war criminals, and reintegration of discredited civil servants, among other measures—­as a “repression” of the past, an attempt to purchase short-­ term stability (legitimacy) by allowing tainted elements to persist. Adenauer’s choice, from this perspective, was thus especially cynical. In contrast, many on the right have defended Adenauer’s policies, arguing that they resulted from his clear-­eyed recognition of the trade-­offs. Anything else (namely, justice), they say, would have been irresponsible of him, risking long-­term instability; Adenauer did what had to be done to secure legitimacy for what turned out to be a solid democracy. While the left has thus disparaged Adenauer’s choice for legitimacy over justice and the right has praised it, they often share with each other, and with the transitional justice theorists mentioned above, the view that Adenauer’s approach was the result of a strategic choice inhering in the novel initial con­ dition of the Federal Republic as a state. In the process, however, both sides underplay the degree to which early governmental policies were a matter of conviction and perception as much as of strategy, and the extent to which such policies were preconditioned in the years before the very contingent formation of  West Germany. In fact, analysis of the years before 1949 shows that Adenauer and his co­ hort, with widespread support across the political spectrum, attempted to draw a line under the past because that is how they understood their responsi­ bility to memory—­not, or at least not only, because they felt compelled to do so by the threat of political failure. These convictions were shaped by a complex set of experiences and development of   ideas over the long term. From this per­ spective, Adenauer and his colleagues were being neither entirely cynical (as the left charges) nor particularly prescient (as the right claims) when they re­ mained silent about German guilt at the individual or collective level except to deny it. The mnemonic frames of the early Federal Republic, in fact, followed

Prologues: The Origins of West German Memory  79

directly on understandings of National Socialism articulated both before and in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi collapse. Indeed, a dialogical approach would expect nothing else, though this is simultaneously dialogism’s advantage and disadvantage: dialogism calls our attention to the emergent qualities of discourse even in the most revolutionary times (as Marx wrote, “Just as they [new leaders] seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service”), but it also makes it very difficult to choose a narrative or analytical starting point.

From 1918 to 1945 In the introduction, I mentioned recognition of “the German problem” as far back as the eighteenth century. To be sure, there are risks in doing so—­namely, the temptation to see all of German history as leading inexorably to Hitler and the Nazis. As the title of one well-­known study of the postwar discourse sarcastically put it (Eberan 1985), “Luther? Friedrich the Great? Wagner? Nietz­sche? Whose fault was Hitler?” It is indeed important, in tracing origins, not to succumb to the temptations of teleology—­the view that the outcome was already foretold in the deep past—­or its correlate, the assertion of some cultural essence that expresses itself in the mere details of history. Recogniz­ ing these dangers, however, does not make it any less important to account for the pathways of discourse in its ever-­present past, even if it is now taking place in significantly new contexts. And indeed Luther, Friedrich, Wagner, and Nietzsche are not utterly irrelevant to the story; nor are Kant, Beethoven, Bismarck, and different groups of ordinary people, for that matter. Neverthe­ less, direct threads of contemporary German memory begin to become more directly relevant to, and recognizable in, this story in the years around the Sec­ ond  World War. Roots of Occupation Plans While it is easy to overstate the impact of particular individuals on the overall course of history, such claims on behalf of the role of particular personalities in discourse and policy making are perhaps more plausible—­and all the more so if the name is Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s attitudes toward Germany were shaped by his childhood memory of having spent six weeks in a Ger­ man boarding school, reinforced by his experiences as assistant secretary of

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the Navy in the First World War. Together, these gave Roosevelt a very nega­ tive view of  Prussian militarism. In contrast to many of  his advisers, Roosevelt never drew a clear distinction between the Nazi regime and ordinary Germans, favoring instead a sort of national character argument. For instance, he repeat­ edly discussed a trip he took to Germany in 1919, when American troops were not flying the Stars and Stripes for fear of  humiliating the Germans. Roosevelt, in contrast, was not inclined to tread too lightly on German sensibilities; he thought it sent the wrong message. No such tender sensibility was appropriate, then, for Roosevelt in his plan­ ning for the occupation of Germany at the end of the Second World War. During that planning, Roosevelt’s sympathies clearly leaned toward those fa­ voring a “hard” peace, though it is not entirely clear what that adjective meant. At the Teheran Conference of November 1943, Roosevelt stated his belief that the very concept of the Reich had to be eliminated from German conscious­ ness and language. Earlier that year, at the January 1943 Casablanca Confer­ ence, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had called for the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers (though Churchill was more hesitant, because he was worried about the effect this would have on the morale of  his war-­weary population). Roosevelt carried to Casablanca the following statement in his notes: He and Churchill were “more than ever determined that peace can come to the world only by a total elimination of German and  Japanese war power” (Sherwood 2001, 665). Unconditional sur­ render, the notes stated, “means not the destruction of the German populace, nor of the Italian or Japanese populace, but does mean the destruction of a philosophy in Germany, Italy and Japan which is based on the conquest and subjugation of other people.” To be sure, “unconditional surrender” was a complex and ill-­defined term (Armstrong 1961), and this statement does not imply that Roosevelt fa­ vored what some—­most famously Secretary of War Henry Stimson—­called “Carthaginian” solutions, which he did not. Nevertheless, Nazi propagandists made a great deal out of this call for “unconditional surrender,” and dredged up any hint of an association of  Roosevelt with Germanophobia, such as falsely accusing him of  having surreptitiously authored a book recommending ster­ ilization of German men. Indeed, Roosevelt’s demand for “unconditional sur­ render” became a centerpiece of the idea in Germany that the Americans were bent on vengeance born of an irrational hatred. This idea was embraced not only by Nazis, but by those who later accused the Western Allies of having failed to work with the German opposition, or with more moderate elements, toward a negotiated peace.

Prologues: The Origins of West German Memory  81

A second, related origin of postwar discourse from the First World War period and after was the experience of Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau  Jr. During the First World War, Morgenthau had accompanied his father, who was US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He thus witnessed the Armenian genocide up close and remained profoundly affected by what he saw. Indeed, Henry Morgenthau Sr. was the most prominent American to speak out about the events. The younger Morgenthau, an associate of Roosevelt’s from New York, was to become a key figure in the Roosevelt administration’s “trust-­ busting” efforts during the 1930s. Morgenthau sympathizers trace elements of his subsequent planning for the occupation of Germany—­which highlighted decartelization and deindustrialization—­to this latter policy. Nevertheless, during and after the war it was Morgenthau’s  Jewishness that became the issue (he was the highest-­ranking  Jew in the history of American government), and not just in Germany. During the war, Morgenthau was re­ peatedly approached by  Jewish leaders who wanted the United States to admit more  Jewish refugees and, later, to devote resources to bombing the rail routes to Auschwitz and other extermination camps, knowledge of which had be­ come reasonably widespread. Roosevelt notoriously refused such entreaties from Jewish leaders, arguing both that bombing would not be effective and that he could not risk giving the appearance that the purpose of the war was to save the Jews (Wyman 1984). In 1944, seeing a lack of planning elsewhere, Morgenthau commissioned ideas about how to conduct the postwar occupation, particularly from his liai­ son to the State Department, Harry Dexter White. Morgenthau ultimately pre­ sented a plan—­which called for widespread deindustrialization of Germany, particularly in the Ruhr Valley, as well as closing of German coal mines—­to Roosevelt and Churchill at their September 1944 conference in Quebec. Con­ vinced by its obvious economic advantages for England (in particular, its elimination of competition with Britain’s coal industry), Churchill initialed, along with Roosevelt, a confidential memorandum indicating support for “a program looking forward to diverting Germany into a largely agricultural country.” Churchill referred to Morgenthau’s plan as a call for “pastoralizing” Germany—­a label that stuck, accurate or not. Roosevelt and Churchill’s agree­ ment at Quebec also included provisions (later dropped) for summary execu­ tions of the Nazi leadership (Olick 2005, 83–­85). Morgenthau’s principal opponents in the US government were Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, both of whom were partly responsible for interpretation of the Morgenthau plan as “Carthagin­ ian.” Instead of tracing Morgenthau’s attitude to his Armenian experience, to

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his antitrust expertise, or to pragmatic concerns, Stimson wrote that Morgen­ thau was “so biased by his Semitic grievances that he really is a very dangerous advisor to the President.” For Stimson, the connection between Morgenthau’s Jewishness and his policy ideas was more than obvious: “Morgenthau is, not unnaturally, very bitter and . . . it became very apparent that he would plunge out for a treatment of Germany which I feel sure would be unwise.” He char­ acterized Morgenthau’s plan as “Semitism gone wild for vengeance.” For his part, Hull asserted that Morgenthau’s plan “would arouse the eternal resent­ ment of the Germans.” About this much, at least, Hull was quite right. The plan was almost immediately leaked to the international press (most likely by Stimson’s deputy,  John  J. McCloy, who was later to become Allied high com­ missioner in occupied Germany [Beschloss 2002]), and it became a key point in Nazi propaganda in the last months of the war. As the Nazi propaganda min­ ister Joseph Goebbels put it, “Hate and revenge of truly Old Testament char­ acter are clear in these plans dreamed up by the American Jew Morgenthau. Industrialized Germany should literally be turned into a huge potato field.” Goebbels thus labeled Morgenthau “the Jewish Angel of Revenge” (  jüdische Racheengel; Olick 2005, 31–­37). Though never instituted in anything like its original form (which, to be sure, was not nearly as “Carthaginian” as its critics, Nazi and otherwise, character­ ized it), the plan did have some rhetorical and policy implications. The origi­ nal Allied Occupation Statute (JCS—­Joint Chiefs of Staff—­1067) declared, for instance, that “Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation,” and early occupation policy included provi­ sions that made this stigmatized status clear, including short-­lived laws against “fraternization” between occupation soldiers and German citizens (partic­ ularly women), broad “denazification” measures, and an ill-­defined policy of “reeducation” (this last to be discussed shortly). Most interesting, however, is the prominent place the Morgenthau Plan as­ sumed in German discourse, and why. Describing an informal 1992 survey of seventeen German high school students in Hamburg, for instance, histo­ rian Bernd Greiner (1995, 16) reports that fourteen of these students replied to a question about Morgenthau’s historical import by referring to his puta­ tive intention to “turn Germany into a cropland and grain silo for the USA,” seven mentioned “American Jew,” and two said, “ Jew, therefore extreme and adhering to thoughts of revenge.” Greiner’s conclusion: “It is scurrilous which names imprint on the collective memory and which not. . . . Henry Morgen­ thau is still [1992] fresh in memory here, even for those who think Henry Stim­ son is the quarterback for the Washington Redskins. . . .” The reason is that

Prologues: The Origins of West German Memory  83

Morgenthau was seen at the time, and obviously for many years later, as an em­ blem of Germany’s postwar victimization: the Jewish angel of revenge indeed. German feelings of victimhood, of course, trace most clearly not just to Morgenthau and Roosevelt’s personal experiences after the First World War and to their planning for the occupation after the Second World War, but to the actual settlement of the First World War. I am referring, of course, to the infamous “stab-­in-­the-­back” legend, as well as to the much-­vaunted “sad­ dling” of Germany with supposedly unmanageable reparations payments. Together these formed one of the most basic tropes of  Nazi—­though not only Nazi—­rhetoric. The belief that Germany had been betrayed by its political and military leaders in the First World War was immediate and long-­standing, and was a principal justification for remilitarization in the 1920s and 1930s. The foreign occupation of the Rhineland was seen as an unbearable humiliation, requiring vindication. It was not just Nazis, or even Germans, however, who ascribed causal force to the notorious “war guilt clause” in the treaty of Ver­ sailles, which was used to both justify and explain German nationalist extrem­ ism. In the memory discourse of the Federal Republic as well, we will see, it has usually been taken as axiomatic that the Treaty of Versailles was a critical error accounting for much of what happened later. Anglo-­American Public Discourse about National Socialism Beyond these experiences during and after the First World War and in pol­ icy planning for the end of the Second World War, roots of postwar German memory can also be found in public discourse more generally during the war itself. In the United States, for instance, there was vigorous discussion about German “pathologies,” which were often seen in collective psychological—­or even psychiatric—­terms. An important conference in New York in the spring of 1944, for instance, drew on social scientific theories about the connections between culture and personality to diagnose “paranoia” and “megalomania” in Germany. As the conference’s convener, the psychiatrist Richard Brickner, put it, “Since paranoia is fundamentally a psychiatric problem, not economic or political, only psychiatric methods will act as a pertinent protective device” (Bricker 1945, 300–­301). Brickner’s own book on the issue (Brickner 1943), titled Is Germany Incurable?, was read widely, including by First Lady Elea­ nor Roosevelt, who commented favorably on it. Other participants in Brick­ ner’s conference, however—­particularly the sociologist Talcott Parsons and the anthropologist Margaret Mead—­understood the issues somewhat differ­ ently. Parsons in particular adapted the ideas of the exiled German political

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scientist Franz Neumann, who had proposed a “polycratic” theory of the Nazi state (Neumann 1944), to underwrite a differentiated strategy for postwar re­ construction—­one which sought different solutions to the distinctive prob­ lems in different societal “subsystems,” such as the economy, the polity, and higher education. While not all participants followed the “polycratic” theory, they all agreed that significant changes would be required to respond to Ger­ many’s “pathologies,” be they psychological or sociological, and that eliminat­ ing the political leadership would not suffice. While it is doubtful that such discussions as these had many direct effects on occupation policy—­though the occupation authorities employed a great number of social scientists and psychologists, and conducted an enormous amount of research on the German population—­they contributed to the more general discourse about “reeducation.” This idea was articulated clearly as early as 1942, in a radio address by Vice President Henry Wallace, who said: “The German people must learn to un-­learn all that they have been taught, not only by Hitler, but by his predecessors in the last hundred years, by so many of their philosophers and teachers, the disciples of blood and iron.” On this basis, Wallace concluded that “we must de-­educate and re-­educate people for democracy” (Olick 2005, 41). Such rhetoric was widespread in the United States during the war. It was there in the research of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research—­displaced to New York and California—­whose associates repeatedly inquired into the “authoritarian personality” and “fascist character,” and who would later study and participate in the German memory discourse (Olick and Perrin 2010). It was there in the writings of many German exiles, including historians, politi­ cians, scholars, artists, and journalists who in many cases would be influential in Germany after 1945. And it was there throughout the American journalis­ tic discourse, too, as were further analyses of German “pathologies.” Many scholars and commentators debated which aspects of German culture were worth saving, and how peaceful democratic habits could be structured and inculcated in Germany. One minor manifestation of this attitude was the “barbed-­wire colleges,” the prisoner-­of-­war camps set up in rural regions of the United States for captured German soldiers, which included programs of civic education for democracy (Robin 1995). Most important, this posture of tutelage, with the associated occasional discipline when necessary, describes what was the ideological posture of the occupation, often much to the chagrin of the pupils. While “the German problem” was discussed with a slightly different accent in Great Britain, it was no less significant a part of the discourse there than in

Prologues: The Origins of West German Memory  85

the United States. Among the most prominent parts of the British discourse were the writings of Lord Robert Vansittart, already mentioned, who gave numerous speeches and wrote several well-­known books frequently referring to “the Hun,” whom he characterized as a “butcher-­bird.” What came to be known as “Vansittartism” was yet another symbol in the postwar German dis­ course for the harsh attitudes with which Germans often claimed they were being treated. Also important were the writings of the historian A. J. P. Taylor. In 1943, Taylor was commissioned by the British Foreign Office to write a chapter on the Weimar Republic for a handbook for future occupation troops. When his essay was rejected as too “one-­sided and partisan,” Taylor decided to make it the centerpiece of a book of his own, which he published in 1945 as The Course of German History, and which, next to William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Shirer 1960), was for many decades one of the most influential works about National Socialism. In his book, Taylor wrote that “the history of the Germans is a history of extremes. It contains every­ thing except moderation, and in the course of a thousand years the Germans have experienced everything except normality. . . . Only the normal person, not particularly good, not particularly bad, healthy, sane, moderate . . . has never sat his stamp on German history” (Taylor 1946, 1). Unlike many criti­ cal accounts, Taylor’s indictment did not focus on the negative impact solely of  Prussianism; it swept up the failed liberal spirits of 1848 as in some sense both condem­nable and typically German as well. Like Roosevelt, Taylor also asserted that National Socialism was “a system which represented the deepest wishes of the German people.” By the same token, Vansittart in particular had at least as many opponents as supporters. The German exile Heinrich Fränkel (1941), for instance, titled a 1942 book Vansittart’s Gift for Goebbels. Frank Owen of the London Evening Standard charged in 1942 that Vansittart was driving thousands of potential anti-­Nazis back into Hitler’s arms. The Evening Standard, moreover, accused Vansittart of racist thinking similar to that of the Nazis (Vansittart’s demand for a retraction was unsuccessful, as was as his similar lawsuit against Time magazine). These, then, were just some of the conditions and attitudes with which the occupation of Germany began, and with which Germans felt confronted (and to which, as we will see, they were often either implicitly or explicitly respond­ ing). Nevertheless, Allied plans were obviously far from coherent; there were many other voices and attitudes, and Allied perceptions and policies changed rapidly in reaction to rapidly changing circumstances. By the same token, these and other topics are relevant here not for their role in the course of the

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occupation, but for their role in German memory discourse, where they re­ mained potent symbols in German perceptions of the situation, and topics to which the German discourse returned again and again.

1 9 4 5 – ­4 9 : T h e O c c u pa t i o n o f G e r m a n y Did the Western Allies truly punish ordinary Germans for the war? Many—­ perhaps even most—­Germans thought so. Many accused the occupiers of ac­ tions similar to, and in some cases even as condemnable as, the atrocities of the Nazis. To be sure, the accuracy of these perceptions is not the ultimate question—­for, as the sociologist W. I. Thomas famously put it in 1928, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Nevertheless, to acknowledge this is not to imply that accuracy is irrelevant. Despite Thom­ as’s dictum, consequences based on a perception of reality are different from consequences based on a delusion (or on other psychological phenomena, like denial or projection). To complicate matters further, it is also possible for people to object to objectionable circumstances for reasons, and to an extent, not directly dictated by those circumstances. And this is, I believe, an accu­ rate assessment of the German situation after 1945: collective guilt was denied even more vigorously than it was charged; and punishing circumstances were often attacked as if they were uniformly intentional, which they were not—­and as if they were more extreme than they were. Woe to the Vanquished? Planning for the occupation of Germany has often been characterized as an epic struggle between those who wanted to dismember it and those who wanted to restore it. As the above discussion of Morgenthau shows, the real­ ity was substantially more complicated. Overall planning—­and execution of those plans—­was driven much more by geopolitical considerations about the balance of power and by the desire to prevent Germany from starting another war than it was by moral concerns. Nevertheless, advanced planning for how to treat the German population was overwhelmed in the first days by what the Allied soldiers found in Germany; and horror at the extent of  Nazi cruelty shaped the first months of the occupation. The Potsdam accord at the end of the summer of 1945, for instance, included a more prominent statement on the need to eliminate racist and politically discriminatory laws along with its retrospectively quite problematic support for population transfers. This re­ newed harshness was at least in part a reaction to reports about the atrocities

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Allied troops had encountered. At the same time, the chaos of the early oc­ cupation, as well as the difficulties the Western Allies encountered in working with the Soviets, strengthened the resolve of those who favored quick recon­ struction, which meant a less punitive stance. In the first days of the occupation, all the Allies took measures to prevent ordinary Germans from evading “the truth.” These measures included forc­ ing locals to tour concentration camps, participate in burial and cleanup, and answer accusations that they could not have been totally ignorant or innocent of “what had occurred.” In many cities and towns, occupation authorities set up photographic displays of evidence. These “placard actions” were often ac­ companied by such slogans as “These atrocities: your fault.” Additionally, the Western Allies produced documentary films about the concentration camp system and showed them widely throughout the Western zones. There is no question that these films were accusatory. Nevertheless, the impetus to use them and other measures to produce a feeling of collective guilt among ordi­ nary Germans was not universally supported, and was quickly abandoned. At the opening of the Nuremberg Tribunal, for instance, chief prosecutor Robert Jackson was quite careful to say in his opening statement that the trial was not about collective guilt: “We would also make clear that we have no purpose to incriminate the whole German people,” he said. “If the German populace had willingly accepted the Nazi program, no storm troopers would have been needed in the early days of the Party and there would have been no need for concentration camps or the Gestapo. . . . The Germans, no less than the non-­German world, has accounts to settle with these defendants” (Taylor 1992, 118). One correlate of this view was that the prosecution did not focus particular attention on crimes against Jews, which, it ultimately held, either could be dealt with as war crimes or fell beyond the court’s jurisdiction. The court, in fact, refused to connect the Nazis’ policy toward  Jews before the war to the extermination camps, and this contributed to the view that the genocide of  Jewish people was the consequence of a war of aggression, rather than a matter for special handling. Regarding collective guilt, as Theodor Eschenburg (1983, 59) has pointed out, “For some, who had assumed no leadership or key positions, of course the delusion may have appeared that through the Nuremberg verdict the guilt was now atoned and the level of their co-­responsibility had sunk.” Indeed, the many people listening to the remarkable last day of the main proceeding (August 31, 1946), during which the defendants were permitted to make brief statements to the court, found a ready lexicon of exculpation that likely re­ sounded with many private sentiments, and which could be heard, as we will

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see, in much rhetoric coming from respectable public figures. General Jodl, for instance, who had signed the unconditional surrender documents, de­ fended both the military leadership and ordinary soldiers by asserting, “They did not serve the powers of Hell and they did not serve a criminal, but rather the people and their fatherland.” Hans Fritzsche, ministerial director of the propaganda ministry, said: “It is quite possible . . . that the storm of indigna­ tion which swept the world because of the atrocities . . . should obliterate the borders of individual responsibility. . . . It may be difficult to separate German crime from German idealism. It is not impossible.” Julius Streicher, publisher of the main Nazi party newspaper, warned: “Do not pronounce a judgment which would imprint the stamp of dishonor upon the forehead of a genera­ tion” (Olick 2005, 115–­16). The question of individual versus collective guilt also emerged in—­and in­ deed shaped—­the context of “denazification.” In wartime discussion, theories could be classed into two general kinds. First, for those who viewed the Third Reich as the result of  historical contingencies exploited by pernicious individ­ uals, responsibility resided only with the leaders. This was the popular view in Germany both during the occupation and for many years after: “Hitler and his henchmen” formed a “seductive clique” who misused the German peo­ ple; since ordinary Germans ended up suffering great losses, they could not at the same time be considered perpetrators of their own destruction. Se­c­ ond, however, as we have seen, on the other side were those who argued that Germans manifested collective pathologies and a defective political culture. From this perspective, not all the blame could be laid on the leadership. The Nazis had enjoyed widespread support, and ordinary Germans had partici­ pated enthusiastically in all aspects of collective life. No mere symbolic pros­ ecution of notorious personalities would address the profound extent of col­lective responsibility borne by wide segments of the population. Indeed, it was a version of the latter view that guided efforts to “denazify” Germany through an elaborate set of procedures. These included a lengthy questionnaire to be filled out by all German adults of a certain age (the age re­ quirement became progressively more restricted with the geopolitical impera­ tive of quick rehabilitation), and classification of each respondent according to degree of complicity—­the latter determined by a system of inquiries and hearings at the local level. These “Nurembergs of the common man,” as one later commentator (Friedrich 1989) put it, met with derision and corruption in the German population. The questionnaire itself, for instance, was ridiculed in a bestselling novel (Salomon 1951), which satirized the very idea of imposed denazification as well as the ignorance of German life it supposedly displayed.

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According to the book’s author, Ernst von Salomon (an archconservative who had been an accomplice to the 1922 assassination of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau): When the Americans decided to pass the contents of the pot—­in which every­ thing had been stewed up together—­through the sieve, they found in their sieve as many categories of man as there had been in that other pot, the Jewish one. It was the second greatest crime of the terribles simplificateurs that they had not attempted to pass the contents of the Jewish pot through the sieve, their greatest being that they had simply destroyed the whole brew (Salomon 1951, 514–­15).

This is not quite a direct equation between the Nazis and the Americans, but it does seem to have been an equation of the Germans and the Jews. Indeed, this exact equation was one of the central tropes of the postwar discourse, ap­ pearing again and again in the words of vastly different commentators in vastly different contexts. Without a doubt, denazification was an administrative “fiasco,” as an Amer­ ican political scientist described it (Herz 1948). There were differences be­ tween procedures in different occupation zones, and even between different localities. The rules were continuously revised, such that it sometimes seemed as if the more minor offenders, who were handled early, ended up with harsher consequences than more major offenders, who either were able to delay the process or were delayed because of the greater complexities. The process itself was often corrupted: false denunciations were common, as were false exculpa­ tions; indeed, there was something of a commerce in what came to be known as “whitewash certificates” (Persilscheine)1—­testimonials from individuals who for one reason or another (for instance, being a Jew) were considered beyond reproach. Finally, the entire process was nearly continuously undermined by foot-­dragging, passive resistance, and other forms of refusal; it was also often difficult to find people willing and acceptable to serve as hearing officers. In August 1947 the Soviet authorities announced their intention to end de­ nazification in their zone. They did so in February 1948, at least in part to curry favor with ordinary Germans (including low-­level Nazis), from whom they hoped to gain political support. Surprisingly, when in reaction the American authorities announced plans to close their own program (which since August 1. A Schein is a certificate; Persil is a brand of  laundry detergent known for eliminating brown stains (brown being the color of the early Nazi uniforms, and the symbolic color of the party).

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1946 was being administered by the Germans), they met with resistance from German authorities, who were concerned with the issue of minor versus ma­ jor offenders, mentioned above, and with the critical reactions the resultant unequal treatment would cause, potentially making it possible to invalidate earlier judgments. As a result, the Western program continued until December 1950—­after, that is, the founding of the Federal Republic. In the end, of the more than three million returned questionnaires that indi­ cated chargeable offenses, 930,000 were left after amnesties and other reduc­ tions. Slightly more than 9,000 people received prison terms, 30,000 received special labor, 22,000 were declared ineligible for public office, 122,000 had their employment restricted, 25,000 had property confiscated, and 500,000 paid fines. Many of these rulings, however, were later swept away when the new German government, as well as the churches, demanded reduction of punish­ ments and general amnesties as a major bargaining chip in debates over rear­ mament in the Cold War context of the early 1950s. Whether these numbers seem high or low depends, of course, on one’s perspective, as does whether the punishments were sufficient. Moreover, the effort’s legacies are ambiguous: at the founding of the Federal Republic, we will see, a great deal of rhetoric was aimed at rejecting putatively false distinctions, as Konrad Adenauer put it in his first government declaration, between “two classes of people in Germany: the politically unobjectionable and the objectionable.” Ending denazification was a declaration that this kind of  judgment would not continue. By the same token, equally vigorous arguments—­for instance that of Ernst von Salomon, mentioned above—­were aimed at avoiding the insufficient differentiation of collective guilt. Collective Guilt? Throughout the first two years of the occupation, while all of this was occur­ ring, there was indeed a significant public debate in Germany about respon­ sibility or guilt. Much of it took place in Allied-­sponsored organs of public discourse, most prominent of which was the Neue Zeitung, “an American newspaper for the German public,” first published on October 18, 1945. That first edition included the following statement from General Eisenhower: “The Neue Zeitung, although it is published in the German language, in no way attempts to be a ‘German’ newspaper. . . . Militaristic ideas must be erased from the German mind. For all civilized nations on this earth, aggresion [sic] is immoral; the Germans, however, have to be educated to this self-­evident truth.” This statement was very much at odds with the intentions of the newspaper’s

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principal founder and editor-­in-­chief, Hans Habe, a Hungarian Jew who, fol­ lowing a varied and often dubious early journalistic and political career, had spent the war in US exile. In contrast to Eisenhower—­who had refused to meet and shake hands with General Alfred Jodl when the latter surrendered at Eisenhower’s headquarters on May 7, 1945—­Habe distinguished strongly between “good” and “bad” Germans. Indeed, the Neue Zeitung’s two central preoccupations under Habe’s direc­ tion were the role of the exiles and the question of collective guilt. Regarding the former, Habe and his colleagues made special efforts to present German ideas and culture that had been crushed by the Nazis. The newspaper was thus filled with essays by and commentaries on exile literature and Nazi-­prohibited traditions, as well as serious discussion of the role of writers. With regard to the issue of collective guilt, the newspaper also carried numerous essays argu­ ing for it, though more arguing against. One of the most significant debates it presented was between the psycho­ analyst Carl  Jung and the world-­famous children’s book author Erich Kästner (Emil and the Detectives), who was the newspaper’s feuilleton editor. In April of 1945, Jung (who spent the war in Swiss exile, despite his early Nazi sym­ pathies) had given an interview to a Swiss newspaper in which he offered a sweeping diagnosis of collective guilt (indeed,  Jung is often credited with be­ ing the first to use the term), and the Neue Zeitung reprinted an article version of the argument.  Jung referred to the “general psychic inferiority of the Ger­ mans” and to a “national inferiority complex” for which, he argued, they had tried “to compensate by megalomania.” Jung argued that all Germans were—­ actively or passively, consciously or unconsciously—­participants in the atroci­ ties, and that the “collective guilt” of the Germans was “for psychologists a fact, and it will be one of the most important tasks of therapy to bring the Germans to recognize this guilt.” As such,  Jung rejected “the popular sentimental dis­ tinction between Nazis and opponents of the regime” (Olick 2005, 192–­200). Kästner, for his part, accused  Jung not only of  hypocrisy but of cruelty in his failure to distinguish those who opposed the regime from those responsible for its atrocities, the result of which he saw as devastating: Then the poor, exhausted opponents of the regime sunk into themselves without a word. Granted, they had not been able to overcome the Genghis Kahn of Inn [Hitler] and his bronzed horde. But they did try to withstand the demons of torture and bloodlust, the furies of the gas chambers and cre­ matoria, the vipers of surveillance, blackmail, and dispossession. Not every one of them could be so valiant and incorruptible as the researcher of the soul

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Prof. Dr. C. G. Jung. . . . So the opponents of the defeated regime silently cov­ ered up their pale, tired, starved heads. The “popular sentimental distinction” [ Jung’s term] between them and the Nazis was not permitted.

Of course, in criticizing  Jung’s failure to make an important distinction, Käst­ ner glossed over a few important distinctions himself—­for instance, between the victims of surveillance and the victims of the gas chambers. This elision, we will see, was quite a common one, whereby many Germans at the time not only saw themselves as victims but, as we have already seen, often projected themselves into the experience of particular Nazi victims, namely the Jews. Habe himself  had a rather iconoclastic view of the issue. He seemed to be­ lieve that the Germans were in fact collectively guilty but, he wrote later, “if the Germans were collectively guilty, we should have concealed it from them” (Habe 1953, 2–­3). His argument was that raising the issue of collective guilt misrepresented Anglo-­American war aims: “We were not waging war to elimi­ nate evil from the face of the earth. . . . We fought Germany because the mili­ tary, political and economic plans of Hitler’s regime endangered our security and our way of life.” (This is not, of course, how the Second World War has entered into collective memory.) Moreover, Habe reflected in 1953, accusing Germany of collective guilt “was impractical,” creating many problems, not least of which that “we couldn’t turn to the good Germans for we had claimed that they do not exist.” Even worse, because of the reversal in Anglo-­American policy with the advent of the Cold War, Habe believed that accusations of col­ lective guilt made the inconsistencies in Anglo-­American policy even more clear: “When five years later we needed the Germans to fight communism, we had to retract everything we had previously said.” Of course, that such retrac­ tions of what was ambiguous to start with were required barely five years later is relevant to the interpretation of German defensiveness: How much defense for how much accusation? And how long had any real accusations lasted? While the pages of Habe’s newspapers—­again, the central organ of pub­ lic opinion in the first year of occupation—­carried a vigorous discussion of German guilt, their editorial policy was thus substantially less accusatory than the “placard actions” and other early condemnatory measures. Extreme ideas rightly or wrongly associated with the Morgenthau Plan, moreover, had not carried the day unmodified. And despite opinion polls in the United States showing persistent negative attitudes toward Germany, Germany’s desperate food situation produced an historically unprecedented and extensive response from abroad in the form of CARE packages and other personal aid. Regard­ ing denazification, it was true that the entire adult population was technically

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under suspicion; by the same token, the fact that the overwhelming majority were exonerated could have been, but was not, interpreted as a rather generous exculpation. None of this, of course, is to imply that Germans did not in fact suffer, both during the war and in the years of uncertainty and deprivation that followed. Indeed, the extent of physical and moral devastation throughout large por­ tions of Central Europe in 1945 was truly unprecedented. For years, Germans had endured horrific bombing raids and the associated terrors of the shelters. German casualties were staggering, and manifested no real boundary between military and civilians. In some areas, in the last months of the war and in the first months of occupation, repeated rapes by invading troops were common. Homelessness was rampant in 1945. Moreover, estimates are that approxi­ mately ten million people were expelled from the East—­officially sanctioned by the Potsdam accords—­with more than a million dying en route. Conditions for German soldiers in US Army captivity, moreover, were dire, with severe food shortages and often inadequate or nonexistent shelter. As many as three million German soldiers spent time in Soviet captivity, and as many as a million died there; tens of thousands did not return until well into the 1950s. The Source of German Suffering Was German suffering the result of a concerted effort to punish an entire peo­ ple? Many thought so, even outside Germany. The British socialist publisher, Victor Gollancz, for instance, who during the war had opposed Vansittart­ ism as propagating race hatred and bloodlust, charged that the food shortages and other aspects of the occupation were the result of a vindictiveness so thor­ ough that it threatened humanitarian values. In a 1948 book, Gollancz pro­ vided extensive detail of ordinary German suffering, particularly in the two winters following the war, and laid blame for it squarely on the occupation au­ thorities. It was indeed true that ordinary Germans experienced terrible hard­ ships and dislocations during the occupation. Who was to blame and what could be done, however, were more complicated questions than Gollancz and his German admirers allowed. It is perhaps surprising to note that a very harsh view of the occupation came as well from the Protestant churches, which, given the absence of central governmental authority among the Germans, exercised exceptional influence during the “Nuremberg interregnum,” as the occupation period is sometimes called. In the first months after the war, the reconstituted Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) made a number of statements, most prominent of which

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was the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, issued on October 19, 1945. The Stutt­ gart Declaration, most powerfully influenced by Pastor Martin Niemöller, has entered German collective memory as a remarkable acceptance of responsi­ bility, and Niemöller—­a member of the resistance—­has become a worldwide symbol of conscience. The Church declared: We know ourselves to be with our nation not only in great community of suf­ fering but also in a solidarity of guilt. With great pain we say: because of us, infinite suffering has been brought to many peoples and countries . . . Even though we fought over many years in the name of  Jesus Christ against the spirit that found its terrible expression in the National Socialist reign of violence; we condemn ourselves because we did not believe more courageously, did not pray more devotedly, did not believe more joyously, and did not love more deeply.

The impact of this statement, however, was substantially greater than that which was intended, at least by some of  its authors. A number of newspapers at the time reported in large headlines, “Evangelical Church Acknowledges War Guilt” and other slight variations. Whether, and in what way, this was an ac­ curate description is not entirely clear from the text just quoted. Tellingly, the statement begins with German suffering. The declaration also claims that its authors are not guilty of  having done nothing, for they say that they did preach to their congregations and did fight the evil (despite a much more mixed re­ cord in the Evangelical Church in the 1930s, which had resulted in a schism within the Church). Furthermore, the declaration is ambiguous because it is not entirely clear who “we” refers to; it seems as if the “we” and “us” refer to the clergy, but not to the German people at all. Nevertheless, the declaration led to a significant public controversy, in which the question of guilt and the role of the churches was extensively de­ bated (Olick 2005, 213–­20). In the course of that debate, many church leaders made clear their opposition to any notion of collective guilt. One of the most prominent, Bishop Theophil Wurm of  Württtemberg, had earlier objected to the beginnings of denazification by comparing “persecuted Nazi party mem­ bers and their sympathizers” who had been removed from their jobs in the first weeks of the occupation to the victims of terror in the Third Reich. Wurm opposed denazification in general as “Bolshevistic,” as a retrospective applica­ tion of  law, and as denying the value of a change of heart through contempla­ tion. As for collective guilt, in a January 1946 statement, he said, “We know that our German people today stands accused of causing the terrible world holocaust which has caused such infinite suffering and need throughout the

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world.” Wurm proclaimed he was up to the task: “We do not hesitate to carry the burden of guilt which the leading men of state and party heaped upon our people.” Nevertheless, he claimed that the crimes of these leading men had to be understood in context: “These circumstances were created in Germany by the conditions which arose after the last war as a consequence of the repara­ tions burdens and the mass unemployment connected with them. . . . “ As for the Nazis: “Every people has its Jacobins who come to power under certain circumstances.” Regarding the supposed admission of guilt some were seeing in the Stutt­ gart Declaration, Wurm sought to qualify that any such admission was to be understood religiously, not politically: The idea of a collectivity of guilt is a biblical one from A to Z. The Bible views sin not simply in isolation but always in connection with something: it affixes responsibility in an overall context, in all directions. The fathers have eaten grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge; I will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. That is one of the rules of life, a divine law we recognize again and again (Greschat 1985, 23).

In many ways, this is ordinary language for a preacher, though it is possible to find the preface here to be an unusual one: “According to today’s slogan,” Wurm stated, “not everyone in Israel sinned equally: many kept themselves uncorrupted.” In what way that was “today’s slogan” is unclear. But whether intentional or not, it is yet another example of the analogy made between Ger­ mans and Jews. Another version of this analogy is present in the contributions of a very different figure, the Catholic historian and commentator Eugen Kogon, who had spent six years in concentration camps for his oppositional activities. Ac­ cording to Kogon, the aversion to contemplating guilt was in fact a result of the accusation itself: To awaken the powers of contemplation in the German world was the task of a far-­reaching Realpolitik of the Allies. It was included in the program of “re-­ education.” And it stemmed from the thesis of a German collective guilt. The shock of accusation, that they were all complicit, was supposed to bring the German to the realization of the true causes of their defeat (Kogon 1964, 10).

Instead, the accusation supposedly produced the opposite: “Because of the awful clamor around it and because of its own blindness it [the German

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people] wanted to hear nothing more of self-­examination. . . . A justified feel­ ing of millions defended itself against the collective accusation, which had a leveling appearance” (Kogon 1964, 10). About this Kogon was clearly right, as was his less convincing claim that Allied policy was responsible for whatever “repression” or “silence” about the Nazi past existed. This claim was to be­ come a pillar of  leftists’ critiques in the 1960s: that Germans had not come to a proper attitude to the past because they had been unsuccessfully goaded into a posture of guilt, and that given appropriate time and space, they would have been more likely to work through the past adequately. Nevertheless, it is interesting, in light of the previous discussion of Bishop Wurm, to point to another of Kogon’s formulations. Kogon was certainly no apologist, and in fact he rejected collective guilt in part because he thought it distracted from the contemplation of individual guilt. He criticized his com­ patriots who condemned the Allies for a hypocritical and condescending atti­ tude. Kogon responded that the queston of who was doing the accusing had no bearing on the accuracy of the accusation. To illustrate this, he chose the same analogy as Wurm: “To this moral question the Bible has already answered, in­ sofar as the prophet named the dictator Nebuchadnezzar the ‘servant of God’ who was sent by him to lead the people of  Israel out of error” (Kogon 1964, 59). According to the analogy, Germans were the people of Israel who had erred, and the Allies were Nebuchadnezzar. This is an interesting reversal, consistent with the theory that Germans, in the words of the philosopher Karl Jaspers—­another important participant in the guilt debate—­were the new “pa­ riah people.” This was the same term the sociologist Max Weber had famously chosen many years earlier to characterize the position of the Jews in history. One further anecdote from Bishop Wurm sums up a widespread attitude, though perhaps in extreme form. In a supposedly conciliatory exchange with the archbishop of Canterbury, a city whose architectural majesty had been de­ stroyed by German firebombs, Wurm wrote: “It is clear to us that our citizens would not be dying of   hunger on the roads, our soldiers would not be with­ ering away in detention camps, if millions had not been forced previously to endure a similar fate.” Nevertheless, according to Wurm, “it is from a sense of deep concern that we call your attention to one fact: good has not simply triumphed over evil with the Allied victory.” The real culprit producing the paramount suffering, for Wurm, was denazification: “What has been done since then in the sphere of denazification was likewise not always designed to awaken the impression of a higher degree of justice and humanity.” More than this, however, “to squeeze the German people together in an ever more crowded space [apparently a reference to the expulsions from the eastern

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territories] and to reduce its possibilities for life as much as possible [appar­ ently a reference to deindustrialization] cannot, in fundamental terms, be eval­ uated any differently than the extermination plans of  Hitler against the Jewish race.” Bishop Wurm, it is important to note, did not represent the ultra-­right wing, and was one of the most influential religious and political figures in the emerging Federal Republic. Historical Perspectives There are countless other examples, issues, and arguments worth exploring in the postwar prologues to the West German discourse. But the purpose here is to give just a basic sense of the origins of that discourse’s themes and terminol­ ogy. Before turning to the emergent political discourse, I thus mention only briefly one further arena—­namely, the various explanations of “the German catastrophe” developed by historians and social scientists in particular. As in the policy discussions we saw, much of the historical and social-­ scientific discussion of German aggression can be divided between those who understood it as deeply rooted in German history and those who thought of it as a contemporary aberration. For the former, the self-­understanding of Ger­ many required wholesale revision; for the latter, it was nonetheless necessary to explain how, despite three hundred years of  humanism, this “industrial ac­ cident,” as a common trope we have already seen put it, could have occurred. What required revision, moreover, often depended on where one stood in the political landscape. Conservatives, for instance, required finer distinctions to preserve their admiration for German power while resisting association with the Nazis. For them, the legacy of the opposition—­which had included many conservatives—­ was a real exoneration. In this light they were able to dismiss attacks on Prus­ sian militarism. In the words of one prominent commentator, Hans Rothfels, the opposition was entitled to look upon efforts to appease Hitler, and upon failure to support the opposition, as the “real stab in the back.” For Rothfels, Prussian military men and their national conservative associates represented the very best of Germany and gave their lives to provide “a bulwark against nationalistic and demagogic excesses.” For Rothfels and many others, “Na­ tional Socialism can be seen as the final summit of an extreme consequence of the secularization movement of the nineteenth century. . . . What triumphed after the pseudo-­legal revolution of 1933 was in fact and to a great extent the dark forces forming the sediment of every modern society.” In this early ver­ sion of the “relativization” position outlined in the introduction to this book,

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conservatives—­and German culture generally—­were no more responsible than anyone else (Rothfels 1962, 21, 41). This view that National Socialism was merely a part of wider forces in mo­ dernity was widespread, and was shared across the political spectrum—­the nationalists and conservatives highlighting processes such as secularization, massificiation, and materialism, and the left seeing National Socialism as an extreme manifestation of tendencies inherent in capitalism. Some placed the beginnings of the German catastrophe as early as the Thirty Years’ War, others dated it to the failed liberal revolution of 1848, or to 1919, or to 1933. Some even saw the early years of National Socialism in a positive light, distorted only by the excesses of the war. All agreed, however, that National Socialism was a perver­ sion, a plague, a catastrophe, and finally a tragedy (Meinecke 1950, 101, 103). In fact, much of the language often went beyond the natural to the meta­ physical, referring to “the epitome of evil.” Friedrich Meinecke, for instance, perhaps the most famous of all German historians in the immediate postwar period, characterized National Socialism as a catastrophe and a tragedy, “the essence of which consists above all in the fact that the divine and the demonic in man are indissolubly linked together.” This sense of the demonic in politics led Meinecke to characterize the Third Reich as “a period of inner foreign rule” that preceded “the postwar period of external foreign rule.” The Third Reich, in this view, came from outside, and was not really German at all. This uncritical equation of  National Socialist rule with the postwar occupation, we have seen, was emblematic. In most historiographical and social scientific accounts from the immediate postwar discourse, the point was that National Socialism was something that happened to the German people, who were its first victims. As the economist Wilhelm Röpke, who would be one of the principal architects of the so-­called “economic miracle” of the 1950s, put it: It should be clear to everybody that Nazism began its march of conquest in Germany itself, that the Germans were the first victims of that barbarian inva­ sion which poured over them from below, that they were the first to be over­ whelmed by terrorism and by mass hypnosis, and that all that the occupied countries had later to endure was suffered first by the Germans themselves, including the worst fate of all, that of  being impressed or seduced into becom­ ing tools of further conquests and oppression (Röpke 1947: 14).

As a result, Röpke argued, “the guilt of the Germans is different from that of the National Socialists; it is the guilt of the seduced, not of the seducers, the

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degradation of the violated, not the infamy of the violators.” We will see echoes of these and related views throughout the political discourse on National Social­ ism over the several decades that followed. But it is important to note both that all of these discourses emerged from the same primordial soup of occu­pa­tion-­ era public discourse, and that they were often directly constituted by it.

The Birth of West German Politics Kurt Schumacher and the Social Democrats Political speech in what would later become West Germany began before the unconditional surrender of German forces on May 7, 1945. Immediately upon his release in April 1945, for instance, the Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher—­despite debilitating illness and injury—­got right to work to re­ establish the Social Democratic Party (SPD), to assume leadership of it, and to bring it to a position of leadership in postwar Germany (Olick 2005, 237–­46). While some points of emphasis changed slightly over time, the main themes of Schumacher’s (and, by extension, the whole party’s) position were already clear in a speech he delivered to the Hannover SPD on May 6, 1945, titled “We Do Not Despair!” There he laid out an orthodox Marxist explanation of the rise of  National Socialism, emphasizing the failed politics of 1848 and the economic and political imperialism of the 1870s. In particular, he identified the “coalition of  heavy and military industry and indeed of the entirety of finance capital with the powers of Prussian militarism.” The result of this, he argued, was a culture whose hallmark was “blind faith in the exclusive determining role of violence.” As for the Nazis, Schumacher described them, much as he had already done in a 1932 Reichstag speech, as “all those who, after the First World War, were unable to find their way back to an orderly life, all frauds from the business world, all the defective and unfit, all civil servants with poor grades and profes­ sional inadequacies, all failures and justly disadvantaged, the lazy and incom­ petent at life.” Schumacher was also quite explicit about guilt. For him there was no question that “the German name is defiled by the concentration camps, the persecution of the Jews [a rare mention], the barbaric execution of the war, the plundering and slave hunting in the occupied territories.” For those who sought exculpation by denying knowledge of the atrocities, he charged: “Their perpetual excuse ‘I didn’t know that!’ is without moral and political value. It may be that they did not know everything, but they knew enough.” Schu­ macher enumerated examples of ordinary complicity, including the receiving

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of war plunder, and that of witnessing “with their own eyes with what bestial meanness one humiliated, robbed, and hunted the Jews. “No more powerful indictment of ordinary Germans is to be found by a leading politician in the entire history of postwar Germany than this: “They not only remained silent, they would have preferred it if Germany had left them peace and guaranteed them a little bit of profit with a victory in the Second World War.” Interesting here is that Schumacher used the third person, referring to “those who,” “their,” and “they”—­for indeed, Schumacher believed that he and his compatriots in the SPD were free of these charges. He therefore re­ ferred repeatedly to a widespread guilt and complicity, but rejected the idea of collective guilt. He argued that the majority of Germans “allowed and en­ couraged that a hoard of adventurers, untested in capabilities and character, snatched power for themselves, and they allowed this hoard to run things uncontrolled. The complicity of large segments of the people for the bloody domination of the Nazis lies in their belief in dictatorship and violence! This guilt cannot be expunged.” He added the uncommon connection that this failure had brought Germany to its current powerlessness, and he argued that recognizing this connection was the “prerequisite” for renewal through “repentance and change.” In this, Schumacher sounded very much like the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who was to write: “Here we Germans face an al­ ternative. Either acceptance of guilt not meant by the rest of the world [an iconoclastic acknowledgment that German defensiveness might have been overstated] but constantly repeated by our conscience comes to be a funda­ mental trait of our German self-­consciousness—­in which case our soul goes the way of transformation—­or we subside into the average triviality of indif­ ference, mere survival. . . . There is no other way to realize truth for the Ger­ man than purification out of the depth of consciousness of guilt.” By the same token, however, Schumacher characterized collective guilt as “a great histori­ cal lie with which one cannot undertake the reconstruction of Germany.” He welcomed admissions of guilt like the Stuttgart Declaration only if they did not “extend guilt to people and currents which had always been deadly enemies of the Nazis”—­in other words, to himself and his party comrades. Later, Schu­ macher distinguished among “actual Nazis,” “hundreds of politically guilty,” and “the great number of those who through insolence, cynical and corrupt behavior supported the atmosphere of Nazism in business, on the street, and at home.” Schumacher was also quite critical of the occupation authorities, whom he grouped with the communists and “all the other enemies of Nazism,” all of whom he accused of failing “to examine their own policies in a self-­critical

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manner.” Indeed, in October 1945 he quipped, “We were sitting in concen­ tration camps while other peoples were making alliances with the Hitler gov­ ernment”—­presumably referring to the British effort to “appease” Hitler in 1937. The central point of Schumacher’s rhetoric was clear: only the Social Democrats were suited to leadership in the new Germany. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, Schumacher was intensely critical of the occupation. At the 1948 party congress in Dusseldorf, Schumacher argued that the SPD “must protect Germany against the rapacity of the conquerors.” Too much punishment, he warned, would only backfire. It is thus no wonder that Ameri­ can, and particularly British, authorities found Schumacher difficult to deal with, and were greatly concerned by the possibility that he would become West Germany’s new leader. Schumacher was arrogant and autocratic, and for many he embodied the discredited Prussian characteristics. Adenauer and National Socialism While Konrad Adenauer did not bear the physical signs of martyrdom that Schumacher did, and had belonged more to the passive rather than the active opposition, the Nazi years were indeed difficult for him and his family (Olick 2005, 246–­62). Elected mayor of Cologne in 1917, he had been one of the lead­ ing figures in the Catholic Center Party. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, they dismissed Adenauer as mayor when he refused to allow their flags to be hung from city government structures. By then in his late Fifties, Adenauer retreated from public life and was forced into hiding, though he was also ar­ rested several times. With his record of leadership and noncomplicity with the Nazis, Ade­ nauer was clearly at the top of the occupation authorities’ list of candidates for new leadership, and he was appointed to the Cologne City Council. At its first meeting, Adenauer and his compatriots were lectured by Major J. Alan Prior of the British Military Government on the urgent need for reeducation. Prior noted that every German he met expressed repugnance of the Nazis. “Nevertheless,” he declared, “the fact remains that for twelve years Germany obviously supported the systematic plundering of Europe and willingly took part in it.” Prior believed that this made ordinary Germans responsible, and he asserted that anyone who cared about the future of Germany would have to acknowledge this. As would be characteristic of much of his public rhetoric, Adenauer’s re­ sponse to Prior traced a fine line. Observing the city’s physical devastation, Adenauer began by identifying the perpetrators: “The cursable ones who

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came to power in the fatal year 1933 are guilty for this unspeakable misery, for this indescribable suffering.” He did refer to the “seduced and crippled people,” and thus seemed to identify at least a passive weakness on the part of the population. But he warned that the real reason why Germany was in such ruins was that the Nazis wanted to prepare the ground on which thoughts of revenge might take root. Adenauer was summarily fired by the British six days later. Ironically, this gave him the opportunity to begin work on the formation of a new party, and thus to become substantially more powerful than he likely would have been had he remained mayor of Cologne. In March 1946, he was elected chairman of the Christian Democratic Union in the British zone, and began work on statements of basic principles. That month he gave two key speeches: a radio address on March 6 called “Democracy Is for Us a Worldview,” and a “Basic Principles Speech” on March 24 at the University of Cologne. Together, these two speeches make clear how steadfast Adenauer’s vision was, from the depths of  wartime despair to the challenges of international brinkmanship during the Cold War. This also goes to my assertion at the beginning of this chapter that Adenauer’s memory politics was not merely a matter of the exigencies of state after 1949, but the expression of a deeply held worldview. In his March 24 speech, for instance, Adenauer began by pointing out that nowhere in Germany had the percentage of votes for Hitler been as low as in Cologne. His point, however, was that “catastrophes, the unleashing of elemental, demonic violence, nevertheless affect the guilty as well as the not guilty,” thus distinguishing, as he later would condemn others for doing, be­ tween two classes of Germans as well as foregrounding the unfairness of  being German. Admitting to despair at what he had witnessed—­and what he admit­ ted knowing about atrocities—­he asserted that he was now proud to see how his countrymen were bearing up under their suffering: “The German people is2 enduring the most difficult period in its history with heroic strength, perse­ verance, and patience.” 2. The phrase “das deutsche Volk” presents a significant problem of translation. In En­ glish, “the American/British/French people” would take the plural, as in “The American people value democracy.” In German, however, “Volk” is very clearly singular. And this grammatical construction carries with it a great deal of culture. To render “das deutsche Volk” as plural—­as in “The German people were downtrodden”—­would misrepresent the meaning of the term. For this reason, throughout this book I have rendered “das deutsche Volk” as singular—­in the Ade­ nauer quote above, for instance, as “The German people is enduring . . . .” “The German people

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Adenauer clearly rejected collective guilt: “I demand no acknowledgment of guilt from the German people, although many Germans have a very heavy guilt, many a guilt which while less heavy nevertheless is still guilt.” But he did not think public declarations of even individual guilt were necessary in front of the world. According to his analysis, the major source of National Social­ ism was the “materialism” that had resulted from the decline of the Christian worldview. Because he believed that wide segments of the population had been receptive to National Socialist ideology, he argued that it was “not correct to say now that the bigwigs, the high military or large industries alone [parties Schumacher’s rhetoric was accusing] are guilty.” To be sure, they bore “a full amount of guilt,” but it was only their personal guilt, though it was ever greater according to their power, and for it “they must be brought to account before German courts.” Rather, the problem was that a “wide segment of the popu­ lation, the farmers, the middle classes, the workers, the intellectuals, did not have the right spiritual attitude; otherwise the victorious march of National Socialism . . . would not have been possible.” The only antidote in the present, Adenauer believed, was re-­Christianization, which is why he insisted—­over objections both in and outside Germany—­on calling his party the Christian Democratic Union. Interestingly, though Schumacher was guiding his party to pick up exactly where it had left off in 1933, he attacked Adenauer as the symbol of the new Germany’s restorative character. He believed that Adenauer represented prop­ ertied interests and was providing a home for former Nazis. Adenauer swatted these charges away—­but for many on both the right and the left, charges of restoration would stick for decades because, among other things, both parties were accepting former Nazis. As for the claim that the CDU represented propertied interests operating on economic motives, Adenauer was purported to be deeply offended. His re­ sponse was to charge Schumacher with failing to provide a shred of evidence, and hence of employing methods better associated with the Nazis, a charge that, as we have already seen, was deployed with great frequency by many dif­ ferent speakers against many policies and parties. Nevertheless, Adenauer’s fuller response was not without its red flags: “It is not correct that large capi­ tal called National Socialism to life in order to keep the middle-­class parties is . . .” may sound wrong in English (though in English as well we refer to a single people and to many peoples, as in “the peoples of  Europe”); but “The German people are . . .” would misrep­ resent the cultural understanding, as would rewriting the originals so as to avoid the question.

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under control.” Adenauer asserted that he himself was no friend of  large capi­ tal or of trusts and cartels. As for the connection of large capital to the rise of National Socialism—­a staple of Socialist theory—­Adenauer dismissed the claim as absurd: “National Socialism was from the first moment on sharply directed against the Jews. But in large capital the  Jews were enormously influ­ ential. Does anyone believe that these influential  Jewish gentlemen helped the archenemy, namely the National Socialists, to political power? No, that would mean vastly underestimating the intelligence and cleverness of these gentle­ men.” Surely, this was an unfortunate formulation, and perhaps a surprising one, given Adenauer’s place in memory as a purposeful, even cynical, philo-­ Semite: here Adenauer excuses large capital with the defense that the Jewish powers unquestionably controlling it were too “clever” to support the Nazis. At this early moment—­March 1946—­Adenauer was still wary of criticizing the occupation. A year later, however, in an April 13, 1947, campaign speech at the University of Cologne, he did not hold back his now full-­blown accusa­ tions. Following two winters of severe hardship, Adenauer returned to an issue from the wartime rhetoric of Roosevelt, though glossing over the significant debate at the time over what exactly Roosevelt had meant: We surrendered unconditionally. Unconditional surrender of the leaders of the National Socialist army is a purely military matter. Unconditional surrender has existed in every war; it means nothing other than that those who uncondi­ tionally surrender cease hostilities and turn themselves, their troops, and their weapons over to the enemy. But the unconditional surrender of the German army [now the German rather than National Socialist army] never had the consequence that Germany ceased to exist. . . . Those to whom injustice has occurred—­and we must recognize that in the National Socialist period injustice was done—­do not thereby have the right themselves to do injustice.

To bolster his critique, Adenauer quoted a 1947 report by former US Presi­ dent Herbert Hoover, who following a visit to Germany had stated, “You can have vengeance or peace, but you can’t have both.” Adenauer criticized the Western Allies for what he called—­in a very common trope—­their self-­ righteousness. “In foreign people as well,” he charged, “there is a piece of Hitler. . . . For this reason, we Germans do not need to go around forever in sackcloth and ashes doing penance because things started in Germany.” In­ deed, this “sackcloth and ashes” formulation would have many afterlives in the Federal Republic, particularly in the late 1970s and 1980s, when neoconserva­ tives rejected the accusatory stance of the new left of the 1960s.

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Theodor Heuss and the Dualities of German History To focus so exclusively on Schumacher and Adenauer—­and finally on The­ odor Heuss—­is to risk interpreting a situation in light of our retrospective knowledge of what would follow. Many other speakers were also relevant in this pre-­state period, and it was not inevitable that these three would remain important later, even though that is indeed what happened. But if the purpose of this prologue is to understand the origins of what came next, it may be worth the risk, as long as we recall the dangers of teleology. Theodor Heuss was to become one of the most significant speakers about the Nazi past in the early Federal Republic, and the speeches he made through­ out his ten-­year presidency of West Germany were unavoidable referents for, and influences on, what came after. Nevertheless, as in the case of Adenauer, it is important not to see those official formulations as emerging spontaneously in the unique and novel conditions of 1949, for they were often merely revi­ sions of statements and ideas formulated earlier. Heuss was as authentic a liberal as could be found, raised in a family com­ mitted to the principles of 1848, and later becoming a protégé of Friedrich Naumann, the major figure in the German liberal tradition before the First World War. Unlike the professional politicians Adenauer and Schumacher, Heuss was a broader intellectual, steeped in the ideas of German humanistic culture and arts, though he also served in the Reichstag from 1924 to 1928 and then again from 1930 to 1933, at which time he made the “political mistake”— ­as this was commonly referred to—­of voting for the Enabling Act that brought Hitler to absolute power in 1933. With the rise of the Nazis, Heuss lost both his political and his journalistic positions, though he managed to continue writing under a pseudonym. While not a direct participant in the  July 20, 1944, coup attempt, he was in contact with its leaders and was slated for a position in the new government if the coup were to have succeeded. Two of  Heuss’s speeches in the occupation years are particularly important for what they tell us about his later thought: “In Memoriam,” delivered in the Stuttgart State Theater on November 25, 1945, as part of a hastily organized “Memorial Day for the Victims of  Fascism”; and “On Germany’s Future,” de­ livered on March 18, 1946, in Berlin at the invitation of the Communist-­led Cultural Association for the Democratic Renewal of Germany. Heuss’s main point in Stuttgart was the importance of memory, though the degree to which he saw this as an uphill battle so soon after the end of the war seems strange. Early on in the speech, he answered imagined critics who might dismiss the need for remembrance. His answer was that remembrance was

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essential for the moral well-­being of the nation: it was not  just for the dead, “but for the sake of our moral future as a people as well.” He warned the Ger­ man populace that it should not “make it too easy for itself to put these evil things behind them like a vile dream.” One issue in particular for Heuss was proper appreciation of the opposition to the Nazis, which he thought had been unappreciated abroad and misunderstood at home. He charged that “the German people [had] made it too easy on itself, too easy in its masses, to give itself over to the chains of National Socialism.” Nevertheless, he asserted vigor­ ously that this capitulation had never been complete: “It was a situation of civil war in which only one group had the weapons.” For Heuss, “the memory of those who innocently suffered, who died bravely, will with its calm and quiet glow be our beacon in the darkest years through which we will pass.” Exactly who those people were, however, is not quite clear, nor is it clear which years he was calling the darkest, given the dark­ ness of National Socialism. With this Memorial Day speech, however, Heuss can be seen to have inaugurated a tradition of ritualistic memory, one that ac­ knowledged the past as providing moral lessons, without specifying those les­ sons precisely and without sinking into guilt. His conclusion was that “the heaviest and most expensive sacrifice” was not guilt, but the German reputa­ tion. In “On Germany’s Future,” Heuss posed this as the central question: “Germany stands and will continue to stand under the burden of our history, rich with greatness, because the history of the fight for freedom among us in Germany, which we also knew, was and remains a history of defeat.” As a result, “the question of the German historical image stands before us as the most dif­ ficult task in culture and politics.” Nevertheless, he warned against easy solu­ tions: “This is not to be accomplished by establishing a cleansing enterprise and letting the brown color be washed off in order that another color can be smeared on from already prepared buckets.” The self-­inquiry required, how­ ever, had to take place in “sacred sobriety”—­a term Heuss adopted from the early-­nineteenth-­century lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Heuss’s posture toward the past—­or at least his rhetoric about it—­was thus quite different from that of Adenauer and Schumacher. For Adenauer, mem­ory provided a clear lesson in recognition of the dangers and mistakes that others imposed on Germany; for Schumacher, memory placed the Nazi “antithesis” in an historical dialectic leading to the Marxist “synthesis.” For Heuss, how­ ever, remembering was more contemplative, less filled with accusations and program. Despite this, Heuss was not free of the exculpatory reflexes that, it should already be clear, were prevalent throughout the postwar discourse. On the one hand, he pointed out as clearly as possible that even mundane

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anti-­Semitism was culpable. Referring to the Nazi expression “It’s only a Jew,” Heuss argued that this was a slippery slope. “From there on, the German soul became sick because it no longer saw in people the human. . . . This laziness of thought, this abdication of self-­responsibility, led entirely of necessity to what we later experienced.” On the other hand, the end of this sentence does not specify what that thing later experienced was, nor does it specify whether it was the Germans or others who experienced it. Earlier in the speech, Heuss had acknowledged that “this war was caused by Germany and was desired by its leadership”; but after describing the ideology of that leadership, he con­ cluded, “In this way we were forced into this war.” He asserted that “we all be­ came dirty in this period and through this period,” though dirty is not exactly guilty, and does not necessarily imply fault. He described a “guilt of passivity,” and concluded from it that “there is no escape from the shared German fate [Gesamtschicksal ]. We are and remain jointly responsible [ gesamthaftbar] for that which we experienced.” Again, “we”—­not they. While Heuss had long spoken of shame and discussed the dualities of Ger­ man history, in a statement on May 8, 1949, the fourth anniversary of the war’s end, he presented another key idea he repeated frequently in speeches as fed­ eral president, and in which he again distinguished his own thinking from the views of Adenauer and Schumacher. For Adenauer, there was definitely a sense of defeat tied to May 8, 1945, as well as empathy for the destruction of his city and country and for the suffering of the people, happy as he was to see the end of National Socialism. For Schumacher, this date was unequivocally a day of liberation. For Heuss, “in its essence this May 8, 1945 remains the most tragic, most questionable paradox of  history for each of us. But why? Because we were simultaneously liberated and destroyed.” This theme of defeat versus liberation remained one of the major structuring divisions in the years that followed. In December 1949, shortly after assuming the federal presidency, Heuss made the following statement at a meeting of the Society for Christian-­Jewish Cooperation, employing a trope we have come to know well: “One has spoken of a collective guilt of the German people. The word ‘collective guilt’ and what stands behind it is a crude simplification; it is a reversal namely in the same way as the Nazis commonly saw the Jews: that the fact of being a Jew already con­ tained within it the phenomenon of guilt.” Again, Germans were being  judged as the Nazis had judged the Jews. In contrast, Heuss offered collective shame: “Something like a collective shame has grown and remained from that time.”3 3. For a somewhat different argument about the relevance of shame versus guilt for under­ standing the German situation, see Olick 2005, chs. 12 and 13. In Heuss’s view, shame was a form

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Conclusion The purpose of this chapter has been to fulfill the requirements of a dialogi­ cal approach, which must account for the sources and trajectories of com­ memorative discourse even across radical structural transformations, which are never quite as radical as clear historical narrative desires. To be sure, the variety of discourses I have presented is substantially broader than what will be found in the pages to come, which will focus, most like the previous section above, almost exclusively on political speech—­though now political speech with the stamp of governmental authority, which always plays a special role in the course of collective narratives. However, most of the themes and much of the terminology we will encounter in that speech, it will be clear, had their ori­ gins in the period before the novel initial condition of  West Germany as a state. A number of basic tropes emerged and became clear in reaction to Allied discourse and policy, as well as out of German traditions and experiences. These included a priority on German suffering and victimization; an asser­ tion that Germans were now being treated in a manner equivalent to how the Nazis treated the Jews, and thus had replaced the Jews as the true “pariah people”; an accusation that the occupation was vengeful and self-­righteous;4 the widespread use of passive constructions and vague references to “what happened” without specification, which I will treat later as a “grammar of ex­ culpation”; an effort to see the Nazi catastrophe first as just that, a catastrophe, a force of nature rather than a result of  human will, as well as a manifestation of long-­standing civilizational processes not unique to Germany; and an effort to distinguish the individual guilt of a few from the shared guilt of many, and from the innocence of oneself and one’s associates.

of thought that encouraged introspection, acknowledgment, and transformation. For other more conservative thinkers, like the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, an earlier understanding of shame instead produced recalcitrance and denial. 4. In my earlier study, I noted the widespread use of a particular term for this self-­ righteousness: “pharisaical.” The biblical reference is to the ancient  Jewish cult that in Christian doctrine represents hypocrisy—­for instance, in Matthew 23:13: “How terrible for you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees! Hypocrites!” Also, the parable of the Pharisee in Luke 18:9–­14 gives the Pharisees as an example of  “people who were sure of their own goodness and despised ev­ erybody else.” In my book In the House of the Hangman, I enumerated the stunning frequency with which this trope recurred. The trope combines a number of the issues mentioned above, namely the accusation of self-­righteousness, the feeling of being victimized, and the projective equation of German suffering with the suffering the Germans inflicted, particularly on the Jews.

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To be sure, this was no mere vocabulary or static repertoire. The pressures under which such speech was produced certainly changed; and the speech that took place in reaction to those pressures changed as well, but it always did so in reaction to and in conversation with what came before. In the process, some terms retreated and new ones appeared, while other terms that persisted changed their sense. But the ways in which the latter changed were always as much a product of the past as of the present. Recognition of this is a potent resource for avoiding the temptation to see such discourse about memory en­ tirely from the perspective of present interests.  Just as occupation planning was born of earlier experiences and actual policy was an application and modifica­ tion of those dispositions in the new context, the German discourse during the occupation years was a reaction both to the realities of the occupation and to what many Germans saw as accusations with which they were confronted both during the war and through the occupation. And whatever the new cir­ cumstances after 1949, the discourse that emerged—­and which in fact became more clearly structured—­was but the continuation of that conversation already underway. “The past is never dead,” the American novelist William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.”

* Part 2 * The Reliable Nation

Chapter 4

Bonn Is Not Weimar

Founding Principles Through 1946 and 1947, the professed goals of Atlantic-­Soviet cooperation became less and less tenable, if indeed they had ever been tenable at all. As the Soviets annexed, dismantled, and suppressed, the Western allies encouraged democratic participation from the bottom up—­beginning at the most local levels and expanding to the level of Land (state). As East-­West purposes, intentions, and perceptions came to increasing loggerheads, the British and Americans returned to earlier ideas of economic, political, and military integration of a Western German state. At first the French were wary of any (even partial) centralization in Germany, but as Cold War postures became more and more entrenched, their fear of Germany took second place to their fear of the Soviet Union. From February 23 to March 6, 1948, representatives of  Britain, the United States, France, and the Benelux countries met at a conference in London, which concluded by calling for a democratic and federal state to be formed out of the Western zones of Germany. On May 20 that same year, as a first step on the road to economic stability and administrative unity, the Western Allies introduced a currency reform in the Western sectors. In response, and to hinder the coalescence of a Western-­integrated German state in general, the Soviets initiated the infamous Berlin blockade on May 24.1 Nevertheless, on July 1 the Western military governors gave over to the minister presidents of 1. The Berlin Blockade went on until May 1949. During this period, the viability of West Berlin was maintained only through an Allied airlift, which involved transport planes arriving virtually every few minutes around the clock for the duration of the blockade.

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the eleven Western Länder (states) the so-­called Frankfurt Documents, which laid out the Western occupation authorities’ ideas (really instructions) for the creation of  West Germany, and they asked the German leaders to call a con­ stitutional convention. The idea of a partial German state was met with profound ambivalence at best by many German leaders, with strong opposition from others, and with indifference by the general population, who were more concerned with the day-­ to-­day exigencies of sheer survival. Among the leaders, the fear was that forming a partial state would further entrench, indeed solidify, Germany’s division. As a result, they decided to call the gathering of sixty-­five delegates2 in Bonn a “Parliamentary Council” (Parlamentarischer Rat) rather than a constitutional convention, and the document to be produced there a “Basic Law” (Grundgesetz) rather than a constitution (Verfassung), to emphasize that the arrangements, while binding, were nonetheless provisional. This “provisional”—­or, as West Germany’s first president, Theodor Heuss, called it, “transitory”—­status was further embedded in the document in a special preamble which stated that the entire German people, motivated by the desire to protect its national and state unity, remained committed to the unification of Germany at some future date. Further, the Basic Law stated that the government could make no law that would betray that interest in future unification.3 One of the most famous works of political commentary in West Germany’s early years was a 1956 book by the Swiss journalist Fritz René Allemann, called Bonn Is Not Weimar (Bonn ist nicht Weimar). This title became perhaps one of the most quoted phrases in commentaries on the West German political system in those years, because it captured a central defining issue for the founders of the Federal Republic: Everyone was deeply aware of how the Weimar democracy had ended, and sought to create a new system in which such a

2. Delegates to the Parliamentary Council, mostly lawyers, were elected by the eleven state parliaments in proportion to the state populations (one delegate per 750,000 people), and also included five nonvoting representatives from Berlin. The Social Democrats (SPD) and the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian partners the Christian Social Union (CSU), by far the two biggest party blocs, had twenty-­seven delegates each, with the remainder of seats going to the Free Democrats (liberals or FDP), Communists (KPD), German Party (DP), and Center Party (Zentrum). 3. Later, this provision became an issue in conservative challenges to the new Ostpolitik (policy towards the East) of the Social-­Liberal era, which a conservative faction under the leadership of Franz-­Josef Strauß challenged as a violation of the Basic Law in the Constitutional Court. They lost.

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failure would be impossible.4 As the constitutional historian Jürgen Seifert has written, “The Basic Law . . . manifests a rejection of the past. It was created as a bulwark that was supposed to make impossible what happened in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic and after 1933” (Seifert 1989, 40). Indeed, some went so far as to call the Basic Law an “Anti-­constitution to the Weimar Constitution” (Sontheimer 1972, 31). The point was to make sure that Bonn did not turn out as Weimar had. Nonetheless, there was substantial controversy as to what exactly the faults of the Weimar system had been, and what lessons should therefore be drawn from it. In the most important early draft of the Basic Law, produced at Herrenchiemsee in Bavaria in advance of the full Council, the framers advocated only a loose federation, to be called the Bund Deutscher Länder (Federation of  German States), with the powers of the government thoroughly subordinate to individual rights. This was because many viewed the dangers of the Weimar system to have included too much centralization and state power. By contrast, Heuss, representing the Liberals, argued vociferously that such a loose federation would sap the federal government of the power it needed to govern effectively. In opposition to central premises of the Herrenchiemsee draft, therefore, Heuss proposed the name (eventually accepted) of “Federal Republic of Germany” (Bundesrepublik Deutschland), and called for assigning some powers to the government to defend the constitutional order. The ultimate principle that resulted, later known as “militant democracy” (streitbare Demokratie), included, among other things, provisions for banning antidemocratic factions.5 The framers thus sought to defend the new order against 4. In his popular 1981 book The Germans, Gordon Craig wrote that while the question “Is Bonn Weimar?” was understandable, it was also, in his opinion, inappropriate. He argued that in contrast to the so-­called revolution of 1918 (which he said was no revolution at all because it “in no way marked an effective break with history and political tradition”), “no such continuity was possible after 1945” because “old structures and elites had been demolished so completely that there was no possibility of building a new system on them.” Indeed, Craig embraced the much-­touted expression “zero hour” (Stunde Null). Though he was certainly correct that 1945 had involved much greater social structural changes than 1918, there nonetheless had been a great deal of controversy on the issue of whether 1945 involved more of a “continuity” than a “caesura,” as the choice was framed in the postwar years and into the 1950s. And the failures of the Weimar system and its constitution were clearly pressing concerns for the members of the Parliamentary Council, from whose perspective the relation of the new state to the Weimar state was of paramount importance. 5. This concept of militant democracy, and its concomitant empowerment of certain kinds of government activity, was the focus of  vituperative and consequential debates at several important

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the kinds of attacks that were seen to have been devastating to the Weimar democracy. They were in this way willing to put some limits on otherwise strictly defended individual freedoms in order to secure the democratic order.6 The final document involved both the rejection and adaptation of many Weimar provisions. In the first place, the Weimar parliament had been plagued both by the proliferation of parties, which had made it difficult for governments to form majorities, and by the concomitant weakness of cabinets and of the chancellor. In order to avoid these problems, the West German framers replaced the standard vote of  “no confidence” with the requirement that a no-­ confidence vote be constructive. In the Weimar parliament it had been quite easy to get enough votes to oust a government, because at any given moment the majority was in opposition; and so governments were ousted almost as frequently as the change of seasons. Under the Basic Law, however, govern­ ments could only be voted out when there was majority support for a new gov­ ernment and chancellor. The framers also moved away from a system of proportional representation to limit the number of parties gaining seats. This resulted in an arcane and little-­understood formula based on two choices involving individuals and party lists. Later, a so-­called five-­percent rule (requiring a party to win five percent of the vote in order to win any seats) added further protection against this danger of fragmentation, eliminating smaller parties from the parliamentary stage. These changes were clear responses to the weak Weimar Republic, which at its best had attracted only reluctant supporters who saw it as the least terrible option—­the so-­called Vernunftrepublikaner (rational republicans, or supporters of the Republic by default). Indeed, for a while there was talk about eliminating the parliamentary system altogether in favor of an American-­style presidential system resting on the separation of powers. But, after the horrors of dictatorship, few were willing to place so much power in one person’s hands. The framers opted instead to moments in West German history, most prominently including the debate in response to the 1972 Ministerial Decree on Radicals in the Civil Service; debates over an emergency powers act, finally passed during the grand coalition of the mid-­1960s; and the banning of the Communist Party (KPD) in 1953, among others to be discussed below (see Braunthal 1990; Jaschke 1991; and  Jesse 1980.) 6. West Germany’s constitutional guarantees went in many regards beyond those of other Western European states. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unintended impact of one of these guarantees—­the right to asylum—­became quite consequential and controversial. Because of the Basic Law’s protections, which exceed those in other countries, many more people sought asylum in Germany than elsewhere in Europe.

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weaken the president to a figurehead while increasing the chancellor’s power to direct the cabinet. It was argued that if the Weimar chancellors had had more power to implement their policies, the system might have avoided collapse. The Basic Law also instituted a much more substantial federalism than had existed in the Weimar Republic by restricting the competences of the central government, most significantly perhaps in matters of education and taxation, and by creating an upper house of the parliament, the Bundesrat. While the lower house, the Bundestag, is elected on the basis of party and person, the Bundesrat is the province of  the Länder. Though it is not empowered to initiate legislation, it does exercise a substantial check on the central government, and its approval is required for all constitutional amendments. The Basic Law introduced an additional novelty in the form of  judicial review by a constitutional court (Kommers 1989). Also, while the Weimar Constitution had included paragraphs on human and individual rights, they were only general value statements rather than binding proscriptions, and they were buried late in the 1919 document. In the Basic Law, human and individual rights were de­ clared inalienable in Article 1, and these were to be binding on all courts and agencies of the government; they included freedom of press, assembly, and speech, as well as a doctrine of  habeas corpus. Despite these extensive departures from the 1919 Weimar Constitution, the framers nonetheless drew extensively on that document, as well as on the Frankfurt draft constitution of 1849. Germany’s new leaders in the West saw their design as fitting within a long German democratic tradition, if admittedly it was the result of occupation directives rather than of a self-­generated democratic revolution. But it is clear that memory of the so-­called German Catastrophe of 1933–­45 (was the catastrophe in 1933 or 1945?) as well as of the failures of the Weimar system to prevent it, was a major factor in the design of the new system. Indeed, the Basic Law constitutes a concrete image and in­ terpretation of the German past, and debates among its framers over specific issues were therefore in important ways debates over what structural features of the Weimar system had led to what unacceptable consequences. That is, they were debates over the causes of  history. Though the occupation authorities had originally intended that the new constitution be approved by a general plebiscite, the leaders of the Parliamentary Council asked for and received permission to ratify the Basic Law through state parliaments instead of putting it before the general populace; they believed a plebiscite would give the impression that the Western states constituted a complete polity. Indeed, the Basic Law included the claim that the Federal Republic represented all Germans until the time at which there could be

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free elections for all of Germany. Concomitantly, the new state also claimed to be the sole legitimate successor of the German Reich, which involved not only the right to represent it, but the duty to assume its burdens, both financial and moral. While the new state claimed to speak for the entire nation, there was to be no doubt that this was a temporary solution. The founders therefore sought the more provisional appearance of indirect ratification, which occurred on May 23, 1949, with all the states approving except Bavaria (which nonetheless voted to go along if the Law received more than two-­thirds approval, which it did). And the public reaction? No joy or celebration, not even much acknowledgment. In a national survey at the time, 40 percent of the adult population stated that they were indifferent to the constitution, 33 percent were “modestly interested,” and only 21 percent were “very interested.” In another survey conducted in 1949, only 51 percent favored the creation of the Federal Republic; the remainder of the sample were either against it (23 percent), indifferent (13 percent), or undecided (13 percent) (Conradt 1982, 18). Principal Founders Citizens of the new Federal Republic elected the first Bundestag in August of 1949. The result was somewhat surprising: the Christian Democrats (and their Bavarian affiliate, the Christian Social Union) edged out the Social Democrats by 31 percent of the vote (139 seats) to 29.2 percent (131 seats), with the Free Democrats (also known as the Liberals) receiving 11.9 percent (52 seats), and the rest going to smaller factions like the Bavarian Party, the German Party, the Communists, and a number of other splinter groups. Many had expected the Social Democrats to win; indeed, as we saw, their leader, Kurt Schumacher, felt deeply that the Social Democrats were the only ones who had the right to govern after many years of painful opposition to the Nazis (Edinger 1965). Most historians of the period believe, however, that Schumacher’s vituperative attacks against the Marshall Plan, as well as widespread fear of the Social Democrats’ neutralist leanings in the face of a threatening Soviet Union, tipped the balance. The first government of the Federal Republic of Germany was thus a coalition of the CDU/CSU and the Liberals, along with the German Party. In order to secure this conservative-­liberal coalition, the Free Democrat Heuss was elected the new state’s first president on September 12, 1949, and the first Bundestag met on September 15 to elect the first chancellor of  West Germany. At the age of seventy-­three, Konrad Adenauer was elected by a margin of just

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one vote: his own. And despite his advanced age, he remained in office for fourteen years. President In their first official speeches, both of these leaders (Adenauer and Heuss) spent substantial time constructing, discussing, and distancing themselves from images of the past, in the process employing terms and echoing themes well prepared in the prologue years. In his inaugural address of September 12, 1949, Heuss offered a new tone for German politics—­a weary but solid pride and a practical encouragement—­as well as addressing concrete structural issues. He began the speech by mentioning how he had been influenced by the Weimar democrat Friedrich Naumann, whose emphasis on human rights was a central feature of the humanist tradition in which Heuss saw himself. Heuss quoted Naumann as saying, “The recognition of nationality and of the humanization of the masses are for us two sides of one and the same thing.” Heuss also further associated himself with Germany’s unsuccessful democratic tradition by thanking his father for “pouring into the soul of his young son the legend of the year 48 [a reference to the aborted bourgeois revolution of 1848],” which taught him that “democracy and freedom are not simply words, but life-­shaping values.” In place of what he named the frequent “high-­flown hubris” of the German people, Heuss called for a return to “measure” and “moderation” in the political arena, thus repeating a widespread description of the National Socialists as obstreperous vulgarians. He offered a model of measure in the form of his own personal modesty: he said he did not want the job of president and that he certainly did not take it for his own aggrandizement, and he responded to claims that he lacked “elbow power” by saying, “We’ve all had quite enough of elbow power.”7 Here and elsewhere, he claimed to offer a calm and rational—­ yet still national—­voice after so many years of  hysteria. 7. It is not at all clear that Heuss lacked “elbow power.” In late 1946, for instance, he vigorously defended his colleague Reinhold Maier during a controversy regarding the latter’s denazification and suitability for office as minister-­president of Baden-­Württemberg. As a member of the Reichstag Maier, like Heuss, had voted for the Enabling Act. In a radio address, Heuss defended Maier by attacking the prosecutor, referring to him as a “Robbespierre.” Heuss’s ar­ gument was that voting for the enabling act had been a “political stupidity,” but that everyone had a “right to a political mistake,” as Eugon Kogon put it in a famous 1947 essay. For further details, see Olick (2005, 131–­34); Fürstenau (1969, 193–­97); and Kittel (1993, 34–­35).

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In his speech, Heuss also addressed structural difficulties of the new state, in particular the problem of centralization versus decentralization. On the one hand, he said, “the German people has become a legal entity in and of itself over the last eight decades and does not simply represent a conglomeration of regional groups.” On the other hand, he argued, “We do not want to have centralism in Germany. We have the lessons of the National Socialists behind us, which show us where it leads when the German person is standardized. We don’t want the standardized German.” This distaste for standardization was part of a reading of  National Socialism, articulated during the occupation years, that saw it as a by-­product of modernization. One notices right away that National Socialism could be portrayed either as a symptom of a common trend or as a complete aberration. Here Heuss’s interest was in its most general qualities. The problem, however, was not simply one of the best state form. The issue of regional identities—­stronger in Germany than elsewhere, due to Germany’s historical fragmentation—­had gained an additional dimension in the postwar period. With the approval of both the Western Allies and the Soviets at Potsdam in August 1945, entire populations of various “ethnically German” regions (including Selesia, Pomerania, the Sudetenland, and elsewhere) had been expelled after the war. As a result, the West German government faced the problem of  both maintaining the claims of these expellees to their regions of origin and considering them nationally German and thus integrable. The “problem” of the expellees was perhaps the greatest administrative task the new government would face in its first years; it was also, as we will see, among the most dicey for images of the past because the suffering of the expellees was seen by so many ordinary Germans to equal, and thus wipe out, the suffering Germans had inflected on others.8 Expellees also tended to be among the most aggressive in matters of foreign policy, rallying for the return of their lost territories. Another structural point was the position of democracy in German society. Heuss compared the situation after 1918 with that after 1945: “It is the historical sorrow of the Germans that democracy wasn’t fought for by them, but came as the last and only possibility for the legitimation of collective life when the state had collapsed in catastrophes and wars.” As a result, Heuss argued, the task of getting on with things had already been there in 1918, but the problem 8. As we will see later, in the 1980s a law against denying the Holocaust included a provision also making it punishable to deny the expulsions, though who exactly was doing so was never specified.

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was “dynastic sensibilities that continued.” After 1945, according to Heuss, the problem was “how far the recent past that lies behind us is still spiritually with us,” though he remarked that this problem was “seen stronger and made bigger externally” than in Germany itself, thus evoking the accusation of intentionally inflicted German suffering as punishment. According to Heuss, the problems of the past, though overemphasized by the world, comprised too much centralization, standardization, excess, “separation of the power of the state from the life of the people,” “hubris,” and “elbow power.” But, as in all things, he sought a balance in memory as well. On the one hand, he argued, “It is a grace of fate for the individual that he can forget. How could we live as individuals if all the suffering, disappointment, and sorrow met in life would always be present to us? And it is for peoples, too, a grace to be able to forget.” On the other hand, Heuss was concerned that “many people misuse this grace and want to forget too quickly. We must remain aware of what led us to where we are today. . . . We can’t make it too easy on ourselves to now forget what the time of Hitler brought us.” This expression—­“time of Hitler” (Hitlerzeit)—­was a common one in this early period. Note also the actorless (“brought us”) and vague (“what”) construction. This formulation, however, was an important signal: guilt is a matter of  historical forces, and it leads therefore to a place in official memory and perhaps to institutional “lessons,” but individuals are paralyzed by too much memory (of their own deeds as well as of their own suffering). One problem of memory to which Heuss alluded is its divisiveness; he warned that remembrance “should not be words of revenge, of  hate.” He referred to a “confusion of souls,” and hoped that it would be possible to create a unity out of the tangle. Moreover, the main question, again, was “what the time of  Hitler brought us.” What it brought others was less important in this context. In this first speech by a leader of the new Republic, we already see a feature that occurred again and again throughout the entire forty years of  West German history, though particularly well in a major speech like this one: Heuss used only the most general terms to refer to what it is that should or should not be remembered: “the lessons of National Socialism” (what lessons?), “what led us there” (what did?), and “catastrophe” (consisting of what?). He did not specify too much. His assessment of German identity, fitting with the entire tone, was one of balance: “Strange German people, full of the greatest tensions, where the second-­rate stands next to the most ingenious flights of fancy (genial spekulativ Schweifenden), the conventional (Spießerhafte) next to great Romanticism.” But he called upon the great icons of German culture—­ Goethe and Beethoven—­“before whom we stand proudly and modestly.”

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Contemplating the “world values” these figures embodied would, he hoped, provide “fortification and consolation in the devastation (Zerschlagenheit) of the present.” 9 It was not that Heuss could not get more specific. It was just that specificity was not appropriate to his purposes here and to the nature of the occasion. Specificity, we will see, belongs to guilt occasions, though there will be limits then too. In general, Heuss offered the new citizenry a battered but confident pride in their German identity, and a call for the collectivity to remember as appropriate but not to blame either personally or collectively. While he often used evocative language, in this speech he referred only vaguely to the condition of the time, and not to the horrors of the Nazi past. Heuss saved his brief lament for the suffering of the ethnic expellees (“the terrible process in which we stand today, this horrible internal migration of millions of  homeless”), while encouraging the people to get on with life. Indeed, this seems to be the essence of  Heuss’s vision: getting on with something rudely interrupted, awareness of past mistakes (only vaguely alluded to in this context), but no particular personal association with it. Heuss, it seems, was very much a man of the times, echoing themes available in the postwar discourse. Chancellor The tasks of the chancellor differ greatly from those of the president in the West German political system. The president’s job is moral and symbolic leadership, his province the soul or conscience of the people. The chancellor has a government to run, though that goal is certainly never without moral and symbolic implications and dimensions. For all they shared, Heuss’s and Adenauer’s first official speeches reflected these different concerns. Some of the differences, however, had as much to do with who the two men were—­ with their beliefs, styles, origins, and experiences—­as with their institutional positions. Theodor Heuss was a journalist, political scholar, and constitutio­nal law­ yer who, as we have already noted, had been a member of the Reichstag in the 1920s. Though not well known at the time of his election, the Protestant Southwesterner from Schwabia became beloved for his eloquence and 9. Recourse to the great figures of German culture such as Beethoven and Goethe was a common trope in the immediate postwar period. In his well-­known book The German Catastrophe, historian Friedrich Meinecke (1950) had called for the formation of Beethoven and Goethe societies as a way to rebuild German pride and values.

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independent spirit. His symbolic and moral presence as first president of the Federal Republic was of  lasting influence, though he worked hard to keep his role scrupulously nonpartisan. He made it his work as the first president to revive Germany’s reputation and self-­respect, as well as to encourage democratic consciousness and the German democratic tradition. As we have already seen, the national democratic spirit of 1848 was for Heuss a major influence (Hamm-­Brücher 1984). As a member of the German Democratic Party (DDP) fraction in the Reich­ stag, as already discussed, Heuss had become fed up with the Weimar system’s paralysis, and voted for the 1933 Enabling Act, which created the Nazi dictatorship. Nonetheless, he continued to speak up as an independent voice for as long as he could, and when he was forbidden to write, he continued to do so under a pseudonym. Despite his 1933 vote, and despite his not having been directly involved in any organized opposition movement, Heuss’s democratic commitment earned him what Arnold Heidenheimer (1966, 119) has called “a story book image [as a representative] of the ‘other Germany.’ ”10 More than anything, it was Heuss’s personal style of moderation more than the substance of  his remarks that secured his place in the memory of German memory, where Heuss is credited with an unusual willingness to remind his audiences of the past. As Herf (1997) points out, Heuss’s critics saw in him the proponent of a vapid philo-­Semitism meant to rehabilitate Germany (Jesse 1990); for his supporters, however, Heuss was a lone voice of probity. Neither of these views, it seems to me, captures the complexity of  Heuss’s rhetoric and positions. He was indeed philo-­Semitic, sometimes overbearingly so; but this ideological complex was not necessarily instrumental. Heuss also produced, as we will see, a number of important and honorable statements for West German memory, but his was not the only such voice, nor were his statements advanced consistently. He was an important leader for his time, but he was most definitely of  his time. Part of  Heuss’s reputation, of course, is due to the nature of the job of president and of the dignity that inheres in it. By contrast, Konrad Adenauer was the hardened power politician par excellence. As we saw, during the Weimar Republic the Catholic Rhinelander had been the lord mayor of Cologne and a leading figure in national politics as well. Adenauer had long been a convinced Westerner. After the First World War he was involved for a time with proposals to form an independent Rhineland Republic which would be oriented towards, and anchored in, Western 10. The “other Germany” refers to those opposed, actively or passively, internally or externally, to the Nazi regime.

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values. He attributed much of the Nazi phenomenon to Prussian militarism and to its search for a “third way” between democracy and socialism, West and East (Poppinga 1975). Consequently, he saw it as essential to anchor the new state in the values and politics of the Western community. His style was direct and single-­minded (though sometimes seen as authoritarian), his message clear: Western integration, security, and anti-­Prussianism.11 Supposedly, when asked to participate in the Twentieth of  July Opposition movement he replied that he had never known a general to do anything right, and that he therefore avoided participation. Adenauer was seen, and saw himself, as above reproach for his behavior during the Third Reich. But, lacking any clear opposition involvements, he became associated with the so-­called inner emigration—­those opponents of the regime who neither actively resisted nor went into exile—­and indeed took on the common posture of bearing no personal connection to what had happened. In this regard, his position was not far from that of  Erich Kästner, or indeed of  Heuss. At the time of his first Regierungserklärung (government program statement), delivered on September 20, 1949, Adenauer faced many significant problems and constraints. As we have already seen, the Federal Republic had been formed as a temporary solution to the untenable standoff between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. It was but a “rump state” (Kernstaat),12 as Adenauer explicitly called it, comprising about a third of what had been the German Reich of 1937, and it was occupied by foreign armies, whose military governors had restricted the new government’s portfolio. The goal of German unification, and indeed the obsolescence of the new state as such, as we have already seen, was written into the Basic Law itself. Two kinds of issues in his first Regierungserklärung—­themselves to become hallmarks of Regierungserklärungen in general—­characterized Adenauer’s presentation of the past on that occasion. First, Adenauer emphasized legal, political, and structural differences between the new government and the Nazi and Weimar systems. It is important to note here the complex ways in which the relations among historical epochs were commonly constructed during this early period: the Weimar and Nazi periods were grouped together genetically, 11. There has, of course, been significant controversy over whether, and the degree to which, Adenauer was willing to give up German unity for integration in the West. See Foschepoth (1991). 12. Kernstaat, technically, means core or seed state. There is, however, often a more polemical intonation to this term, sometimes captured in English with “rump state,” connoting incompleteness.

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implying an almost unbroken continuity and relation of cause and effect;13 the Nazi period without the Weimar system was juxtaposed to East Germany comparatively, implying the latter’s illegitimacy;14 and the new Bonn democracy was distinguished fundamentally from (a) Weimar, sometimes more as a matter of degree and sometimes more qualitatively; from (b) Nazism; and, in this early period, from (c) the postwar occupation period.15 The new democracy’s legitimation work in this period thus drew explicitly on both historical and contemporary systems comparisons, as well as on a supposed wisdom of experience. Adenauer spoke about why the new Bonn democracy could not succumb to the same problems as the Weimar democracy had, as well as about its advantages over the Nazi order. First, he stated, personal and religious freedoms were guaranteed: “We have above everything the protection of personal rights. No one here can be robbed of freedom and life by a secret state police or similar institutions, as was the case in the National Socialist Reich and as, much to our regret, is still the case in wide parts of Germany, in the Eastern Zone.” Second, he assured that the government would respect the opposition: “The voter would have justifiably asked in the case of a grand coalition between these parties whether the elections were necessary at all. . . . I am of the opinion that the opposition is a state necessity.” Third, he argued that the federalistic indepen­dence of the states provided a solid guarantee against the abuse of central power. Fourth, he claimed that Germany was in significant ways intertwined with the rest of the world (the implied counterimage is of an ostracized, defeated, and resentful Germany after the First World War). Finally, he promised that the new government would protect the middle classes through what was called a “social market economy,” thereby defending against what Adenauer frequently referred to as “massification,” which could be seen as a feature of both National Socialism and communism: “We are filled with the conviction that the people that protects the most middle and small 13. Heuss also shared this characterization, having written that the true birthplace of National Socialism was Versailles, not Munich. In the process, he was fully in line with the standard defense. 14. It was not until the grand coalition of 1966–­69 and later that any West German leaders actually referred to East Germany by name (either as “East Germany” or as the “German Democratic Republic”). During the 1950s some of the favorite terms included “the Zone” (referring to the Soviet zone of occupation), “the Pankow Regime” (referring to the neighborhood of East Berlin in which the East German government had its administration), and “Central Germany” (implying a claim to the former German territories east of the Oder-­Neisse line, which would make East Germany the central third of the German national area). 15. Technically, the occupation lasted until 1955.

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independent existences possible will lead the securest, quietest, and best life.” In these points, the central message of all Adenauer’s years in power was declared: reliability, domestically and internationally. As a later CDU campaign poster declared: “No Experiments!” The second major theme Adenauer addressed in his first program speech as chancellor was the suspicion with which Germany was viewed in light of the Nazi past. For him there may have been be some specific legal matters to be dealt with, but here and elsewhere he absolutely rejected any notion of collective guilt. “The fears that have become particularly noticeable in the foreign press are most certainly widely exaggerated,” he said. He saw the blame as being applied indiscriminately to all of Germany and to all Germans—­blame that argued for perpetuating Germany’s dependent status. Denazification, he argued, had been largely destructive, a further burden the ordinary German had to bear. As already mentioned in a previous chapter: Through the denazification, much misfortune and much harm was produced. Those who were truly guilty of the crimes committed in the National Socialist time and in war should be punished with all severity. But as far as the rest, we can no longer distinguish two classes of people in Germany: the politically unobjectionable and the objectionable. This distinction must disappear immediately.

Who exactly “the truly guilty” were was not clear, though one can surmise that it was those already dealt with at Nuremberg, and those psychopathic perpetrators who would have been a problem in any society—­decidedly not ordinary Germans or rank-­and-­file Nazis. Adenauer’s call was thus to forgive and forget, based in part on how much Germany had suffered: “The war and the disorders of the postwar period have brought such hard trials and such tribulations for so many that one has to summon understanding for many lapses and misdemeanors. The question of a general amnesty will therefore be examined by the federal government.” Here, though, Adenauer seems to have been conflating amnesty for Nazis and amnesty for those who committed crimes during the occupation, including subverting denazification, or “fringsing”—­a term named after Cardinal Josef Frings, who during the postwar hunger had declared it moral for people to engage in petty theft to survive. Additionally, the implication was that misdeeds during the Nazi years were atoned by German suffering after the war. This forgiving approach to the past was the heart of Adenauer’s posture of securing support for the new state. But to what degree Adenauer truly believed

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this was morally the right thing to do and to what degree he merely thought it a necessary price is, as already argued, inextricable. On the one hand, Adenauer shared the frustrations with denazification we have already discussed. As an “inner emigrant,” he also seemed to share the belief that National Socialism was a devilish conspiracy by a narrow clique, never truly rooted in the population. On the other hand, as Adenauer’s longtime advisor Herbert Blankenhorn later put it, “Dr. Adenauer said nothing for years on the topic of the Jews because he wished to win over the German people in its entirety to the cause of democracy. If Adenauer had said in 1949 what we had done in the past, then the German people would have been against him” (quoted in Herf 1997, 226). The only thing misleading about this characterization is the implication that both things could not be true at once—­that this was Adenauer’s conviction and that he recognized its costs and benefits—­or that the fact that there would be consequences for addressing crimes against the Jews was the reason he did not do so. As far as dealing with those indisputably involved in Nazi atrocities (the implication, again, being that this was a very small number), Adenauer claimed that he was all for prosecuting what he called “those truly guilty of the crimes,” and spoke of  “claimed war crimes,” but said he was generally ready to “let the past be the past.” He added: When the Federal Government is determined to let the past be past when it seems defensible, in the conviction that many have already paid for subjectively minor guilt, it is on the other hand also absolutely decided to draw out of the past all the necessary lessons, in regard to all those who clamor against the state, may they be attributable to right radicalism or left radicalism.

Not punishment but prevention, in Adenauer’s scheme, was the formula for reliability. For Adenauer in this speech, the main lesson of the past (which remained undescribed here) was commitment to the idea of militant democracy; and it was already clear here in 1949 that the left was seen as the more substantial threat: anti-­Semitism—­which, Adenauer admitted, still occurred “here and there”—­was regrettable and to be judged as harshly as possible “after all that which happened in the National Socialist time,” but the present threat now seemed to be internally from the left and externally from the East. This fits well with the widespread interpretation we have already seen of the  Judeocide as a by-­product of more serious problems. A stricter rhetoric of blame would have been difficult for Adenauer (leaving aside whether or not he desired it) because he depended on the support of ultra-­right wing parties and that of

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“rehabilitated” National Socialists in those parties and his own, to say nothing of the ones in his own administration. Adenauer’s arguments that Germany should let the past be the past while remaining vigilant, as we will see again and again, embody what became a de rigeur style of presentation, here and throughout the forty years of  West German history, in what I earlier called a “grammar of exculpation.” A number of grammatical, syntactical, and rhetorical moves girded up the rejection of collective guilt, both in explicit arguments about it and in more passing portrayals of the past that reinforced it. Again, images of the past often employed passive constructions (e.g., “the crimes that were committed”). They were almost always actorless (e.g., “the misfortune that met us”), or at very least perpetrated by an alien clique (e.g., “National Socialism bestowed upon us,” or “megalomaniacal rulers brought”). The past was often portrayed as something wholly beyond human control, as with the frequent use of metaphors like “catastrophe” or “forces of destruction.” Furthermore, descriptions of what exactly went on in the concentration camps—­beyond vague references like “destruction” or “what happened to the Jews” or “all that”—­were rare. This was particularly the case on governance and tradition occasions. In the victimhood genre, in contrast, description was often vivid and filled with pathos, but about what Germans suffered, not about what suffering they caused. On guilt occasions, descriptions could be more elaborate than elsewhere, though vivid description often seemed to lead quickly to a reverential silence. Nevertheless, the basic grammar was fairly consistent across occasions and contexts. There was thus a tension between the consistency of the grammar and the moderate diversity of messages, though the consistency of the grammar sometimes seemed to undermine the message. There was just so much one could do within the framework. The accumulation of such rhetorical patterns accomplishes substantially more than simply repudiating the collective guilt thesis. To describe an abstract, impersonal, organizational, or isolated social force as the origin of events separates the common people as well as most elites from what happened; there is no bond with the perpetrators, whatever the facts of their popularity may have been. Characterizing the events with naturalistic metaphors reinforces the idea that they were beyond control of the audience. And the lack of anything more than vague reference to the specificity of the crimes passes up the opportunity to forge a sympathetic bond with the victims, while a more evocative language is reserved for focusing attention on the suffering of common Germans—­exactly those whose support the new government required. Adenauer thus directly followed his account of anti-­Semitism with a dis­ cussion of German suffering. In this first Regierungserklärung, for instance,

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he turned immediately to a description of German prisoners of war: “The fate of these millions of Germans, who for years now have born the bitter lot of captivity, is so heavy, the suffering of their families in Germany so great, that all peoples must help finally to return these captives and displaced to their homeland and families.” He went on to discuss the ethnic expellees, almost threatening what would happen if their status was not confronted on an international level: “One must solve it if one does not want to let West Germany become a hotbed of political and economic unrest for a long period.” And he concluded this section by disputing the finality of Germany’s territorial losses. In sum, he portrayed the German nation as wretched and suffering, a condition brought about by a small criminal and repudiated element within it. It was therefore difficult to see Germany or the vast majority of Germans as perpetrators or even as slightly implicated. These and other strategies recurred not only throughout the Adenauer era, but across other times and in different contexts. They mixed with other elements and other issues in different circumstances. But they constituted an enduring pattern in the rejection of collective guilt, which, as we will see, formed such an important part of West German political culture. All in all, Adenauer’s assessment of  West Germany’s position was at best ambivalent. He lamented the continued industrial dismantling: “This question of the dismantling of our industrial plants moves the entire German people. There certainly isn’t anyone in Germany who opposes the dismantling of the truly war-­essential.[16] But the destruction of  large economic values is a matter that those abroad should not treat as settled.” Moreover, as he showed with his stride onto the carpet, he found West Germany’s subordination unsatisfactory: The occupation statute is anything but ideal. It is [however] progress over the lawless state in which we lived until the enactment of the occupation statute. But there is no other way for the German people to come again to freedom and equal status than to make sure that we climb up again together with the Allies after the total collapse that National Socialism bestowed upon us.

In various places in the speech, Adenauer provided concrete remarks about what needed to be done to ensure Germany’s future. Here was the heart of the administrative approach to the past. First, he called for legislation to deal with several important dispossessed groups in the new republic, including the civil 16. This statement was patently false; many in Germany at the time were opposed to any dismantling.

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servants who had served the Third Reich, German victims of the war (including widows), and the German ethnic expellees.17 He made it a central task for his government to reintegrate these groups into a new consensus. Second, he charted West Germany’s desire for European integration. Improving relations with France was essential: “The German-­French opposition, which for hundreds of years ruled European politics and occasioned so much war, destruction, and spilling of  blood, must finally be eliminated.”18 More generally, what Germany needed, and was getting, was “clarity, security, and unity of law.” Here, then, were the two pillars of reliability, domestic and international. Both were aimed at moving forward in the most productive manner, without letting the past control the future except as a lesson leading to institutional remedies. All in all, in this first programmatic statement Adenauer was defensive and avoided any imputation of guilt, focusing instead on German suffering, the unfairness of the German situation, and what needed to be done for Germany to get back on solid footing as an equal player. To some degree, this fit with Adenauer’s self-­understanding as a victim; from that perspective, it was easy to interpret the Nazi period as something visited on the Germans, who may have been weak but not collectively guilty. On the other hand, despite his rejection of any collective guilt thesis, his calls for German rehabilitation, and his generally strident posture, there were reports that Adenauer did not trust the political instincts of the German people. In 1952, when the Soviets were dangling offers (real or not) of free elections in order to prevent the integration of West Germany into an Atlantic alliance, Adenauer supposedly told the British that he would not trust the German voter in such a situation (Donhöff 1993, 86–­87). The reason for this attitude could have been Adenauer’s sense of  his own political indispensability, or it could simply have been a reflection of  his reading of public opinion. For the purpose of understanding the Regierungserklärung, however, and the administrative genre as it took shape in the “reliable nation,” the more interesting issue is not Adenauer’s psychological or strategic motive, but what it made sense for a new leader to say, and what range of discursive possibilities was open to him. Many years later, in 1983, the conservative philosopher 17. On the civil service, see especially Frei (1996); on the war victims, see Hughes (1999). On the expellees, see de Zayas (2006). 18. As we will see elsewhere, Adenauer and his colleagues during the first decade of the Federal Republic often placed the Second World War at the end of a long line of  European wars, which they sometimes referred to as a “European Civil War.” This functioned rhetorically to indicate at least some balance of responsibility, or of irresponsibility, on both sides of the Rhine.

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Hermann Lübbe published a highly controversial article in which he argued that the much-­touted denial and avoidance of collective memories in public discourse during the first decade of West German history was essential to building a new consensus. Without this “communicative silence,” he argued, it would have been impossible to achieve the working consensus Lübbe considered necessary to the success of the new state; too much attention to issues of guilt, he argued, would have resulted in a “state of civil war.” Whatever the problems with this argument, Lübbe captured something of the attitude Adenauer projected in these early remarks. The communicative silence was nevertheless not simply Adenauer’s invention, some kind of strategic policy; as we have seen, it was an already deeply embedded reflex.

Administering the Remnants of the Past At the beginnings of the Federal Republic, Adenauer’s government faced the problem of integrating several potentially problematic groups into a new citizenry. These too were part of the burdens left by the war and dictatorship; they were also key places for interpreting and constructing that legacy. Here the power of German traditions combined powerfully with the sense of German victimhood. How thoroughgoing was the restructuring of society to be? Were all traditional values to be placed under a microscope? Of what could Germans still be proud? Their birthplace? Their professions? Their folkways? Their long-­standing and often distinctive institutions? In the first place, there were the ethnic expellees from the Eastern territories (Benz 1985). The costs of war were indeed many and widespread in the German population, but the ethnic expellees were in many ways first among equals in the German accounting. The best explanation for this is that many Germans felt the expulsions were gratuitous, a stark case of revenge taken on Germany; here, it seemed to many, was the clearest example of the victimization of Germans not at the hands of their own state and the war it had provoked, but after the war, at the hands of others who despised and mistreated them. The loss of territories also went to the heart of questions of German sovereignty, and in this early period it was also tied up with the question of national unity. West Germany’s official response to this in the early years was vehement insistence on the rights of those groups to their “ancestral homelands.” In or­ der to demonstrate its unequivocal support for those rights, Adenauer’s government emphasized again and again the concept of  homeland (Heimat), referred to East Germany as “central Germany” to remind of former territories farther to the east, objected to the elements of the Potsdam Accords that ceded

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territories east of the Oder-­Neisse line, spoke continuously about the tragedy of the expulsions, and provided material and moral relief for the victims. They did not, however, acknowledge any causal connection between the activities of the Nazis in these regions and the postwar expulsions, arguing, in fact, that such an association of two wrongs was indefensible. Indeed, clearer emphasis was placed most often on this second wrong—­that against the Germans. And then it was often used as proof that the Germans had already paid the price for their perpetration. Heimattag (Homeland Day) was thus an important station of the West German political liturgy over many years. In the first decade after the war, the po­ litical issues were quite potent and practical: How could the returned expellees be integrated into the West German population, itself already strained by material devastation, particularly in the housing supply? And could something real be done about the territorial issue? Adenauer’s cabinet therefore included the very powerful position of  Minister of  Expellees. Eventually, as we will see, the position was eliminated as the practical problems abated and the political issue became merely symbolic. Heimattag in these years was a moment for demanding resources and making claims; in later years, however, it became a festival of victimhood hardened into resentment, and a rallying point for revanch­ist factions. Adenauer’s government also faced reintegration problems in regard to the civil service (Beamtentum). In German history, civil servants (Beamter) and their employers had had a very special relation of mutual obligation. Unlike even high-­ranking white-­collar employees (Angestellte), civil service careers were governed by legal arrangements that included lifetime tenure and strict seniority-­based hierarchy. At the same time, civil servants were by legal definition servants of the state, and thus often displayed exceptional devotion to whatever authority was in power. They were also precluded from striking. Their job was to administer what the state enacted as law; they were explicitly excluded from voicing political preferences. These factors combined to give them a sense of unique place in the German power structure. The Allied Occupation Authorities had vehemently opposed the restoration of the German civil service after the war (Braunthal 1990). They viewed it with particular suspicion. The civil service had often displayed exceptional devotion to the Nazi state;19 it was a powerful and essentially undemocratic 19. Indeed, the Nazi state had gained control of the status of the civil service. During the Weimar period, civil service reform had threatened to weaken distinctions between civil ser­

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closed elite (the Allies desired a fundamental replacement of elites), and it threatened the American democratic doctrine of “separation of powers.” On the other side, the new German leaders saw themselves faced with three different groups of civil servants, each disaffected in its own way (Benz 1981, 239). First were those civil servants for whom, because of the expulsion of ethnic Germans as well as all German authorities from the East, the state authority with which they had entered into the special legal arrangement (and which thus owed them a position or a pension) no longer existed. Second were those who had the special civil servant relation with authorities—­those of the Nazi or German Reich—­that had ceased to exist with the occupation and then the founding of the Federal Republic. And finally were those, some fifty-­eight thousand out of approximately one million total, who as a result of denazification had been prohibited from public service. Despite Allied pressure, conservative factions among the framers of the Basic Law (many of them civil servants themselves) were unwilling to accept a thorough restructuring of this traditionally important segment of German society. In Article 131 of the Basic Law, then, the framers entitled the above-­ mentioned categories of civil servants to some future legislative solution. And as debates over this issue stretched into 1952 and 1953, the Allies lost their desire to pressure the West Germans into a fundamental restructuring. Indeed, the Korean War brought an end to most adversarial impulses towards West Germany on the part of the Allies. While this regulation of the status of civil servants might seem an arcane matter of administrative law, it was important in several ways. In the first place, it was a significant source of struggle between the Allied authorities and the new state. The West German government’s ability to resist that pressure was an important indicator of the change in Allied attitude in the context of the Cold War. In this way, it was one symbol of the Federal Republic’s increasing sovereignty. In the second place, however, for critics this was but one of many examples of  how the establishment of the Federal Republic involved a significant restoration of  long-­standing structures, rather than a much-­called-­for total break. The reality was, of course, somewhere between the two. In the third place, the legislative solution to the problem had some more practical effects on personnel for the new government. It had long been argued that without the reinstatement of civil servants who had had ties to the Nazi vants and salaried employees by calling for an increased role for merit over seniority, as well as possible restrictions on absolute tenure. The Nazis revoked these reforms.

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regime, there would be insufficient numbers of qualified people to run the new state. As far as Adenauer was concerned, the experience of  having worked for the Nazis, even in a relatively high position, was not enough to disqualify one from service in the Federal Republic. Everyone was to be given a chance to start over. Perhaps the most famous case of such a reappointment (and thus an example of the government’s attitude in this regard) was Adenauer’s appointment of Hans Globke to be his state secretary in the chancellor’s office (roughly equivalent to an American president’s chief of staff, thus quite a high-­level appointment; Bevers 2009). Globke, whose case we will examine in more detail later, had distinguished himself in the Third Reich by writing one of three commentaries to the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Racial Laws. His claim, like that of many others (including the later President Richard von Weizsäcker’s father, Ernst, who had been tried and convicted for his role as a diplomat in the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz), was that he had remained in place in order to try to lessen the consequences of  Nazi policies from within the system. When Globke’s place in Adenauer’s administration escalated into a controversy, Adenauer vociferously defended his appointment as well as Globke’s record. He refused to bow to pressure to dismiss Globke, apparently feeling that it would be a signal to all those who had been associated with the Nazis that any such association was culpable. Adenauer’s supposed motivation was concern that such a dismissal would alienate too large a proportion of Germans, who, based on memory of the early denazification decrees, feared that rank-­ and-­file Nazis could be excluded from all public service. Of course, that logic does not necessarily follow: Globke’s role in the Nazi regime had been fairly heavy. No one was arguing that he should be prohibited from being a postman, or that eliminating him meant that former Nazis would be excluded from all positions. Globke, the critics charged, should be removed because the position to which Adenauer had appointed him was extraordinarily high and powerful, and carried significant symbolic weight. Adenauer, however, refused. An additional crucial issue relating to German traditions and the sense of German victimhood at the beginning of the Adenauer era came in the context of discussing rearmament, which we will take up again later as well.20 After the First World War, of course, the German military had been completely 20. This is obviously an extensive and complex issue, with a long history of its own. An excellent account is provided by Abenheim (1988). See also Diehl (1985), Diehl (1993), and Large (1987).

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dis­banded. While many members of various groups like the SS had been sentenced by the Allied Military Government right after the war, and in the early Fifties were often still in captivity, virtually all members of the German military suffered a more general ignominy. Indeed, the most poignant gesture demonstrating this was that Eisenhower—­then Supreme Commander of Allied Forces—­had refused to shake hands with German military leaders at the signing of the surrender in May 1945. In his 1945 book Crusade in Europe, Eisenhower had also expressed his belief that “the Wehrmacht, and especially the German officer corps, had been identical with Hitler and his exponents of the rule of force” (Abenheim 1988, 70). The question, then, went as follows: If all of the German military establishment was totally discredited, who would make up the new West German military, something the Allies saw as urgently necessary? Indeed, many veterans and veterans’ groups made their support of rearmament contingent on rehabilitating the reputation of the German soldier (Large 1987); for many former soldiers and others, rearmanent would have to go forward “ohne mich” (without me), as a common trope put it about military and political involvement more broadly, unless their reputation would be rehabilitated. The reputation of soldiers, of course, already depended on important, though often fluid, distinctions among various military organizations under the Nazis. For instance, such organizations as the dreaded SS were declared to be inherently criminal by the military tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. At the same time, there was great emphasis placed on the essential innocence of the Wehrmacht (the German army), considered a normal army serving its country. Of course, there are many important problems with any attempt to draw absolute distinctions. One important question was over the connections between the SS and the Waffen-­SS. It was claimed by many that the Waffen-­SS was simply an elite group of soldiers with special military jobs, not implicated in the more notorious activities associated with the regular SS. There is, however, substantial evidence that various Waffen-­SS units carried out concentration camp-­related duties as well as were involved in execution squads (Einsatzkommando). By the same token, it is also true that towards the end of the war, the Waffen-­SS was used more and more like regular Wehrmacht units, and that as the war went on, its membership comprised more and more draftees. Questions about the nature of the Waffen-­SS came up again in the 1980s, when it was revealed that forty-­nine Waffen-­SS soldiers were buried at Bitburg. It was often argued on that occasion that a refusal by the American president to visit the cemetery because of the Waffen-­SS would have been an insult to the honor of every German soldier.

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There are also questions about any essential innocence of the Wehrmacht itself: without its vigorous fighting right up until the very end, according to this argument, the “Final Solution” would not have been possible (Large 1987; Diehl 1993). Indeed, the question of the role of the Wehrmacht led to a significant controversy in the 1990s surrounding an exhibit of photographs demonstrating that ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers were implicated in atrocities that were part of the Holocaust. Such an exhibition did not prove anything historians did not already know (the issue was even more problematic because some of the pictures were mislabeled); it was, instead, the public nature of the display and the curators’ intention to challenge the myth of  “ordinary soldiers” doing their patriotic duty, which had been central to the rhetoric of the Kohl era (on the exhibit controversy, see Hamburg Institute for Social Research 1999; on the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust more widely, see Bartov 2001). Indeed, the vigorous and organized opposition of veterans to rearmament was sufficient to force a rehabilitation of the soldier’s reputation in the first years of the West German state. In January 1951, Eisenhower was pressured by German opinion leaders (especially leaders of former Wehrmacht groups) into recanting his 1945 statement. Eisenhower thus released two statements, in which he said that “the German soldier had fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” and that there is a real difference between the regular German soldier and officer and Hitler and his criminal group. . . . For my part, I do not believe that the German soldier as such has lost his honor. The fact that certain individuals committed in war dishonorable and despicable acts reflects on the individuals concerned and not on the great majority of German soldiers and officers (Abenheim 1988, 70).

In 1952, Adenauer too bowed to pressure, and asserted the honor of the Wehrmacht soldier in a speech to the Bundestag on December 3. He said he wanted to declare today before this high house in the name of the Federal Government that we express our appreciation [anerkennen] to all arms bearers of our people who in the name of the high soldierly tradition fought honorably on land, on the water, and in the air. We are convinced that the good reputation and the great achievement of the German soldier are still and will remain alive despite all defamations over the past years.

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In August 1953, Adenauer went one step further with a similar statement before the Bundestag about the Waffen-­SS. He argued that the soldiers of the Waffen-­SS had been simply drafted, whether they wanted to be or not. They were drafted just like any other soldiers. And we, like the German people and public opinion as a whole, must learn to distinguish between the Waffen-­SS and the SS. The former had only the name in common with the latter; in all other respects they were soldiers just like the rest (Large 1987, 89).

Echoes of this moment, again, would be heard clearly decades later at Bitburg. These declarations, along with the entire complex surrounding rearmament, served to mollify veterans’ groups and obtain their support for rearmament, as well as to solidify the image of the Nazis as a small criminal clique who had nothing to do with the German people. In this view, the German people as a whole, including the soldiers, were normal patriots who remained essentially innocent, even when they fought vehemently for the honor of the country far after it was lost and, in the process, supported the Nazi regime and enabled the “Final Solution.” This was to say nothing of the possible complicity of  large segments of the population, in forms ranging from popular support of  Nazi leaders and policies to roles in carrying out atrocities. The image of the war was that of a relatively normal one for the overwhelming majority of Germans. These traditions—­civil service and military—­thus reemerged relatively un­ scathed from the National Socialist abyss, receiving their own institutional Persilscheine (whitewash certificates) from the government. Providing this, Adenauer and many of his advisors believed, was a fair price to pay for social integration; but it is also clear how much they were also motivated by a belief that these rehabilitations were morally appropriate. Introspection, we will see, was appropriate, but it had to be in the right time and place. And the government program was not it.

Chapter 5

Expiation and Explanation

R e pa r a t i o n s t o I s r a e l ( w i e d e r g u t m a c h u n g ) 1 The first major moment in which the new West German state had to confront questions of guilt and responsibility directly came when it had to consider reparations to the newly-­founded State of Israel. The issues here are quite complex, and they require, deserve, and have received their own book-­length treatments (see Balabkins 1971; Schwarz 1981; Deutschkron 1983; Pross 1988; and Wolffsohn 1988). Nonetheless, a brief review of the issues, arguments, and images of the past constructed in the process of negotiating these agreements is essential to understanding this genre of  West German historical im­ age making—­guilt and expiation. One must begin with the West German claim that it had the sole right to represent the interests of the German people (Alleinvertretungsrecht) and considered itself the only legitimate successor state to the German Reich, which, it argued, had not ceased to exist in 1945. These claims were an essential part of  West Germany’s rejection of the nation’s division. Nonetheless, this status as legal successor carried with it significant responsibilities. If  West Germany 1. The English expression “reparations” is not a perfect translation of the German Wiedergutmachung. The English expression is more specifically a repayment by a defeated nation to a victorious nation of damages caused in war. The German term Wiedergutmachung, literally “making good again,” is a more general term, more akin to restitution. As we will see below, the payments to Israel were explicitly called an indemnity and not a reparation, because Israel, not yet a state at the time, had not been a combatant in the war. The word also signaled the difference between the costs imposed on Germany after the First World War (which were called Kriegsschulden, or war debts) and the payments it would make to Israel.

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were to be considered the legitimate legal successor to the German Reich, it had to assume the debts—­both financial and, to arguable degrees, moral—­that the Reich had incurred. Adenauer expressed the intention of paying those debts—­both the Reich’s extant foreign debt and some kind of restitution for Jewish victims—­in his first interview as chancellor, which he gave to the unfortunately named Karl Marx, editor of the weekly German-­Jewish newspaper the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, on November 11, 1949.2 In that interview (Vogel 1969, 17–­18), Adenauer offered his first concrete remarks as chancellor on German responsibility and on the status of  Jews after the Holocaust. In response to the first question Marx posed—­concerning the possible contradiction between the explicitly Christian character of Adenauer’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, and the recognition of  Jewish Germanness—­Adenauer said that he saw no such contradiction: In the days of the Hitler regime, respect for the dignity of man was thoroughly destroyed. . . . We as Christians mean to restore respect for man without regard to his denominational, racial, or national origin. In the spirit of this tolerance we regard our Jewish fellow-­countrymen as fellow-­citizens with full rights . . . This is what we mean by the term “Christian” in this connection.

Adenauer’s use of the phrase “We as Christians” indicated, of course, that he did not fully grasp the question. Marx was asking whether using the label “Christian” for a party symbolically excluded  Jews; he was not asking whether there would be an actual exclusion. Christian Democracy, of course, had a long tradition in Europe. By identifying his party’s principle denomination­ ally, however, Adenauer was in fact implying—­and this is what Marx was getting at—­that there would be a symbolic exclusion. By saying “We as Christians,” Adenauer thus inadvertently made exactly the symbolic exclusion whose reality he was denying. Moreover, while Adenauer clearly intended this statement as a decisive declaration of Germany’s new attitude, one cannot help notice that Jewish Germanness was still something dependent on Christian “tolerance.” While it may have made sense at the time, it appears problematic in hindsight that Adenauer saw no exclusion in this declaration of the new governing party’s Christian values.

2. This interview, as well as most other documents relating to both the reparations agreements and to other aspects of relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel, is contained in Vogel (1969).

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The most practically consequential part of this interview, however, was Adenauer’s statement that he intended to pursue the issue of reparations: The German people is resolved to make good the wrong done to the Jews in its name by a criminal regime, so far as this is still possible now that millions of human beings have been destroyed beyond recall. This reparation we regard as our duty. Far too little has been done for this repair since 1945. The Federal Government is determined to take the appropriate steps.

Adenauer went on to detail intended government measures to fight anti-­ Semitism and ensure the rights of Jews, claiming that the new government would do this not just to appease the international community: “We shall combat any anti-­Semitism not only because we find it undesirable as a matter of foreign and domestic policy but because we reject it vigorously for reasons of humanity.” The difference in tone and in detail between these statements and those in the program statement (Regierungserklärung) is striking, a clear example of the genre boundaries in this period: to the Germans dismiss anti-­ Semitism, to the Jews accept it. In the same interview, Adenauer also made a specific offer: “The State of Israel is the outwardly visible concentration of the Jews of all nationalities [a tendentious statement to be sure]. The federal government intends to put at the disposal of the State of  Israel goods to the value of 10 million DM [Deutschmark] for purposes of reconstruction, as a first direct sign that the wrongs done to Jews all over the world by Germans must be made good.” This remark, however, produced outrage among the Jewish representatives, rather than the intended impression of beneficence. The idea that the murder of six million people could be atoned for with a paltry ten million marks, even as a first offer, was unacceptable to representatives of the international Jewish community, as well as to many others. Part of the explanation for this ten-­million-­mark figure lies in the budgetary concerns Adenauer and his ministers had at the time. Not simply had industrial as well as domestic infrastructures been devastated during the war, but the costs of caring for German victims, whether ethnic expellees, homeless, war casualties, widows, or others, were practically unimaginable. On top of that, the Federal Republic faced three additional costs: the foreign debt of the Reich, the costs of rearmament, and, only third, restitution for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. There were literal tradeoffs among kinds of  victims. Even so, the offered number was low.

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In early 1951, representatives of the Israeli government, wishing to avoid any contact with Germany, sent a note to the victorious powers asking for restitution. The Western governments directed them to Bonn, thus rebuking the request, while the East ignored them entirely. According to the historian Michael Wolffsohn (1988, 22–­23), the Americans were unsupportive of  Israel’s demands because they felt that the costs of rearmament and restitution together were prohibitive, and they clearly preferred the first over the second. Additionally, given Germany’s weak financial position, whatever expenses Germany incurred, many believed, would ultimately accrue to the United States. As Wolffsohn (1988, 24) also documents, when Israeli President David Ben-­Gurion complained to the United States that it seemed as if the perpetrator, Germany, was doing better than the victim, Israel, the US secretary of state replied that those were the priorities. Wolffsohn (1988, 21–­29) presents these details in part to refute arguments that the West Germans agreed to reparations only to appease the Americans. By showing that the Americans were not all that supportive and indeed had other interests, he demonstrates that the Reparations Treaties involved more than pure strategic maneuvering by the West Germans. It was thus necessary for Israel to deal directly with West Germany if it was to get the restitution it so desperately needed. Nonetheless, the idea was an extremely emotional—­indeed repugnant—­one for much of the Israeli public, which was vehemently opposed to any negotiations with Germany at all, or to what many thought of as blood money (Segev 1993). So talks had to proceed quite cautiously, and largely in secret—­because of the Israelis, not the Germans. By the middle of 1951 the Israeli government, as well as representatives of the newly formed Conference on  Jewish Material Claims against Germany (associated with the World Jewish Congress, and headed by its leader, Nahum Goldmann), discussed through informal channels conditions for dealing directly with the West German government. For Ben-­Gurion’s government, the sine qua non for such a relationship was West Germany’s acknowledgment of responsibility for the Nazi past. Work on such a statement, which Adenauer was to deliver to the Bundestag, therefore began in the summer of 1951, and virtually every sentence was written again and again in a difficult negotiation process (Balabkins 1971, 90; Wolffsohn 1988, 23). The major stumbling blocks were Ben-­Gurion’s demand that Adenauer acknowledge collective German guilt, and Adenauer’s refusal to do so. After more than three months of negotiations over the text, Adenauer finally delivered a brief address on the matter to the Bundestag on September 27,

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1951. He began by recounting and refuting world doubts about Germany’s new attitude: Recently, world opinion has concerned itself repeatedly with the attitude of the Federal Republic towards the Jews. Doubts have been expressed here and there as to whether the new state has been guided in this momentous question by principles that do justice to the frightful crimes of a past epoch and put the relationship of the Jews to the German people on a new and healthy basis.

Adenauer responded to these doubts by recalling those provisions the Federal Republic had made to protect individual rights and proscribe racism, including legal principles of human rights in the Basic Law as well as acceptance of the Council of  Europe’s Convention on the Rights of  Man, all hallmarks of reliability. He also called upon the churches and educational institutions “to make every effort within their own spheres so that the spirit of human and religious tolerance in the entire German people, but particularly among German youth, shall not only be formally recognized, but shall become a fact in spiritual attitude and practical action.” He added to this a statement of  his administration’s commitment to prosecute anti-­Semitic propagandizing through legislation against such “propagation of  hate” (Volksverhetzung). The most important part of the speech, though, was that Adenauer finally stated unequivocally his intent to pursue reparations with Israel. While no specific figure was mentioned, it is clear that he was no longer speaking about ten million marks: The Federal Government and with it the great majority of the German people are aware of the immeasurable suffering that was brought upon the Jews in Germany and the occupied territories during the time of National Socialism. The overwhelming majority of the German people abominated the crimes committed against the Jews, and did not participate in them. During the National Socialist period there were many among the German people who at their own peril showed their readiness to help their Jewish fellow citizens for religious reasons, from distress of conscience, out of shame at the disgrace of the German name. But unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people, calling for moral and material indemnity, both with regard to the individual harm done to Jews and to the Jewish property for which no legitimate individual claimants exist. In this field, the first steps have been taken. Much still remains to be done. The federal government will see to it that reparation legislation is soon enacted and justly put into execution.

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Adenauer went on to bring up limits on West Germany’s financial ability to deal with large claims in light of  “the bitter necessity of caring for the innumerable war victims and the support of refugees and expellees. . . .” Adenauer’s statement, unanimously approved by the Bundestag, thus contained almost all of the classical defensive elements and formulations we have already seen elsewhere, including the grammatical constructions and the defensive claim that most Germans were not involved with what happened or were even ignorant of it: “The overwhelming majority of the German people abominated the crimes committed against the Jews, and did not participate in them.” And of a collective guilt there is quite explicitly no mention. Altogether a virtuousic example of the grammar of exculpation in the very act of assuming the burdens of the past! Following this address to the Bundestag, the Federal Republic moved quickly to make arrangements for negotiations, which began in the Dutch town of Wassenaar on March 20, 1952. Before that, though, Adenauer and Nahum Goldmann met secretly at Claridge’s Hotel in London, where they agreed on the sum of 1.5 billion marks as a basis for negotiations. This figure was arrived at by estimating a payment of 3,000 marks to Israel for every European refugee it had absorbed as a result of the War. The final agreements that came out of the Wassenaar meetings by June of 1952—­known as the Hague agreements—­ ended up at about twice that figure, or 3 billion marks. The only difficulty now was for Adenauer to secure passage. While the opposition Social Democratic Party supported the agreements unequivocally, Adenauer’s own CDU was less enthusiastic. Indeed, the cabi­ net approved the treaties by a vote of only five to four. Arguments against the agreement included the claims that the amount was simply too much, given West Germany’s other financial burdens (echoes of Versailles), and that this infusion to Israel would violate “traditional” German friendship with Arab nations. Both of these arguments were to a certain degree spurious. Negotiations of Germany’s foreign debt at the London Debt Conference of that year produced arrangements that enabled Germany to afford the reparations agreements. And German relationships with Arab lands had been good in part because of the Nazis, not despite them; the effect of reparations on relations with the Arabs might have been the same, but its implications for the worthiness of  the argument were not. Adenauer thus couched his arguments in frankly moral terms. A central moment in this matter came when Adenauer presented the reparations treaties—­which had been signed in Luxembourg on September 10, 1952—­to the Bundestag on March 4, 1953. In his presentation, Adenauer laid out the moral foundation for the agreements, presented the specifics in careful

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detail, and refuted various objections that had been raised. He began by describing the Luxembourg Treaties as the fulfillment of the mandate given to him by the Bundestag in September 1951, calling them “the conclusion [emphasis added] of what for every German is the saddest chapter of our history.” Indeed, this choice of “conclusion” is perhaps the most telling single word in the entire affair: Wiedergutmaching (reparation) is thus very much tied up with the desire to draw a Schlussstrich (final line), another common trope at the time. “Such an action is necessary if only for moral reasons,” Adenauer nevertheless argued, and he specified these moral reasons carefully: “Certainly by far not all Germans were National Socialists, and there were also some National Socialists who did not approve of the atrocities committed. Neverthe­ less this act of restitution by the German people is necessary. The outrages began, after all, with the misuse of the name of the German people.” Again, a narrow clique operated against the will of the people (this might be considered one of the founding myths of official memory). Particularly striking here is the difference between Adenauer’s earlier insistence that “the overwhelming majority of the German people abominated the crimes” and his much more limited assertion here, for a domestic audience, that “certainly by far not all Germans were National Socialists, and there were also some National Socialists who did not approve of the atrocities committed.” Beyond the moral imperative to make up even for what one did not want but was done in the name of the nation by a clique present-­day Germans did not support, and at whose hands they too had suffered, Adenauer provided another kind of  justification as well. It was one involving a broad German reputational issue: So far as our strength can accomplish anything to eliminate the results—­I am thinking of the material damage done by National Socialism to those it persecuted—­the German people has a grave and sacred duty to help, even though sacrifices are demanded, perhaps heavy sacrifices from those of us who do not feel personally guilty. Ever since it was established, the Federal government has always recognized this duty. By fulfilling it we want to make good the damage, so far as possible, so far as it is within our power. The name of our fatherland must regain the esteem appropriate to the historic accomplishments of the German people in culture and economic matters.

Adenauer thus included a moral obligation to make good what was done in the German name, as well as the broadly instrumental goal of refurbishing the

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nation’s reputation. Later commentators and critics, however, were often split, again seeing these remarks as proof that Adenauer’s motivations were either fundamentally moral or wholly instrumental. Clearly, both motivations were at work. They were bound, however, by a discursive framing that minimized responsibility even when it was maximizing performance. Once again, Adenauer thus argued clearly against collective guilt, but maintained the need for reparations. He described the persecution as a loss of value—­both human and material—­which must be compensated: The Jews, not only in Germany but wherever the arm of National Socialism reached—­for a long time during the war this was the greater part of Europe—­ had to undergo the cruelest persecutions. The extent of this persecution, the sacrifice of human and material values that it brought, not only justifies but demands treatment of the reparation to the Jewish persecutees.

From the point of view of the present, this may seem like a very strange or even incomprehensible formulation (recall the quote from Tony Kushner in chapter 1 about the error of assuming that what is axiomatic in the present was also axiomatic in the past); why was it necessary to argue so vigorously in favor of something that in retrospects seems like it was absolutely necessary? But public opinion polls at the time showed that while Germans did in general support restitution to Jews, they ranked Jews last on an ordinal list of who should receive financial help (Merritt 1995, 140–­45). Adenauer thus had an uphill battle to convince his compatriots that the expenditure was necessary and that the Jews were deserving. In his speech, Adenauer went on to describe the particular provisions of the reparations treaties, which, he made clear, were indemnities for refugees absorbed by Israel, and not war reparations. The latter, he said, would be inappropriate because “the German Reich committed no acts of war against this state.” He then made an unusual direct reference to the Holocaust: These burdens [of absorbing European refugees] are a direct or indirect consequence of extermination carried out against Jewry by the National Socialist regime of violence. The persecution of the Jews began in Germany with the National Socialists’ seizure of power in 1933. It increased steadily, and during hostilities, without becoming an act of war as defined in international law, it reached that ghastly level whose full extent became known to us all only afterward.

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This is perhaps Adenauer’s most direct and explicit description of what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust in any speech he gave as chancellor. His distance, embodied in his use of the passive voice, and his assignment of the acts to a small handful of Nazis or to no one in particular was, however, emblematic. The last phrase—­“became known to us all only afterward”—­is, moreover, classic for the genre. Adenauer went on in the speech to counter various arguments against the agreements, with the paradoxical effect of putting those arguments on the table. His point was that Germany’s gesture was all the more admirable because there were good reasons not to make it. In regard to the Arab argument that payments to Israel for absorbing refugees were immoral because Israel itself was creating Palestinian refugees, Adenauer said that the two problems had to be kept separate, and that Germany was not involved in the latter. He did add, however, that from its own experience, Germany was especially sympathetic to the plight of refugees. As far as a second Arab claim—­that since Israel was at war with nations of the Arab League, any subsidy to Israel would engender a violation of neutrality—­Adenauer responded that careful provisions had been made to ensure that no militarily useful goods would be in the shipments. Thus, neither argument was discredited; instead, each was carefully credited and taken into account. Adenauer also included some very general remarks about the desired impact of the agreements. First, he said that We therefore have a well-­founded hope that the conclusion of these agreements will ultimately lead to an entirely new relationship between the German and the Jewish people, as well as to the restoration of normal relations between the Federal Republic and the State of  Israel. After all that has happened, we have to show patience and put our trust in the effectiveness of our will to make reparations, and finally in the healing power of time.

At that time, the Federal Republic wanted very much to entertain normal relations with Israel. It would have been a decisive sign of West Germany’s reorientation. Nonetheless, ten years later, when Israel was itself ready (in the context of military aid) to establish official relations with the Federal Republic, West German leaders hesitated, again, with arguments about not wanting to alienate Arab nations. Adenauer’s call for “restoration of normal relations” in this speech was also technically rather odd, given that there was nothing to restore, and given his clarity about the difference between an indemnity and reparations.

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Additionally, Adenauer brought up the issue of  Israeli laws against displaying the German flag in Israel, which were to be eliminated with the treaties,3 as well as Israeli restitution of seized German property within its territory, which also was to be returned. That these symbolic repudiations of Germany were worth negotiating, despite their triviality, demonstrates the degree to which the exercise was concerned with the German image. Finally, and in conclu­ sion, Adenauer emphasized “the importance of the agreement in the more general context of the development of the human coexistence of nations.” He used the occasion to criticize the Communists for propagating anti-­Semitism. One might thus say he thereby undermined the dignity of the gesture by exploiting it for Cold War advantage. Of course, the Soviet Union instrumentalized the question of the Nazi past in West Germany at least as much, and probably more. Debate over ratification in the Bundestag was fairly extensive, though it never really appeared that the treaties would fail. Criticisms included the above-­mentioned concerns about relations to the Arab world, which led the FDP to reject the Treaties, as well as concerns about the ability of the Federal Republic to bear the financial burdens. Another important question, however, was whether the Treaties involved an implicit acknowledgment of collective guilt. Speakers from most parties addressed this point (Vogel 1969a, 74–­87). The FDP rejected it unequivocally. But Eugen Gerstenmeier for the CDU and Carlo Schmid for the SPD both agreed on a more complicated formula. Gerstenmeier—­a former member of the opposition to Hitler, and one of the Federal Republic’s most profound moralists and spokesmen on such issues—­in one of the most detailed and honest accountings rejected collective guilt by pointing to those who had resisted the Nazis. He referred to the outburst of madness to which an estimated six million German, French, Belgian, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Danish, and other European citizens fell victim. Systematically and with almost perfect technique they were shot, gassed, annihilated, from infant to elderly, for no other reason than that they were ostensibly or really persons “of different blood,” persons of the Jewish race.

However, Gerstenmeier argued that “there were hundreds of thousands in Germany who shuddered at this. There were thousands who, in torment, tried to give help. And there were not a few who risked their necks in this help, and lost.” He went on to argue that “it was to these martyrs of humanity, 3. On the wider politics of German national symbols, see Hattenhauer (1990).

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representatives of the German people, that Germany chiefly owes its ability to reject the doctrine of the collective guilt of all Germans. But their number is far from large enough to permit the other doctrine of collective innocence.” For his part, Carlo Schmid adopted this formulation for the SPD as well when he said, “The Social Democratic deputies reject the thesis of the collective guilt of the German people as they do the other, equally false thesis of collective innocence.” Nevertheless: “. . . even without collective guilt, the totality of Germans must stand strong, within the limits of the capacity of our people, for indemnity for the injustice that was committed, sullying our name in the process.” Again, the stain upon Germany’s name called out for some counterevidence; otherwise the humiliation would have been too much. An additional concern of some was that such an indemnity to an entire people, rather than restitution of individual material claims, was unprecedented and legally problematic. Nonetheless, the desire for such a collective symbolic gesture finally won the day: 238 for, 34 against, with 86 abstentions. The debate over reparations was a crucial moment in the politics of the young Federal Republic, as well as for the memory of memory. The frequency with which references to it came up over the next forty years demonstrates that it not only shaped the present and future discourse about the past, but also set the terms with which the new Germany could do what had to be done—­ namely, understand itself as morally upright and internationally viable (both then and in the future) without accepting a burden of collective guilt. As the historian Anson Rabinbach (1988, 164) put it, “The single most important consequence of the reparations debate in the new Republic was discursive: it distinguished between war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crimes committed against  Jews, and so retroactively created a moral hierarchy.” At the top of a different hierarchy, however, was the Federal Republic of Germany, which had accomplished something unprecedented in the history of memory by voluntarily making amends. This result would not be forgotten, though the narrowness of the original cabinet vote would be.

T h e o d o r H e u s s a t B e r g e n - B­ e l s e n In the broader context of the negotiations over reparations, Federal President Theodor Heuss visited the notorious concentration camp Bergen-­Belsen in late November 1952. On this first official visit of a leader of the Federal Republic to such a place—­a focal point of Germany’s shame (or was it guilt?)—­ Heuss helped to dedicate a memorial and delivered a much-­noted speech (Vogel 1969, 105–­8). The address was a complex one, including moral calls

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for individual contemplation, plentiful poetic phrasings, and sophisticated descriptions of the Holocaust and its causes, while yet again advancing a strongly relativistic argument against collective guilt. In this speech, Heuss called for direct confrontation with the events embodied at Bergen-­Belsen, characterizing avoidance as part of what he described as the cowardice responsible for the events in the first place: For the refusal [to give the speech], the evasion inherent in a “no” would have seemed cowardly to me, and we Germans will, shall, and must, it seems to me, learn to be brave when faced with the truth, and particularly so on ground drenched and devastated by the excesses of human cowardice. For naked violence which adorns itself with carbines, pistols and whips is always cowardly in the last resort when it struts well-­fed, menacing, and pitilessly around unprotected poverty, illness, and hunger. Any German who speaks here must rely on his inner freedom to acknowledge the utter cruelty of the crimes committed by Germans on this spot. He who would palliate or minimize them or would even invoke the misguided use of so-­called reasons of state would be merely insolent.

This unusual formulation—­in which we see a rare reference to German per­ petration—­can be explained by the context: such an acknowledgment is more likely to occur in the guilt genre than elsewhere. At the end of the speech moreover, Heuss argued that every individual must pay attention to the message of such a memorial: “Here we have the obelisk, there the wall with the inscriptions in many languages. They are made of stone, cold stone. Saxa loquuntur—­stones can talk. It rests with the individual, with you, to understand this language, this special language of stone, for your own sake and for the sake of us all.” In other words, he avoids here the explicit exculpation of the general population, or at least the usual freeing of them from any personal responsibility for memory, if not for the events being remembered, while nevertheless asserting an individual, rather than collective, responsibility. Heuss thus seemingly refuted all those who would deny, look away from, or wish to bury the past, opting instead for a clear-­eyed acceptance of it in all of its horror. His message was an elementally humanistic appeal, one transcending and rejecting national boundaries insofar as they limit basic humanity: “A cynical fellow, a ruffian, might say: Most of them were only Jews, Poles, Russians, Frenchmen, Belgians, Norwegians, Greeks, and so forth. Only? They were human beings like you and me; they had their parents, their children, their husbands, their wives!” Again, for Heuss, the personal level of the

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vulgarity was almost more potent than the structural and political more commonly emphasized in the rhetoric. Between these calls for honesty and introspection, Heuss provided a number of descriptions, explanations, and arguments which together form an important classic reference frequently referred to in subsequent addresses. Here Heuss lectured professorially, for instance, on how the Holocaust differed from past oppressions of the Jews and of other peoples: In the past there have been many kinds of persecution of the Jews. They were the outcome partly of religious fanaticism and partly of sentiments engendered by social and economic competition. After 1933, [however,] there could be no question of religious fanaticism. For metaphysical problems of any kind could not have been more foreign to detractors of Holy Scripture of both the Old and the New Testament, to the enemies of all religious ties. And social and economic arguments are not enough when there is more to be accomplished than predatory murder. It was more than that. The underlying issue was something else. The breach caused by biological naturalism based on pseudo-­education led to the pedantry of murder as a virtually automatic process without the modest desire for even a basic quasi-­moral standard of  judgment. It is here, in particular, that the extreme depravity of this age is to be found.

To be sure, there had been many similar analyses in the wake of the war. A particularly close one was by the sociologist Alfred Weber, who had carefully adumbrated the vacuity of racist “logic” in his well known 1947 book Farewell to European History. Heuss thus seemed to be very much in dialogue not with other politicians, or even with the general public, but with other intellectuals, with whose diagnoses he was clearly engaged.4 Indeed, despite its similarities to some of the statements in the intellectual discourse, Heuss’s speech at Bergen-­Belsen was among the most extensive explanations offered by any West German leader in the forty years of West German history; and it is among the very few mentions of the biological component of Nazi racist ideology in such speech. Nonetheless, it is striking that Heuss drew no direct connections between the events and ideologies he described and their occurrence particularly in Germany, which thereby appeared rather accidental. Indeed, it was more of a surprise to him that the events and 4. For a more detailed analysis of that discourse, and of  Weber’s argument, see Olick 2005, ch. 8.

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ideologies that underwrote them could have arisen in Germany: “It is our disgrace,” he said, “that these things happened within the geographical confines of that national history whence Lessing and Kant, Goethe and Schiller entered into the universal spirit.” While he added that “no one, no one at all, can take this disgrace from us,” he did not offer any explanation as to why it could have or should have happened within that context, or what bearing it might have on the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. Indeed, like other postwar defenders of  humanism, Heuss characterized the Nazi disaster very generally as a “tragic distortion of the fate of Europe.” Heuss also advanced an explicit argument against moral distinctions among nations, a position that was something of a presumption for a representative of Germany standing in a concentration camp in 1952. This was, of course, not Heuss’s first major speech on these questions (and we will look backward shortly). But the context here was much more public than heretofore (the earlier statement, as we will see, was not an official performance). The overriding goal for Heuss at Bergen-­Belsen, as for so many others elsewhere, seems to have been to reject accusations of collective guilt. The specifics here were couched as a strangely combined acceptance and rejection of various comparisons and other mitigating arguments. Heuss thus stated that while he had heard of other concentration camps like Dachau, Buchenwald, or Oranienberg (places that were mainly used for political prisoners), he had first heard of the Bergen-­Belsen and Auschwitz extermination camps only in the spring of 1945. He went on to say, “This remark is not intended to serve as an excuse for those who like to say: We knew nothing about all this. We did know of these matters.” While this is a clear acknowledgment of German civilian knowledge—­ something not often admitted, to be compared to Adenauer’s denial quoted above—­Heuss nonetheless explained that such knowledge was incomprehensible from the standpoint of an enduring political and moral heritage: “Our imagination, which drew upon civic and Christian traditions, was incapable of encompassing such a measure of cold and woeful annihilation.” Germans knew, or had had adequate information to know, but such information was incomprehensible from their moral and cultural standpoint. Heuss thus dared the acknowledgment, but then backed away by mitigating it. At best, the statement was one of wishful thinking; at worst, it was a denial of overwhelming reality. Heuss also brought up the arguments that Germans too had suffered in just such camps in 1945 and in 1946, and continued to suffer in such ways at the hands of the Communists. He refuted the claim that this comparison would wipe out the need for Germans to remember. He did this, though, in a way that

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did not wholly eliminate the comparison: “To point to the injustice and brutality of others in order to furnish an excuse for oneself is a method adopted only by those who lay no claim to moral standards.” He was clear, however, that not just the crimes but even the reluctance to acknowledge one’s own collective responsibility are universal: Such people are to be found among all nations, among the Americans as well as among the Germans or the French and so on. No one nation is better than another. There are people of every kind in each nation. America is not “God’s own country,” and harmless Emanuel Geibel [a nineteenth-­century poet and playwright who had first supported the revolution of 1848, but then supported the German empire after 1871] caused some irresponsible mischief by saying that the world will be healed one day through the German spirit.

Heuss even drew the Jews—­who, he said, “were virtually forced by Hitler into a national consciousness”—­into this comparative accounting: “And were the Jews the ‘chosen people,’ if they had not also been chosen to suffer sorrow and agony?” The point seemed to be that groups may only falsely claim superior or special positions, and that doing so leads to the status of either perpetrator or victim. Was Heuss discrediting  Jewish collective identity as, on the one hand, a pure reaction and, on the other hand, a false superiority? Not quite, but there was enough here to call into question the complaint that Heuss was one of the leading figures of postwar German philo-­Semitism (Stern 1992; Jesse 1990). In this account, then, all nations and all peoples are the same. So while Heuss rejected comparison as a strategy of evasion, he seemingly embraced it as a means of equation. The lesson was therefore the most general one, and universally applicable at that: It seems to me that the tariff of virtue with which the nations equip themselves is a trite and pernicious thing. It endangers the clear and decent sense of patriotism which will support everyone who consciously lives in history, and which may lend pride and assurance to anyone who perceives the great events, but must not be allowed to seduce us into the apathy of pharisaic self-­assurance.

All in all, Heuss’s speech was a complex and difficult one, apparently for both speaker and listener, a hodgepodge of seemingly contradictory themes and arguments. At times his moral message was strong, especially in its demand for remembrance as a task for every individual. His rebuke of those who sought to evade awkward remembrance through comparative excuse-­making

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was clear. Yet he treaded a fine line between extracting the broadest humanistic lesson from Bergen-­Belsen—­surely an important impulse and message—­and eliding the German specificity of that remembrance in the context of denying collective guilt. Nonetheless, the speech was well received, and in later years was often read as a profound moment for the young Federal Republic. It was indeed an unusual statement for the genre, which later, as we will see, became the most ritualized in the liturgy. The question for us will be why Heuss’s experimental formulations in 1952 succeeded where Jenninger’s failed in 1988. Part of the answer has to do with expectations; in 1952 there were not many.

R e f r a m i n g A n t i -­S e m i t i s m As we saw in Adenauer’s first Regierungserklärung, it was very important to West German leaders to reassure themselves and the world that anti-­Semitism and antidemocratic extremism were things of the past in Germany, a temporary aberration that had been eliminated, as demonstrated by the overwhelming rejection of such positions in the elections. Of course, Adenauer recognized—­ as we saw in his first statement on reparations in 1951—­that education and decisive public rejection were important in keeping anti-­Semitism a social and political taboo. A central forum for the dissemination of this new attitude were the Societies for Christian-­Jewish Cooperation (Gesellschaften für christlich-­ jüdische Zusammensarbeit), a group of regional interfaith organizations that sponsored, among other things, the annual Week of Brotherhood (Woche der Brüderlichkeit), usually celebrated in March.5 This annual event often included addresses by the Federal Republic’s leaders, and was thus an important moment for remarks on the Nazi past and the legacies of anti-­Semitism, as well as on how the past might be overcome. Of course, speeches in such specialized contexts carried a different weight than the grander moments. In 1949, newly elected Federal President Heuss went around the new re­ public, visiting its different regions. On his visit to the state of Hesse in De­­ cember, Heuss addressed a special meeting of the Society for Christian-­Jewish Cooperation there, and in the process set some basic terms for Weeks of Brotherhood as well as other speech occasions concerning guilt over the Holocaust—­though, as always, Heuss’s expiation was colored by his reverence for legitimating German traditions. Heuss thus began his address by analyzing 5. For the history of the Societies for Jewish-­Christian Cooperation and of the Week of Brotherhood they sponsored, see Foschepoth (1992).

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an old statement by the sociologist Werner Sombart: “Humanity and nationality belong together.” Heuss believed that Sombart had abandoned this balanced nationalism after 1933. But Heuss also argued that even the balanced view could contain a dangerous tendency. He thus quoted the Austrian author Franz Grillparzer, an early liberal, who had said, “From humanity through nationality to bestiality.” Heuss admitted that many would have defended against that argument in earlier years in favor of Sombart’s national principle. But it seems that, in the intervening years, Grillparzer’s concern had been borne out: According to Heuss, Grillparzer’s statement “was a word of warning, it became a word of the most terrible prophecy, and the most horrible is that the realization of this prophesying of history sought out our homeland [Heimat] as its parade ground [Exerzierfeld ].” In being framed so broadly in terms of the transhistorical balance between nationality and humanity, however, the issues lost their German specificity. Germany was simply the “parade ground” on which these universal forces unfortunately played themselves out. In this, Heuss was consistent with other diagnosticians in the guilt debates of the late 1940s (Olick 2005, 157–­79). Heuss then turned to a direct investigation of the pressing question: What kind of guilt did Germany and Germans face for what had happened? Heuss took the question head-­on: “It does not make sense to beat around the bush [um die Dinge herumzureden]. The terrible injustice that took place [sich vollzogen hat] against the Jewish people must be brought to speech in this sense: Are we, am I, are you guilty because we lived in Germany, are we complicit in this devilish crime?” Though he says “you and I,” the question was clearly whether there was a collective guilt for the crimes. Heuss said no decisively: “The word ‘collective guilt’ and what stands behind it is a terrible simplification; it is a reversal exactly of the same kind of thinking with which the Nazis were used to seeing the Jews: that the fact of being  Jewish already contained the phenomenon of guilt.” The Nazis had judged the Jews collectively, so it would be reproducing their ideological frame—­thinking like a Nazi—­to judge the Germans collectively. Again, already an old formula. Moreover, this said nothing about the implications of the real differences between the kinds of collectivization done in the German name and in the Jewish name. The horrible crimes committed in the German name by large numbers of Germans—­crimes that also depended on large segments of the population perhaps unwittingly complying with, and even enthusiastically supporting, other aspects of the regime and its activities—­were very real. In contrast, the Nazi accusations of a Jewish collective guilt were obvious and insidious fabrications, or at least ancient biblical myths, ones moreover with an insidious history.

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In place of collective guilt, however, Heuss was willing to accept what he called a collective shame: “But something like a collective shame has grown out of this time and has remained. The worst that Hitler did to us—­and he did a lot to us—­is nonetheless this, that he forced us into the shame of carrying together with him and his associates the name ‘German.’ ” What is unusual here is not the formulation of shame, but the strange response to it. Heuss is willing to face it; his “resoluteness” is not a refusal to acknowledge the shame, but courage to take it on. Heuss was aware, of course, that even this acknowledgment of shame would be criticized by those who either wanted to forget the Nazi past or did not want to admit responsibility for it. He responded to these critics directly: We may not simply forget, may also not forget things that people would prefer to forget because it is comfortable to do so. We may not forget the Nuremberg laws, the Jew’s star, the burning of synagogues, the removal of  Jewish people into exile, misfortune, and death. These are facts that we should not forget, that we may not forget because we may not make it comfortable for ourselves.

And he went on to characterize the unique horror of the Nazi past: The most gruesome in these occurrences of which we speak openly is this: It is not a question of the stirred-­up fanaticism of the pogrom that we had for so long read about in the newspapers—­that in Russia, in Romania, this or that occurred—­rather, it is the cold horror of rational pedantry. That was the special German contribution to what happened. And the most terrible is that this process did not occur, so to say, emotionally, which would be bad enough, but that it followed decrees and was supposed to serve for a long time. What kind of world view was that? It was biological materialism that recognized no moral categories but wanted to represent them, and that knew nothing about the existence of individual valuation between man and man.

Here one is reminded of many earlier claims that National Socialism was merely “the special German form of a tendency that was of an international character,” as the economist Wilhelm Röpke had put it in his 1947 book The Solution to the German Problem.6 6. Röpke, an economist, became, along with Economics Minister (and later Chancellor) Ludwig Erhard, a principal architect of  West Germany’s “social market economy,” which produced the so-­called economic miracle of the 1950s.

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In the remainder of this important speech, Heuss developed the philo-­ Semitic argument, for which he is frequently hailed, about the importance of Jews in German culture, and about the loss Germany had suffered as a result of their destruction. However, he also discussed the problem of anti-­Semitism as a widespread one, and therefore concluded that while “for us in Germany these questions are specially posed . . . they also concern the whole world. We must accept them in all seriousness first, because they were handled in this senseless devilish manner here. But the rest of the world, too, has the task of dealing with these matters, not only we alone.” It seems as if  Heuss took on just a bit of the attitude, which would become much more common in the 1960s, that Germany’s special status provided it with special insights and thus en­ abled it to act as a model for the rest. Heuss concluded, however, by saying that this issue “finds its final answer in the soul of the individual person.” Hate, he said, is easy: “Love is always a challenge. But victory is only in the dare.” In sum, then, this speech helped define the German guilt genre, as well as being clearly defined by it. Only in this kind of context could a political leader afford such a contemplative tone. The administrative speaker had to be a man of action and the tradition speaker a man of  honor. But the German victimhood speaker, which we have not yet seen in detail, was a man alternately of outrage and resignation. It was only German guilt that called for quiet contemplation. Heuss later expanded the theme of  love and cooperation in a 1952 Week of Brotherhood address in which he laid out a complicated argument for intergroup understanding and the elimination of prejudice as being utterly essential for a moral society. The differences between this speech and the one at Bergen-­ Belsen, as well as those between this speech and Heuss’s inaugural address, make clear the power of context and genre. It was not just that the Week of Brotherhood called for the discussion of particular themes; it was that one handled such themes in a particular way on such an occasion. Heuss’s message was generally about morality and understanding, but it obviously lay specifically within the context of the Holocaust and anti-­Semitism: . . . the question of “brotherhood” is not exhausted in the Christian-­Jewish complex, but everyone also knows that it has in the last decades possessed its historically most consequential area of sensitivity and injury there. It makes sense in this way that the admonition to self-­examination comes from a people that feels as the most severe burden on the soul the deformation of the Christian-­Jewish relation in the terrible and unholy destructive practice of a German state of exception.

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The association here between Christian-­Jewish relations and the “German state of exception” remained obscure, as was often the case in Heuss’s frequently abstruse comments, though the most significant use of the term “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand) was by the notorious Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, and it is not clear here whether Heuss was using the term naively, ironically, or intentionally. Heuss’s broader point, however, seemed to be that the Jews had something special to teach the Germans. Heuss decried the practice of prejudice, and argued that it would take courage to combat it: “The way to brotherhood will often enough be a matter of courage, and to be sure, courage against one’s self, against inherited habits of thought that have become laziness of thought. . . .” These were prejudices entrenched by years of pseudoscientific propaganda: “What evil did so-­called racial science cause if it did not decompose moral self-­responsibility into a scientifically veiled naturalism?” Heuss doubted whether that way of thinking was really a thing of the past, as so many, including Adenauer, claimed in those years: “The method of taking an Other as the enemy for the sake of an ideology or of an interest did not and is not dying out everywhere; instead of ‘Jew,’ one says ‘bourgeois’ or ‘burschui,’ and already a ‘people’s collective opera­ tion’ [the reference here is to East German collectivizations] is in the works.” In this way, Heuss was implying that the problem of anti-­Semitism and the problem of communist anticapitalism employed the same logic. The anti-­Semitism analogy thus seemed rather malleable, including both the Allied treatment of the Germans and the communist treatment of the bourgoisie. Anti-­Semitism, it seemed, had become the master trope of collectivistic thinking per se. Heuss argued as well against those who believed that enough had been said about National Socialism because it was already history. But he did this in a telling way: by criticizing the Americans for their attitude manifest in the denazification policies. He said that while the Americans quickly recognized that their denazification procedures were unjust, their response was to say, “Forget about it.” Heuss added, “But that is not so comfortable for countless people.” He was appealing to the Germans’ own sense of victimhood (without commenting on the disproportionality of the comparison) to make remembrance an understandable desire: “And who would possess the impertinence to tell Jewish people, ‘Forget about it!’ In both the moral and material sense, Hitler’s legacy won’t be settled so cheaply.” The subtext here seemed to be that the Germans could not so easily forget about the collectivistic accusation against themselves. If the Jews could not forgive and forget so quickly, neither could the Germans.

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The Limits of Tolerance This 1952 speech by Heuss shared a common element with those he and others, like Bundestag President Eugen Gerstenmeier, gave throughout the Fifties: an emphasis on the virtue of tolerance but also the limits on it. While tolerance was praised as necessary for coexistence and understanding among groups, the question was one of  how far that tolerance should extend. Should one also tolerate the views of those who agitate against tolerance in favor of hate? The answer was no, though to varying degrees. Heuss, for instance, rejected “tolerance” altogether as a term because, he said, it implied the abdication of all standards. Gerstenmeier was more moderate in his 1955 address, arguing that the state could not attack individuals for their opinions, but only for their acts. Nonetheless, there was an overriding consensus that the protection of the democratic order and the rights of every individual, regardless of race or group, deserved militant protection. Again, this was the underlying doctrine of “militant democracy,” which allowed for outlawing of certain political positions—­perhaps born of a rejection of Nazism, but used mainly against communism. The question, of course, did not come totally out of the blue, nor was it merely in reference to the memory of past anti-­Semitism; the issue of anti-­ Semitism was not quite as distant as was so often claimed. Indeed, in the very early days of 1953, West German leaders were faced with three events that caused a significant image problem in the international press. First, the British military government arrested seven leading Nazi agitators. Concurrently, a survey was released that indicated persistent widespread support for National Socialist ideas. On top of that, the doctrine of militant democracy—­the idea, stemming from the failure of the Weimar Republic to combat extremism, that democracy had to be defended vigorously against its detractors—­was put to its first real test in 1953 when the Constitutional Court upheld a government prohibition on the Communist Party (KPD) in West Germany. For his part, Chancellor Adenauer’s response to the survey and the arrests was one of quick and harshly worded denial. In a radio address he delivered on January 19, 1953—­entitled “Unrestrained Suspicion”—­Adenauer denied the negative implications of these events. In the first place, he sought to counteract the image, awoken by the British arrests, that the West German government was not committed to eliminating such influences in West German society. He argued that while the arrested group had been watched closely by West German authorities, they had not had sufficient evidence to make the

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arrests. He went on to complain that the British move provided a lamentable opportunity for those opposing European integration: What immediate occasion led to these arrests is as yet unknown to me. I can only reassure that the German authorities would have already moved if there had been sufficient materials for an arrest. I cannot resist the impression that henceforth enemies of a European unification and of a common defense, who in recent times have seen themselves forced to remain silent, have taken up the opportunity to impede or to destroy this unification into which the Federal Government has put all of its energies since the very beginning.

There was something paranoid in Adenauer’s response, portraying any suspicion of German resolution to deal with anti-­Semitism as a tool of insidious forces. Of course, the rhetorical effect is quite brilliant: Instead of allowing the events to call into question German reliability, Adenauer delegitimated the issue of anti-­Semitism by associating it with radicals who sought to undermine reliability. Accusations of persistent German anti-­Semitism, he thus implied, fed into the hands of the Communists. In regard to the survey, Adenauer disputed its pertinence, or at least the reality of the change it indicated, which he ascribed to methodologically spurious comparisons to other survey data. He reasserted his government’s commitment to opposing National Socialist tendencies, while also denying that they were a real problem. With all clarity I say that I condemn that former leading National Socialists are attempting to play a role in the political and public life of the Federal Republic. How the German population stands in that regard they have repeatedly brought to expression with the ballot. In comparison to other democratic countries the political relations in the Federal Republic against extremism from the right and left have proven themselves stable. After the experiences that every German had on his own body, he is substantially immune against radicalism.

This statement, however, was loaded with contradictions. In the first place, it was at about this time that Adenauer was coming under severe criticism for having appointed Hans Globke to be his state secretary in the Chancellor’s Office. Globke, as already discussed, had been a high-­ranking Nazi jurist who had written the legal commentary to the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935. Adenauer defended his advisor vociferously and refused to dismiss him. Second,

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while he said that the German voters had repeatedly rejected radicalism, we must remember that this was only January of 1953. While Adenauer went on to predict a repeat of that rejection, his confidence was rather overstated, though not totally baseless, given the intervening local elections. Also, as we just saw in Heuss’s rhetoric, Adenauer saw the Germans as victims of extremism, and assigned to them an almost superior insight as a result of it. Adenauer’s main claim, however, expressed most clearly in the title of his speech (to repeat, “Unrestrained Suspicion”), was that all of this continued concern over German political stability was unwarranted and unfair. At the beginning of the speech he complained once again that “abroad and here and there in Germany the impression has come about as if we were standing before a reawakening of National Socialism, and as if a real danger existed through the rise of a new National Socialist movement.” With this dismissal of such extreme possibilities, he implied that concerns were misplaced. He concluded the speech by arguing: “The Federal Government, carried by the agreement of the majority of the Parliament and of public opinion, has made the Federal Republic into a useful and reliable partner of the free world. And it will remain so!” (emphasis added). Further suspicions, he implied, were inappropriate, unfair, and—­insofar as they made people abroad wary of Germans and raised German feelings of unfair treatment—­played into the hands of Europe’s enemies. When Heuss and Gerstenmeier spoke about the limits on tolerance and the need for wariness toward and prosecution of extremists on both the left and the right, they were thus not speaking in an abstract conceptual vacuum. No matter how much Adenauer denied the persistent residue of  Nazi ideology and sympathies, the issue would not be so easily laid to rest.

Chapter 6

Germany in the West

The burden of the Nazi past, of course, was not limited to the horrors of the Holocaust; Germany under the Nazi flag had also provoked and waged a crimi­ nal war of aggression simultaneously against both West and East. Germany was guilty not only of Auschwitz, but of conquering France and invading the Soviet Union, in addition to its harsh occupations elsewhere. However inextricable the Second World War and the Holocaust were in reality, they thus presented analytically separable problems for memory in the Federal Republic of Ger­ many. There were occasions and issues relating to the war and its legacies more generally, rather than directly to the Jewish genocide. And while such things were in a way more “normal” parts of the life of nations, they nonetheless re­ quired interpretation, commemoration, and, to a certain degree, atonement. Three dates are particularly important to that commemoration.  January 30, 1933, is known as the “Machtergreifung” or “seizure of power” by Hitler and the Nazis. On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, thus offi­ cially beginning the Second World War. And on May 8, 1945, leaders of  Nazi Germany signed an unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers. All of these were dates of major historical significance, and all have been marked periodi­ cally throughout the history of the Federal Republic, though with changing significances and readings. Confrontation with the legacy of the war in the Federal Republic also en­ compasses a number of distinct issues at different times. Chronologically, the first of such issues that leaders of the new state faced was peace with the West (mainly France) and the integration of large disaffected segments of the

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German population—­mainly ethnic expellees, but also former soldiers and civil servants who had served the Nazis. The second problem relating to Ger­ many’s history of belligerence came after making peace with the West—­namely, the need to make peace with the East. And third, as we will see in the context of relations with Israel, once the burdens in relation to both West and East had been sufficiently overcome, West German leaders sought in the late 1970s and 1980s to increase Germany’s role in world affairs through a process of “normalization.”

The War and West German Sovereignty Friendly overtures towards the West, mainly France, went under the banner of a general reconciliation. Often in the early years of the Federal Republic, as already noted, when that reconciliation was a main topic on the agenda, the Second World War was characterized as simply the latest in a long history of battles comprising a “European civil war” that had been going on for centu­ ries. In this sense, the politicians shared a framework with many of the histo­ rians and intellectuals of the immediate postwar years, some of whom were discussed in chapter 3 above. The immediate goal of foreign policy in the early years of  West Germany was to end this destructive history of civil war (Bruderkrieg) that had been based upon an artificial “arch-­antipathy” (Erbfeindschaft). The main premise advanced in such a characterization was that the natural relation of France and Germany was one of community. There supposedly existed a Western or European “community of values,” specifically that based on the Enlightenment. With such famous figures as Kant, Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven in its history, no one could deny that Germany was an important participant in, and cradle of, that movement. The culprit seemed to be a negatively defined nationalism that had grown out of such events as the Napoleonic invasion of Germany, the Treaty of Ver­ sailles, and the repeated French occupation of the Rhineland. Indeed, it was often argued that the German national idea had essentially been forged out of such events. German identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was explicitly a negative reaction to French power. This artificial antipathy, it was argued by Adenauer among others, gave rise to an especially virulent form of nationalism. All of Europe had been caught under its tortuous sway for too long. It was time to abjure nationalism in all its forms. A main rhetorical feature of such a position is that both everyone and no one were to blame. The negative content of German identity—­its virulent and chauvinistic form of nationalism—­was forged in the context of German-­French

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belligerence. France too, it was often pointed out, had an aggressive history. In a civil war, at the end of which there remains just the single community of  val­ ues, one faction may bear more responsibility, but what is important is that the whole survives: the peace must be won by all. This not only had the result of alleviating Germany’s absolute guilt, but also argued for larger collective Euro­ pean institutions in which the uniqueness of Germany’s burdens, both moral and material, might be shared. These formulations came up again and again throughout the first decade of the Adenauer era in a wide variety of speeches. In this context it is interesting to note that anniversaries of  January 30, 1933 (Hitler’s “seizure of power”), of September 1, 1939 (the beginning of the war), and even of May 8, 1945 (the end of the war) went largely uncommemorated in the first two electoral periods of the new state. Instead, they were taken up more broadly in governance speeches. Only hesitantly in the late 1950s and early 1960s did these dates become speech occasions; in the 1950s they were largely silence occasions.

The Legitimacy of New Institutions This is not to say that the new state did not engage in any commemoration. By 1952 the new government had accomplished a great deal in terms of leg­ islative, physical, and economic reconstruction. The “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) was solidly underway, and as the Cold War heated up, the Federal Republic’s position became stronger. West Germany was now an essential bulwark and prize, as well as a potential source of industrial and, yes, even military might for the West. And politically, the new parliamentary de­ mocracy seemed to be working reasonably well. Under these conditions, the new state celebrated itself for the first time in 1952, thus inaugurating the tra­ dition of West German tradition. Perhaps “celebration” expresses too much jubilation; the occasions were rather more hesitantly marked. On September 7—­the anniversary of the first meeting of the Bundestag—­for instance, Federal President Heuss questioned whether that moment was strong enough to warrant a place in the collective memory: “Today we don’t yet know whether the seventh of September has wedded itself to the consciousness of the German people in such a way that it is a matter of course to celebrate it with gratitude.” And on that same day, the president of the Bundestag, Hermann Ehlers (CDU), discoursed on the role and appropriateness of such celebrations: “More still than other peoples,” he said, “we are today asked whether we truly have an inner justification to cel­ ebrate a national holiday.”

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Ehlers’s speech was especially interesting from the point of  view of deriving legitimacy from new traditions. In it, he laid out an extensive justification for the new state and for how it should be viewed by its leaders and citizens. The reason he embarked on this justification was to oppose the argument that “it would be the most inappropriate way to promote thoughts of unity if one were to celebrate a national holiday of the Federal Republic”—­in other words, of West Germany rather than of a unified Germany. Critics charged that such a celebration would “glorify and solidify the division . . .” To deny this, Ehlers made the case, first, that it had been a responsible move to form the new state, and second, that even such a partial state required a certain loyalty. He argued that while “it was not the state-­shaping political will of our people that led to this state formation including only a part of Germany, but the consequence of the political and military collapse and the result of occupation policy. . . . We must [nevertheless] conclude that . . . it would have been irresponsible not to use this political chance.” Ehlers praised the pragmatic approach, and directly implied that any other road could have been, and indeed had been, disastrous by drawing a comparison to the post–­First World War period: We could have already learned from the experience after the first lost world war that the self-­sacrificing and time-­consuming methods of securing a new build-­up stone by stone is the most auspicious. Whoever today would want to convince the German people that another method would be better suited or would promise greater success would be on the way that we’ve already gone once, to the harm of our people.

Of course, a number of other suspicions remained cogent, and Ehlers dis­ missed them. He recognized, for instance, that the goal of reunification may have been viewed as retrenched nationalism, and he sought to differentiate: “We Germans have learned through the misfortune that met us that such a national occurrence [reunification] is valued wrongly if it is only national and isolating one people against others.” Germans had thus learned from their own suffering. At this early stage, moreover, there was a general fear of anything resem­bling state pomp after so many years of Nazi histrionics. So Ehlers asserted that “there is no one among us who would again want an authoritarian state or a to­ talitarian dictatorship.” Nonetheless, he said, “We would, however, be poorly advised if we allowed the distortion and adulteration of state organs that we have experienced to become the occasion for . . . throwing the baby out with

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the bath water.” In this context, Ehlers thus also criticized the predominant rejection of all things of  Weimar origin: One may criticize this or that. In total, though, one must say that it [the Weimar Constitution of 1919] could have provided the prerequisites for a free German nation-­state if it had been possible to administer it calmly and if the most widely disparate forces of destruction had not from the very beginning assailed its foundations. . . . In retrospect, we are in a better position today1 than in the years 1919 to 1933 to recognize that the fact of the Constitution’s establishment on August 11, 1919, was an extraordinarily significant turning point in our his­ tory . . .  justifying a serious consideration of the foundations of our state life. . . . Had we undertaken it [such a consideration] carefully, perhaps some things would have turned out differently in our most recent history.

The implication is one heard frequently in this early period—­that the Weimar democracy suffered not only, or not even essentially, from radicalism, but from lack of commitment to democratic principles. (This was, of course, in no way seen to oppose the basic principle of militant democracy—­the need to fight against radicals.) Additionally, many leaders in the early years of the Federal Republic were fighting against what became known, especially in the context of rearmament debates, as the “without me” (ohne mich) generation (already mentioned in chapter 4). Many people who had experienced the false prom­ ises, disappointments, and ultimate disaster of involvement in the Weimar and Nazi periods retreated from politics, wary of new involvements. This was es­ pecially problematic in the context of rearmament. For Ehlers, among others, it was thus crucial to generate a sense of alle­ giance to this difficult new partial state because lack of such allegiance was implicated in the fall of the Weimar democracy. Ehlers therefore argued that periodic celebrations could play a role in creating that support and involve­ ment of the populace: “Let no one say that a hastily established and temporary state does not need a state feeling.” Other elements of state symbolism that raised difficulties included the national anthem and the flag. The makeshift solution for the anthem was to sing only the third verse, which spoke of “unity and law and freedom.” The Federal Republic also chose the black-­red-­gold flag, which had a long history of association with democratic elements in Ger­ man history, and which had been suppressed by the Nazis. Flags, however, 1. Here again is a superior wisdom after the experience of  historical mistakes.

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were rarely displayed in the Federal Republic, for fear of raising the image of the flag-­bedecked Germany of the previous era (Benz 1989; Hattenahuer 1990; and Ortmeyer 1991). Other than arguing for the appropriateness of acknowledging anniversaries of the Federal Republic, speakers in 1952 took the occasion to establish fur­ ther distance from the Nazi period. Adenauer thus spoke of the “return into the community of peace-­loving nations” that had already been accomplished through solid leadership and the “diligence and willingness to work of the German people,” after the “total ruins of the Third Reich.” And Parliamentary State Secretary Otto Lenz (CDU) referred to the “smoking ruins of a war long become meaningless, irresponsibly begun, and irresponsibly pursued to the bitter end . . . .” Though Lenz was careful to say “irresponsibly begun” as well as “pursued to the bitter end,” the latter phrase was perhaps the more signifi­ cant for many people (perhaps especially for some segments of the military op­ position). He further implied, however, that this was long-­past history by ask­ ing, rhetorically: Who still thinks about how the hate of the whole world directed itself against a Germany whose megalomaniacal rulers brought unspeakable suffering not only over their own people, but over the whole world, only to go down in an inferno in which uncounted millions fell? . . . Most have forgotten the years of starvation and misery, of struggle for bare existence, of a joyless and empty life. . . . All that lies behind us—­but should always stand before us.

Of course, this imputed forgetting could not possibly have been true in 1952, and was aimed rather as a rhetorical technique of temporal distancing. Here again, the order is what was remarkable: instead of starting from the suffering Germany had brought to the world and only then adding in a consideration of German victimhood, the obvious victimhood was German, and the Germans had to remind themselves not to forget the others. Existentially, one’s own suf­ fering is always primary. Whether this is a “By the way, other people suffered too,” or a “The most important (or at least equally important) thing is that other people suffered,” is a matter of the specific context. Whichever inter­ pretation is fairer, though, it is clear that this formulation once again located blame with a small leadership and did not begin with the self-­inquiry that a minority of German intellectuals—­K arl Jaspers and Eugon Kogon the most prominent—­had called for in the first years after the war, and which the left in the Sixties would assert had been suppressed (the “second guilt” position).

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In his address on September 7, Heuss gave the distance more substance, in what was an emblematic statement for the emerging German traditions genre (though repeating a formulation he had used as early as 1945): “We ourselves may wish that the Germans—­after having had an excess of drama and histri­ onics performed for them [vorgespielt erhalten hatten], which perished in a depravedly composed mass tragedy [Volkstragödie]—­would win back a feeling that, following Hölderlin’s expression, above all, sobriety is holy.” What the Germans needed and were getting was solid, hard-­working pragmatism. Heuss dismissed the terminology of the economic “miracle,” and called it instead “a very simple . . . completely prosaic matter, the diligence of the German per­ son . . . including the politician.” Again, as we saw in the analysis of  Heuss’s No­ vember 1945 “In Memoriam” speech, analyzed in chapter 3, the poet Hölderlin represented the valued tradition of sobriety, now being realized in the reliable stance of the new government. No experiments, but also no drama. In sum, the anniversary presentations in 1952 concerned themselves with the validity of the celebration and of the state itself, and with the distance and difference from the past. At the same time, they were hesitant about, though anxious for, categories—­like collective sentiment and state ceremony—­that they saw as necessary but burdened, requiring careful application.

From Past to Future By the time of Germany’s second federal elections, in late summer 1953, the domestic and international situations had changed substantially from those of 1949, when the new state had been founded. In the early 1950s, the Atlantic-­ Soviet antithesis was stressed to the point of potential catastrophe; many in the West viewed the so-­called Korean Conflict as a prelude to a Soviet grab for Western Europe. Open questions of West Germany’s role in the Western Alliance thus became more urgent; Germany was now seen to be the linchpin in the entire European, and indeed world, order. As a result, when Chancellor Adenauer delivered his second Regierungserklärung on October 20, 1953, his position, as well as West Germany’s, was rather stronger that it had been four years earlier. In the first place, Adenauer’s CDU/ CSU had increased its share of the vote from 31 percent in 1949 to 45.2 percent in 1953, with the SPD falling from 29.2 to 28 percent.2 And in the second place, 2. Much of the increase for the CDU/CSU was due to the disappearance of many smaller parties from the scene, as the CDU/CSU increased its broad-­based appeal.

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the Atlantic Allies were anxious to integrate West Germany, both for its poten­ tial contribution to the defense of  Europe in terms of manpower, and to ensure that neutralist—­and thus, it was argued, potentially capitulatory—­tendencies in West Germany did not carry the day. As far as the Federal Republic’s military contribution, negotiations had been underway for the creation of an integrated European Defense Commu­ nity. Though this planned structure never came to be, due to the failure of the French Parliament to ratify the signed treaty, the fact of German remilitariza­ tion was, given the power constellation of the time, perhaps inevitable. So in these years, the leadership of the Federal Republic was confronting a number of potentially troubling issues related to these questions, both domestically and internationally. As already mentioned, opposition to a German military contribution within West Germany was, from a number of different perspectives, quite a formida­ ble factor in Adenauer’s domestic balancing act at that time. There were those, especially within various Protestant circles—­most notably under the leader­ ship of Pastor Martin Niemöller and future President Gustav Heinemann—­ who opposed a German military contribution on moral grounds after so many years of war. There were also those who opposed the contribution on the na­ tionalistic grounds that it was not in the collective German interest;3 and there were those—­mainly former members of the military, including a powerful lobby of former Waffen-­SS officers (Large 1987)—­who opposed it because they felt that members of the military had been assigned too much blame for events of the Third Reich, had been unfairly treated in and by the new state, and therefore should not put themselves on the line for this dubious new state and its equally dubious Western orientation. Internationally, the French were especially wary of any German remilita­ rization, and potentially tricky issues like the Saarland question,4 as well as uncertainties due to leadership changes in both the United States (from Tru­ man to Eisenhower) and the Soviet Union (from Stalin to Khrushchev), kept 3. An important element in some versions of this argument was the so-­called “Stalin Note” of 1952, in which Stalin dangled an offer to reunify Germany as a neutralized state. Adenauer and the Western leaders rejected the dubious proposal, believing that it was a spurious attempt to disrupt the solidity of the Western Alliance (Steininger 1991). 4. This heavily industrialized and strategically important area in the southwest had been assigned to French control in the immediate postwar agreements, though the majority of its population identified as German. West Germany sought its return, and eventually gained it through a plebiscite in 1955.

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Adenauer and his government busy enough. Nevertheless, all of these factors increased West Germany’s bargaining position, even though the European De­ fense Community failed. It was clear that, because of its strategic significance, the new state was moving quickly towards some form of increase in status, whether it was to be integration into a supernational military and economic structure or, as it turned out, more traditional sovereignty.5 Of course, none of this was compatible with continued “reeducation” and blame policies—­ already a distant memory, though easily mobilized when useful—­and the West Germans demanded and received an easier way on these issues. In his 1953 Regierungserklärung, therefore, Adenauer was if anything even more strident than in 1949. He began by devoting the first and perhaps most significant section of his address to evaluating the election results as indicators of the new German public opinion. He pointed out that extremist factions of both the left and the right had suffered defeats and, further, that these defeats were not simply due to changes in the electoral laws since 1949. He used this fact to contradict those who remained suspicious about extremist tendencies in the German public: “The German people . . . can be proud of this result. It has thereby expressly repudiated the opinion displayed in certain circles that Germany inclines towards extreme political views.” Adenauer examined the results in exceptional detail, and sought to explain and to evaluate them. The decline of support for the extreme left, he said, was the result of “the ex­ periences that the German people has had with the Communist reality.” In discussing the far right, he charged again the overestimation of these forces by the international community: The chances of success of these groups were not appraised to be small from many sides, namely abroad. The election result shows nevertheless that the numerical weight of the National Socialist residues were overestimated by far. Even for those who, because of their previous membership in the National So­ cialist Party, had not yet been allowed to vote in 1949, the slogans of the past apparently have lost their power of attraction.

The claim here was that the new government had successfully integrated di­ verse factions into a solid basis of support, and that it had succeeded in the ad­ ministrative tasks it had been handed by the past. Adenauer therefore used this

5. The Federal Republic from 1949 until 1955 was not a sovereign state, as the Atlantic Allies had reserved significant powers, including those over such important areas as foreign policy.

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situation to draw a final assessment of Germany’s political reliability (though Adenauer had already begun frequently using the word “finally” in 1946): After the electoral result, no doubt is allowed that the time of right-wing radical­ ism in Germany is finally over. The German people has with its overwhelm­ ing majority decided against any totalitarian system and for those parties that unqualifiedly stand for the democratic state order. . . . The German people has proven in the elections a high level of political maturity and judgment. It has thereby been demonstrated what progress has been made in the inner consoli­ dation and recovery of Germany.

The general conclusion about the election was thus that further concerns about Germany were misplaced: “We hope that the picture of a rebirth of Na­ tional Socialism, of an aggressive Germany, will now no longer appear in the public opinion of other states.” Indeed, such an image was indeed frequently appearing in the foreign press, in both the West and in the East, as part of the commentary on the Federal Republic’s proposed military role in Western de­ fense plans. Adenauer did not hesitate to take credit for the claimed turnaround: “With great satisfaction, I can conclude that the politics and activities of the Federal Government and its leading parties over the past four years have received the recognition and the approval of all levels of the German people. These elec­ tions were a referendum, and especially for the foreign policy pursued over the past four years.” He averred further that the results repudiated opposition criticisms, especially those claiming that the government’s negotiations over a West German military contribution were illegitimate and lacked a mandate from the people: The choice of the voters is completely clear. No one today will still be able to claim that the German people opposes the treaties and a German defense con­ tribution. The without-­me standpoint [ohne-­mich-­Standpunkt] that around two years ago played a role, and of which the entire opposition from the com­ munists to the circles around Dr. Heinemann6 made use, has been overcome and has made room for a realistic assessment of the German situation.

6. In 1952, Justice Minister Gustav Heinemann (later to become the third president of the Federal Republic in 1968) resigned his position and membership in the CDU to form a new party, whose purpose it would be to oppose West German remilitarization.

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These claims early in the speech provided the background for a number of specific demands and policy intentions. In the first place, having pur­ ported that National Socialist sympathies had died, Adenauer pushed for the dismissal of criminal complaints against individuals for their Nazi-­period activities: We hope that the result of this election will accelerate and influence the sum­ mary reexamination of the war criminal trials, that all the condemned who did not commit real crimes [as opposed to what kind of crimes?] will be set free as soon as possible and will immediately receive all possible mitigation of their imprisonment. In addition, the Federal Government has continuously stood up to the Allied High Commission, arranging certain mitigations and measures for the prisoners in Spandau7 which, for example, appear urgently desirable in light of the advanced age and health condition of some of the prisoners. The Fed­ eral Government hopes that its continuous efforts in this question will finally be successful.8

In the second place, Adeanuer pushed for further progress in European integration, pressuring for French ratification of the European Defense Community: The German people, who in the Bundestag elections of September 6 laid down such a clear and unlimited affirmation of the foreign policy up until now—­ especially of the European integration treaties—­would be overtaken with disap­ pointment if the completion of the full treaty package—­of  which the Germany Treaty is also a part—­would be delayed further. After the German people has done everything to make the way clear for ratification, it would not understand if it would not finally come to enjoy the status of independence. I hope that abroad one has understanding for and is taking into consideration these feel­ ings of the German people.

7. A number of leading notorious Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were sentenced to terms in Spandau prison in Berlin—­a building reserved just for that purpose, and guarded by all four powers: the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. This was one of the few aspects of international cooperation that withstood the test of time. Spandau’s last prisoner, Rudolf Hess, remained imprisoned there until his death in 1987. 8. For data and history of punishment of war criminals, see Steinbach (1981), Weber and Steinbach (1984), Friedrich (1984), and Rückerl (1980).

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At the end of the speech, Adenauer also mentioned the Oder-­Neisse line (the line between East Germany and the lost eastern territories)—­which he said the West German government would never recognize9—­and called for the Soviets to release remaining prisoners of war. Additionally, Adenauer raised the goal of European integration once more above all else, basing his appeal once again on an interpretation of European history: “The painful experiences that we have gathered from the history of Europe in the last centuries have brought us the certainty that nationalism, which has been the cause of so many catastrophes, must be overcome.” This last statement is quite interesting, especially in light of the German military contribution on the table at that time: nationalism and the painful experiences of European history implied again that the current situation was the result of a shared history, and that it was the entire nineteenth century that had to be overcome, not just German aggression in the twentieth. This trope—­prepared, as we saw, in the immediate postwar period—­appeared frequently throughout the Fifties (indeed, it had appeared already in the 1949 Regierungserklärung, when Adenauer referred to the “German-­French antipathy that has ruled Eu­ ropean politics for hundreds of  years”), and, as we will see, it would appear again in the neoconservative Eighties. Finally, Adenauer used an account of  how well the new state had dealt with the legacies of the past as a measure of distance from that past: “The relations of the Federal Republic . . . to all free peoples of the world have continually normalized and improved themselves. The state of war is also formally over with almost all peoples of the Western world. We entertain diplomatic relations with almost all of its governments.” The glaring, and implied, exception here was Israel, with which the federal government would urgently have liked to establish relations (an implied quid pro quo for reparations), though this was far from likely so soon after the Holocaust. We will see later the interesting cir­ cumstances in the mid-­Sixties, when it was the West Germans, not the Israelis, who hesitated. Though Adenauer acknowledged that “heavy debts which the past imposed on us had to and still must be paid in the process,” the goal of this particular address was to emphasize how much had been accomplished, and how the relevance of those debts—­seemingly not as important as lessons from the previous centuries—­had waned in light of the new historical conjuncture.

9. This occurred only in 1989, after the collapse of East German communism, and not with­ out significant controversy.

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“ G e r m a n y i n t h e W e s t ” 10 When in 1954 the French failed to ratify the European Defense Community treaties, Adenauer moved quickly to separate the General Treaty (which con­ cerned West German sovereignty, now to be called the Germany Treaty) from the EDC plan. At the same time, the United States sponsored West German membership in NATO, including an independent military under German com­ mand. Though the SPD expressed serious misgivings concerning the military issue, they were proud of the impending return of sovereignty to the Federal Republic, and therefore supported the treaty. As a result, though the Western Allies reserved emergency powers for themselves, the Federal Republic of Ger­ many was, in conjunction with its accession to full NATO membership, granted sovereignty on May 5, 1955, almost exactly ten years after the unconditional surrender of  Nazi forces in the First World War. This important day for emerging tradition in West Germany was, like many other occasions in these early years, characterized in terms of distance from the Nazi past, self-­congratulation, and confident assurances of a new attitude. Both Adenauer and Heuss, here and elsewhere, sought to separate the Nazi past as something interrupting German history, rather than as something defining it. Adenauer thus remarked, “Ten years ago Germany broke apart and ceased to be a self-­governing state. It was the darkest hour of our fatherland. . . . We reached the goal [sovereignty] through steadfast endeavor and sober judgment of the political situation. . . . The voter showed levelheadedness (Besonnenheit).” But Adenauer sought as well to connect these latter developments to a longer German tradition, one unsullied by the Nazi intrusion: “It corresponds to our deepest conviction that there is only one place in the world for us, the place on the side of free peoples. This corresponds also to the meaning of Ger­ man history and to the decades-­long—­if in vain—­endeavors of earlier govern­ ments to come to a solid relation of friendship with the nations of the West.” Heuss, reelected easily in 1954, was also concerned with the implications of the defeat of 1945 for German traditions, though he presented the Nazi pe­ riod as perhaps more problematic for German tradition than Adenauer had. 10. This section title comes from the well known 1985 book Das Deutschland im Westen, by the French-­German historian Alfred Grosser. Though Grosser’s book is an analysis of forty years of  West German history, the expression “Germany in the West” is especially character­ istic of the period of  West German history between 1955, when West Germany became more a subject of  Western history than an object, and 1966, when the Grand Coalition began to turn the Federal Republic’s diplomatic attention to the East.

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For Heuss, the major characterization of the defeat of May 8, 1945, which he was then recalling on its tenth anniversary, was that it had combined defeat with emancipation. This formula, as we saw already promulgated by Heuss in 1949, was to be much cited, most prominently on May 8, 1985, the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war, by Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker in what, as mentioned in chapter 1, was one of the most noted speeches in West German history. We will examine that speech in great detail later, but pointing out the trope’s origins here will be part of recognizing the power of genre trajectories. The meanings of the end of the war on May 8, 1945, as we saw, were significantly debated already in 1945 and immediately afterwards. Despite these earlier sources—­which were, after all, existentially obvious to many people at the time—­Heuss’s 1955 formulation had the status of an origi­ nal (though he repeated many of  his earlier formulations): Ten years ago, a belligerent undertaking that had always been senseless was ended through a few signatures. For the German consciousness, this day will al­ ways appear in a strangely provocative ambiguity; for, in the then quite present military destruction of Hitler’s depraved episode of domination [Herrschaftsepisode], the destruction of centuries-­old German state and national history [Volksgeschichte] was included, not yet at that time clear in measure or excess, nevertheless observed by us with tragic lack of illusion, and next to it the feeling of  being freed—­from what? From the endangering of  life and freedom, from the worry for friends and relatives? That’s not what I mean. Rather, from lying, caprice, violence as the declared legitimate and practiced method of political life. That was the shame into which Hitler had forced us Germans—­one could not and cannot shake it off, it will accompany our lineage [Geschlecht], but one could, and had to, and has to try to overcome it with a proper response [Gegenleistung], a proper response, and not promises alone.

Notable here, of course, was Heuss’s location of the blame in Hitler’s hands, the construction of the German people as having had this fate forced upon them, and the characterization of the period as an “episode.” In this interesting statement of what became the “defeat versus liberation” trope, Heuss nevertheless drew a more direct moral connection between state forms: the example of the Nazi state required the response of the Federal Re­ public. For Heuss, the achievement of the Federal Republic was to bring “out of the chaos a new order.” In this process, the lifting of the occupation on May 5, 1955, was a turning point which marked the end of  “ten years of schooling” and the time for a change of class. The words in German here are Unterrichtsstunde

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and Klassenwechsel. Unterrichtsstunde—­literally, “teaching hour”—­implies a definite sense of apprenticeship or even loco parentis. Klassenwechsel—­literally, “change of class”—­implies a graduation, as in from one grade to the next. The obvious reference is to the West’s policy of “reeducation.”

Steady On In 1957 the Christian Democrats won an absolute majority in the Bundestag for the first time, though they continued to govern in coalition with the Free Democrats. In his third Regierungserklärung at that time, Adenauer took a more pragmatic tone than before in outlining all sorts of financial and legisla­ tive tasks. The only references made even remotely to the past were comments on social welfare programs for the expellees from the Eastern territories. And, in foreign matters, Adenauer no longer complained about West Germany’s democratic probation because that period, as we have just seen, ended in 1955. All in all, the 1957 address was a classic of Cold War rhetoric. Defensive references to the past from earlier speeches were displaced here by pointedly general remarks about the “absolute power of the state” and the dangers of “collectivism.” And it was clear here that the Soviet Union was the embodi­ ment of injustice in the world, with Germany as one of its victims. In 1959 the Federal Republic celebrated further tenth anniversaries—­of the Parliamentary Council, of the Basic Law, of the Bundestag, and of the Repub­ lic itself. Speeches on all of these occasions, like those seven years earlier, em­ phasized distance from as well as comparative advantage over the Nazi and Weimar periods, though now there was no longer a comparison to the oc­ cupation period, as there had been earlier. While these speeches were thus characterized by many of the same rhetorical elements as earlier, they were just a bit more confident, and often included more explicit references to venerable aspects of German state life. The West German tradition had been forged. During the celebration of the Federal Republic’s tenth anniversary, for in­ stance, Interior Minister Gerhard Schröder (CDU, not to be confused with the SPD chancellor of the early 2000s) justified the celebration by comparing the past ten years to the Nazi period (similar to the 1952 speech by Schröder’s colleague Hermann Ehlers, examined in the previous chapter): In general, it is apparent that the Federal Republic is not especially inclined to celebrate memorial occasions. And perhaps many therefore ask these days whether ten years of contemporary history is enough time to justify an

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evaluation. I would like to answer in this case with a clear yes and, as a basis for it, to draw a comparison to our recent past. I would specifically draw attention to another ten-­year period: between the day of the seizure of power (Machtergreifung) by Hitler on January 30, 1933, and the catastrophe of  Stalingrad lie almost exactly ten years. This reference seems to me meaningful in a double manner. It shows that ten years of contemporary history, in good as well as in bad, can be a very important period.

For his part, Chancellor Adenauer spoke about the speed of historical change, which he characterized as a passive process: “The past five decades [referring to the period from the beginning of  World War I to the sovereignty of the Federal Republic] have passed over the German people, over Germany, in a breathtaking flood. . . . We have in these years especially emphasized many events with commemorations, and thereby had the wish that the German peo­ ple be able to orient itself  historically according to them.” Which commemora­ tions Adenauer was referring to, however, was not entirely clear. As we saw in the pre-­1949 period, German historical consciousness was directed far back to earlier epochs; political commemoration of the Nazi period had not yet really begun. In his speech, Interior Minister Schröder characterized the relation be­ tween the Weimar period and the present, and also  judged the present, saying: The demand for a stable government was the fruit of many bitter insights from the Weimar period. At that time, a quick change of weak governments ruined the authority of the state. . . . We know that the German voters in the last ten years have understood perfectly the necessity of a stable government. In this I see an historical achievement of the German voters, even if they were certainly acting less out of constitutional knowledge than out of a healthy feeling.

Schröder added that “this land is our fatherland in good and bad,” and praised the past ten years further: “These years were not ruled by the marching boot and the uniform, but rather by the virtues of the civilian. They were not a tri­ umph of power, but much more a triumph of sober politics.” This emphasis on German history with both good and bad would reappear as a major trope in the 1980s, while the emphasis on sobriety, as we have seen many times, was a major trope of the 1950s. Returning to Adenauer’s speech, it is also possible once again, as we have done so many times already, to see an avoidance of describing the past very exactly (which makes sense, given his German audience). Adenauer thus said,

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“I don’t want to enter here into a long description of the terrible destruction of  Germany through the war . . . of  what this war brought over Germany—­and let me add—­also over other lands.” The reminder of “other lands,” we know by now, was quite necessary. Nonetheless, in his speech celebrating the Basic Law, Adenauer acknowledged the negative motivation that past provided: “We were all motivated by a feeling of  hope for a better German future, by the feel­ ing that we were about to liquidate an evil past.” Of course, “liquidate” was a strange choice of words even for Adenauer.

Chapter 7

The Return of the Repressed

At the end of 1959 and into 1960, the issue of persistent anti-­Semitism returned unavoidably to public attention and demanded an official response, which took the form of denial and exculpation more than expiation. Around Christmas in 1959, there was a resurgence of anti-­Semitic vandalism, including the defacement of a number of  Jewish cemeteries and of the newly renovated synagogue in Cologne. These matters were highly embarrassing for West German leaders, and they came at an especially delicate time. In the first place, the Soviet Union, as always, benefited from any disgracing of  West Germany’s reputation in such a manner, and tensions over Berlin were at a high point.1 Second, a series of important trials of  Nazi war criminals had just begun—­ trials that were to bring the brutality of the concentration camps into a wider public light than they had ever been in before. The appearance at that time of such blatant ostensible anti-­Semitism was thus tremendously inopportune for West Germany. While it was seemingly possible to dismiss these particular events as the acts of independent disaffected youths, clearly they touched a nerve. On the 1. In his monumental study of the era (part of the epic six-­volume work on the entire history of West Germany [Bracher 1986]), Hans-­Peter Schwarz (1981, 209–­10) maintains, as was rumored at the time, that Soviet agents had committed these provocative acts. While this may have been the case—­though it was never proved, and never moved beyond the level of  innuendo and rumor—­such attitudes were not nearly as unknown in West Germany as the response claimed. That is, it was not impossible to imagine, official claims to the side, that the vandalism was a homegrown and characteristic phenomenon.

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one hand, Adenauer was quick to issue public statements denying the representativity of the sentiment as well as downplaying the events’ importance as an indicator of  anything at all. On the other hand, and not unrelated, 1960 was a banner year for public appearances by West German leaders at all sorts of occasions directed against anti-­Semitism. These included perhaps the busiest Week of  Brotherhood ever, an Adenauer visit to Bergen-­Belsen, a final push on legislation outlawing incitements to hate and violence (Volksverhetzung), and a White Book on the vandalism incidents delivered to the Bundestag by Interior Minister Schröder. While Adenauer publicly downplayed the importance of the vandalism, the public relations troops were out in force in the months that followed. They very much needed to be. Adenauer responded to the vandalism officially in a radio and television address on  January 16, 1960. In that speech he provided an unequivocal repudiation of the events and of their apparent indications of wider attitudes: “What happened in Cologne at the synagogue and at the monument is a shame and a crime. The Federal Government, for which I speak, hopes that the organs of justice proceed against it with all severity.” He went on to characterize the more general vandalism of cemeteries (which, he pointed out, occurred outside of Germany as well) as “almost exclusively boorishness.” The punishment he saw fitting—­contrary to his stated hope that the organs of  justice would proceed “with all severity”—­was one for stupid vandals rather than serious political extremists: “To all of my German fellow citizens I say: If you catch a hoodlum anywhere, punish him on the spot and give him a sound thrashing. That is the punishment that he has earned.” To Jews in Germany, he affirmed: “You can be fully at ease. This state stands behind you with all its power; I give you my word.” Despite this clear—­if, in the case of the cemetery desecrations, trivializing—­ repudiation of such anti-­Semitic sentiments, Adenauer was also strikingly defensive. After saying that he had personally attended the consecration of the synagogue, he referred to the “wave of outrage against the perpetrators,” which he lamented had become “in some other countries a wave of hate against the Germans in general.” This latter, the scorn of  world opinion against Germans in general, seemed to concern him more than anything else. In response, Adenauer claimed that he himself was especially qualified to respond to it. He listed his credentials in regard to Jewish matters in rather extensive detail, reminding his listeners that he and his family had been victims of the National Socialists: “It should suffice when I say that I stood on the death list of the National Socialists four times, and that it borders on a miracle that I lived through these years.” He went on to discuss his personal relations with  Jews: “And my

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relation to Jewry? Now, it was two  Jews who, when my family and I found ourselves in greatest financial distress in the time of National Socialism, were the first to offer me financial help. They knew how I had always stood towards the Jews.” Adenauer also presented his government’s policy record as evidence of its probity in these matters: “When I became federal chancellor, I fought with all of my power for the Reparations Treaties with Israel. I wanted thereby to inform the whole world that today’s Germany rejects anti-­Semitism from its very depths.” This is a clear example of the memory of memory, a first rent earned on the investment in reparations. There is, of course, no indication of the difficulties that battling for the treaties had posed for Adenauer, nor any indication of the overwhelming sentiment against the idea of reparations to Israel by German public opinion in the early Fifties. Once such a gesture has been made, it is part of the record. Adenauer’s overall goal, as always, was to quell doubts about West Germany’s reliability, which he saw as the unjustified result of these isolated incidents: “To our opponents abroad and to doubters abroad I say, the unanimity of the entire German people in the condemnation of anti-­Semitism and of National Socialism has shown itself in the most complete and strongest way imaginable.” Contrary to the clear evidence that anti-­Semitism was indeed persistent, Adenauer boldly claimed: “The German people has shown that these thoughts and tendencies have no foundation in it.” He went on again to defend against any general association of Germany with National Socialism: The majority of the German people in the time of National Socialism served National Socialism only under the hardest force of dictatorship. In no way was every German a National Socialist. I believe one should have gradually recognized that abroad as well. In the German people National Socialism, dictatorship, has no roots, and the few incorrigibles who are still around will have no success. I guarantee it.

The statement “In no way was every German a National Socialist” of course does not mean that a majority were not National Socialists. Adenauer’s argument, however, was that further suspicions were unwarranted because Germany had clearly overcome its past, though its responsibility for that past—­which he sought to minimize by using the phrase “the other Germany,” referring to the opposition, inner emigrants, and exiles—­was limited; Germany must, he insisted, now be considered a reliable partner in the West. Moreover, he was arguing, continued attention to these issues by the international community played into the hands of those who would wish to prevent Western

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unity, be they nationalists of one variety or another or, more importantly, the Eastern bloc. Concerns about the German past, Adenauer thus implied, must have been illegitimately motivated.2 As already mentioned, the increased rhetorical presence of West German leaders at past-­oriented events throughout 1960 betrays a somewhat greater concern than was expressed in Adenauer’s denials. Clearly, it was considered important to make a good showing, though it is difficult to say whether this was to promote genuine awareness of the issue in Germany or simply to appease the international community. In place of the indisposed Bundestag President Gerstenmeier (CDU), the vice president of the Bundestag, Carlo Schmid (SPD), thus addressed the Bundestag on the anti-­Semitic events in a plenary session on January 20, 1960. His speech, though, in some contrast to that of the governing party’s statements, was an especially impassioned moral plea, perhaps a good indicator of the views on the past that would come to the fore under the Social Democrats in another nine years. In the first place, Schmid explained the special situation of Germany in regard to such events: That this could happen in our country is a shame—­a shame that does not become small because walls in other countries too were stained with swastikas and defamations of the Jewish people. We Germans have no right to point our finger at others; boorishness under the swastika certainly followed elsewhere, but here with us six million Jews were murdered. What happened this week is therefore more damaging here than elsewhere. Our reaction against it must, therefore, be more forceful, both morally and with police enforcement, and come from deeper insights than elsewhere.

Of course, the starting assumption in this context was always—­even for Schmid, who was a strong moral voice for the Social Democrats—­that the 2. In the weeks before the vandalism, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno had given a radio address titled “What Does It Mean to Master the Past?” (Was Bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?), in which he famously explained that he was more concerned with fascist tendencies within West German democracy than outside of it. Adorno gave the speech twice more in the months after the attacks, adding that unfortunately his fears had been entirely borne out by events. This speech, itself the capstone of a decade-­long project on Nazi residues in the West German population, became a landmark of the New Left in the 1960s for its indictment of  West German society as harboring residual authoritarian potential, as well as for its implication that the Adenauer government was restorationist. The background to this work is reconstructed in Olick and Perrin (2010).

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problem was not specifically German. That was taken for granted: Where the rest of the world assumed German uniqueness, German politicians assumed the opposite, and thus had to explain that while it was unfair to imply that it was only Germany’s problem, it was also Germany’s problem, though Sch­mid in fact was arguing that it was especially Germany’s problem That it was necessary to make such a point—­against those who denied special responsibility—­ is clear from the context we have already examined. While Schmid went on to repeat that the acts were committed by indepen­ dent hoodlums, with motivations universal to such groups and not specifically political, he also did see an important message and a greater danger in society’s reaction to them. First he said that parents, teachers, and even possibly a general climate were responsible, and added a strong admonition: That this is so concerns us all. Here lies a task for us all, and if  we do not complete this task our people will not heal. As long as one can say it here without having to fear being shunned: The behavior of  the Third Reich towards the Jews was certainly a serious mistake, but one that led to us being enemies with the whole world; as long as it can be discussed among us, with the intention to exculpate, whether six million or “only” three million Jews were murdered, as long as among us every single child is not taught and has not grasped that the problem is not whether it is six or three million, but rather whether it is zero or one murdered, then we—­even those of our people who kept their hands clean in the crazy time—­have failed.

Schmid’s call was thus one for greater introspection and more serious contemplation of the moral dimensions of the issue, a contemplation that resists the urge to strategize and to calculate possible harms and benefits when faced with such a serious historical challenge: “We will above all have failed as long as we evaluate what was done at the synagogue not under the aspect of morality, but from the perspective of the possible damage that the Federal Republic may have suffered.” But he did indicate the deficits of too strong a shared response, or at least that was the manifest message. It was delivered, more­ over, with all the tropes of the grammar of exculpation, well familiar by this point. Perhaps also as part of the damage control, Chancellor Adenauer participated in a memorial ceremony at Bergen-­Belsen on February 2, 1960, in which he laid a wreath and delivered a short speech. The tonal difference between Schmid and Adenauer was striking, even though both were more or less within

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the guilt genre. Adenauer repeated a number of items from his earlier address, though a pleading moral tone came through more clearly this time, and he was somewhat less defensive. He began very plainly: “. . . I am deeply moved and deeply shaken in the remembrance of all the suffering and all the misery that prevailed for years in this area.” He went on to say that his own experiences made it especially difficult for him: “You will know that I too was in a concentration camp for awhile, and that I in that way absorbed the whole atmosphere of such a camp, and that it comes alive again on a day like today.” There were, of course, differences among concentration camps, and between concentra­ tion camps and extermination camps like Bergen-­Belsen, as well as among the treatment received by various prisoner groups. So while Adenauer’s experiences may very well have been significant, there can be no real equation between his fate and that of  the  Jews in the extermination camps. Implying that there was is thus a problematic suggestion. In this speech at Bergen-­Belsen, Adenauer referred directly to the vandalism wave of late 1959, which he described as having occurred in Germany as well as in other countries, though “above all what happened in Germany is what concerns me.” There was, of course, no reason to bring up the fact that these events had also happened elsewhere, except to mitigate the impact of what had happened in Germany. Even if Adenauer denied that this was his goal, his actual words contradict the assertion. Adenauer thus pleaded with the world to accept his promise that Germany had changed: Contemporary Germany respects all races, all peoples, and places at the highest level the respect for the rights and freedom of every individual. I ask you and I ask the public, not only in my country but the public of the world, to accept the assurance that we stand with all of our power that, also in regard to the education of the youth, what most unfortunately [leider Gottes] occurred during the National Socialist time never again happens in the world.

In this context, Adenauer’s claim of reliability sounded like a more distant hope than in the other genres. Despite all this careful attention to  Jewish and past-­oriented issues after the anti-­Semitic events of 1959, however, the issue of  persistent anti-­Semitism was not taken up into the more general narrative of the state. Instead, as we have seen, it was always described as an aberration, and was brought up only where it could not be avoided, particularly on those guilt occasions when the Federal Republic always worked hard to demonstrate its official philo-­Semitism.

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T h e E n d o f t h e P o s t wa r ? Given that the Christian Democrats achieved an absolute majority in the elections of 1957, it became clear that the SPD would have to undertake a change in orientation and self-­presentation if it were ever to emerge from the opposition. For its part, the CDU had succeeded in bridging traditional schisms in German politics—­like the Catholic-­Protestant division, as well as certain class and urban/rural distinctions (Linz 1959)—­to become a genuinely broad-­based party. This shift was one of the most important changes in German politics after the war. At the same time, it was clear that the SPD had failed to become as broad-­based a party, and that this would be required of it if it were to play a significant role in government. So, in 1959, SPD leaders (Schumacher had died in 1952) met in Bad Godesberg and agreed to back away from their traditional strongly class-­based rhetoric, and to embrace a more general program, thus seeking to gain a wider segment of the vote. As part of this “Bad Godesberg Program,” they also once and for all unequivocally accepted the Federal Republic’s Western orientation. As part of their party’s rejuvenation, the Social Democrats ran the young (forty-­seven years old) and charismatic mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, as its chancellor candidate against Adenauer (who was eighty-­five years old) in the 1961 federal elections, claiming to offer a new generation of Germans a newly progressive attitude—­one not mired in traditional and, it was argued, burdened German conservatism. In response, Christian Democrats insinuated that Brandt’s emigration to Scandinavia during the war called into question his patriotism. (This echoed debates from the early years of the occupation over the moral status of exiles.) While Brandt and the Social Democrats did not ultimately gain the chancellorship in 1961, they did improve their lot substantially. And while remaining in coalition with the CDU/CSU, the FDP pushed strongly for Adenauer’s replacement. In addition to the reorientation of the SPD at Bad Godesberg, another important event of 1959 was the election of the little-­known, undistinguished, and supposedly inarticulate (we will see otherwise) Minister of Agriculture Heinrich Lübke (CDU) to succeed the immensely popular and eloquent Theodor Heuss as federal president. Earlier, Adenauer had proposed that Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard be nominated for president—­mainly as a way of dampening Erhard’s chancellorship ambitions, as Adenauer considered Erhard not politically up to the task. When it became clear that his own CDU generally supported Erhard as the next chancellor, Adenauer placed himself in consideration for the presidency. But he abandoned this when he realized

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that the job allowed little real room for influencing policy, and instead clung tightly to the chancellorship, in part by promising party leaders that he would retire soon after the election. Lübke, a conservative Catholic with rural roots, was thus a compromise candidate, one who nonetheless remained in office for most of two terms (he retired early, in part due to declining health and in part so that the election of his replacement would not interfere with Bundestag elections). In his inaugural address, he focused on the past as a source of  his own outlook on, and suitability for, the office. For Lübke, as for most others of his generation, World War I had been a crucial (though seemingly positive) experience for him, having taught him the “sense and meaning of duty of the individual for the collective.” Early in his speech, he also prominently mentioned having been arrested by the Nazis, which, he said, taught him the importance of freedom and human rights. As we will see later, there nevertheless emerged important questions about Lübke’s activities during the Third Reich. The East Ger­ mans released documents that appeared to indicate that Lübke, who had worked for an architectural firm that had government contracts, had been involved in the designing of concentration camp barracks. Lübke refuted the claims, but the sharpest rebuke in the discourse seemed to be reserved for the East Germans for having released the documents as part of a propaganda campaign, which showed once again that they could not be trusted; Lübke’s reputation was relatively unscathed. Regarding his interpretation of the role of  the presidency—­which he would frequently seek to use more actively than Heuss had3—­in his inaugural address Lübke referred back to the perceived difficulties of the Weimar Republic (a typical reference, especially in the first few years of the Federal Republic), clearly addressing the administrative legacies of the past: There was full agreement that the powers of the federal president in comparison to the time of the Weimar Republic had to be limited. The explanation for that is easy to find if we keep in mind that our Basic Law, in its material contents, draws the conclusion out of the painful lessons that the most recent period of our history has given us. The members of the Parliamentary Council wanted to avoid the repetition of two evils: the total fragmentation of political

3. Kurt Sontheimer (1972, 148) suggests that Lübke’s attempt to exercise greater practical influence than Heuss was perhaps due to his inability to be as morally and symbolically influential as Heuss had been.

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forces that in the Weimar Republic led to the depletion of state authority, and the concentration of great authority in one hand. Neither total state power nor the total dissolution of state authority is the expectation that is attached to the Basic Law of the Federal Republic in its practical effect.

In addition to this discourse on institutional structure as a result of “historical lessons,” however, Lübke introduced a theme that remained a central one for his rhetoric: the role of new and postcolonial states, especially in Africa. And, in a rather peculiar association, he argued that the rise of new states and identities in the Third World bore on the division of Germany. His claim was that the emphasis on freedom and independence for the states of Africa was irreconcilable with the division of Germany. However, he also acknowledged that Germany had to prove to the world that it could help new states before it could expect the world to help and support Germany. In many ways, this can be seen as a foreshadowing of “the moral nation,” the sense of positive benefits from Germany’s now overcome pariah status. On the one hand, this association of concern for the Third World anticipated the general message of world peace and decolonization that was so important in the social-­liberal Sixties and Seventies. On the other hand, here and elsewhere Lübke’s impulse seemed to be more to establish the logical contradictions in global politics in favor of Germany than to pursue some general principle of universal peace for its own sake.

L ü b k e ’ s R e s p o n s e t o A n t i - ­S e m i t i s m At the opening of the Week of Brotherhood in 1960, the newly sworn-­in federal president also gave an interesting address in Cologne in the context of the anti-­Semitism crisis. Though Lübke is often characterized as having been an awkward speaker, and never gained his predecessor Heuss’s reputation for probity or eloquence in regard to the past, what he lacked in terms of Heuss’s poetic (though often obscure) language and evocative tones, he sometimes gained in clarity and straightforwardness. At the same time, Lübke’s speech in Cologne also began to show signs of change in the discourse—­in particular, the growing acknowledgment of the specificity of the Jews as victims of National Socialism—­while nonetheless also employing familiar tropes and grammar. Lübke began by making a point of having come particularly to Cologne to give his speech, above all other places where such Week of Brotherhood celebrations were also taking place, though the reference to the vandalism in

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Cologne was implicit: “I came to Cologne, where the oldest  Jewish synagogue community in Germany exists, in order to acknowledge through my participation in this event that our entire people stands for brotherhood and reconciliation, after all the heavy suffering of the past.” However, there were, he recognized, difficult barriers to that brotherhood and reconciliation: What stands in the way of this coming together, to which we are all committed and for which we seriously endeavor? There is in the first place the immense measure of guilt and crime that the rulers of the National Socialist regime brought upon themselves in regard to the Jewish people. That they did it under the misuse of the German name burdens us all, although we were not in the position to hinder these crimes because at that time we ourselves did not have the necessary possibilities at our disposal. But many of us—­I passed that period for the most part in Berlin—­will remember all the many attempts to help, all the many actions that were successful but which nevertheless represent much too little in light of the catastrophe as a whole.

While Lübke thus reproduced many of the standard defense mechanisms—­ portrayal of the rulers as the only ones guilty, of the misuse of the German name, of well-­meaning civilians who did all they could, and so on—­he did not use these arguments to limit responsibility. Instead, he argued for continued attention to the issue. And while Lübke used the Reparations Treaty as evidence of Germany’s new attitude, he did not present it as sufficient: “We then tried, as we won back our ability to act, to show at least through our acts of reparation how much we feel this burden, and that we are endeavoring to soothe the wounds that were received. But with these material reparations alone we most certainly do not solve the problem. We must do more.” According to Lübke, a deeper introspection, embodied in the efforts of the Societies for Christian-­Jewish Cooperation, was necessary: “We must, as a precondition for our collective life as human beings who are equal before God and the law, go back into the past in order to explain where the bases lie for the unnatural development of our human relations.” Lübke provided a version of that introspection in this speech by investigating the history of the Jews in Cologne. He went all the way back to the year 321 and traced the development of anti-­Semitic beliefs through the Middle Ages to the present. From this history he drew lessons for both Christians and Germans in regard to Jews: “We Christians initially have the greater and more difficult task to master, because we always have to newly place under examination our righteous preparedness to respect and to express brotherly

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love after all the suffering that was inflicted on the Jewish people in the past.” The unintended consequence of this formulation—­one for which Philipp Jenninger would be rebuked thirty years later—­was the use of the “we,” which, even when calling for acknowledgment of the Jews, excludes them. As for the Germans, Lübke said, “There should, however, be neither discrimination nor privileges, but rather respect for the constitution and brotherhood towards all people. In that regard, we Germans must place a duty in the foreground, namely, gradually to make the misfortune of the ‘Thousand Year Reich,’ which came over the world under the misuse of the German name, fade away through our behavior.” While denying that the churches had anything but an oppositional role in the Third Reich, Lübke nonetheless called upon them and on other educational institutions to contribute to the dismantling of prejudice among the younger generations: Young people are the least burdened by the heavy past. To them, the prejudices that have always stood in the way of a lasting rapproachment are foreign. But I believe it is here, as already mentioned, the task of the parental home and school—­and certainly in more serious form than has taken place up until now—­to work for the children learning Jewish history, and also that they get contemporary history correctly taught on this point.

While in the earlier-­cited passages Lübke certainly included standard defense mechanisms, these latter points provided a fairly clear critique of the educational habits of the time, and of the unwillingness to present the past to the younger generation in accurate detail. Most school curricula were brave if in their presentations of history they went so far as to discuss Bismarck (on the history of memory in postwar pedagogy, see Dudek 1995). In hindsight, this was perhaps an indication of trends to come in the 1960s, when there would be a much more radical questioning of the events of contemporary history and of the older generation’s general unwillingness to delve too deeply into such matters.4 By the same token, making an issue of  history in education was a way of marking its distance from the present. This speech, as well as the one Lübke made during the following year’s Week of Brotherhood, was a good example of what has been called an official philo-­Semitism in the first decades of the Federal Republic ( Jesse 1990). Though Lübke said that  Jews should be neither privileged nor disadvantaged, 4. A fairly vigorous debate on the role of education in democracy was underway in public discourse more generally. For documents of this debate, see Stahl (1961).

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it is also clear that he was officially promoting an interest in and support for Jewish culture in addition to the human rights of  Jews as individuals. Again, this is a marked change in the discourse. In his 1961 speech, Lübke argued that  Jews and Christians were naturally bound together, in their histories and common values as well as in their basic opposition to the godlessness of totalitarianism in general. He drew examples from ancient history to argue that early anti-­Semitism, coming from the Romans, was built on the same foundation as the oppression of Christians had been. With regard to contemporary totalitarianism, he hypothesized a value community between Christians and Jews: “It is one of the specific characteristics of the twentieth century that totalitarian domination, which found its expression in the Third Reich as much as in Bolshevism, places in question exactly what unites Jews and Christians with each other. Namely, it denies the existence of God and with it everything that follows from this for the existence of  human beings.” In this, Lübke repudiated the common prejudice that Bolshevism and Judaism were one and the same. Of course, to pull off this rhetorical unification of Christians and Jews, Lübke had to describe Christianity as an institution that had always opposed National Socialism: “A friendly collaboration between Christians and Jews does not have to be grounded fully anew after the horrors of the National Socialist domination. One can connect much more to friendships that proved themselves in the most difficult time.” He then gave examples of  Christian mar­ tyrs in the Third Reich. The record of the churches during the Third Reich, of course, was substantially more mixed than this implied. In both speeches, Lübke combined these characterizations of German innocence with his nonetheless clear call for real reconciliation. For instance, he typically described the events as having been caused by an evil few: “Hitler and his henchmen under the misuse of the name of the German people violated the Jews of Europe and brought them to the verge of destruction.” But he portrayed the situation of the German people as one of subjugation as well: “The German people was assigned a double role in the National Socialist time: on the one hand it took part in the dictatorship and on the other hand was subjected to it. Germans were among the persecutors, but also among the persecuted; among the murderers, but also among the murdered; among the defilers, but also among the defiled.” This is among the clearer statements from this period that focused at all on some Germans being murderers and guilty of crimes. As we have seen, even such a fifty-­fifty balance was usually passed over in favor of emphasis that vast majorities had not been involved, or that it had been only a small clique. Nevertheless, this unusual statement was followed by a classic qualification: “As right and necessary as it is to acknowledge

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the co-­responsibility of our people and to draw the consequences from it, we achieve the full picture of historical reality only when we make clear to ourselves that the crimes were actually committed by a small minority and how much our people too was itself drawn into the suffering.” Finally, Lübke explained the participation of the German people as ultimately the result of an impossible social and economic situation: “It was through the outer and inner misery that was, as a consequence of the First World War and the world economic crisis, so weakened and helpless that it so easily submitted to Hitler’s deception maneuvers and arts of seduction.” He demonstrated his philo-­Semitism in calling for more than simple tolerance, and by acknowledging the centrality of the Holocaust as an experience for both Jews and Germans: “The meaning of this week applies to one of the most significant occurrences of recent German history, and with that to one of the most serious questions of the contemporary political life of our people.” As we will see later, this characterization differed markedly from formulations offered in the 1980s, when it was argued that the Holocaust was by no means the central or most important moment of German history. Lübke continued, But we must today, after all that happened, again find a common ground on which Jews and Germans can live not just next to each other but with each other. Such a common existence, for which we are striving, will only be possible if we accept responsibility without sparing ourselves for what happened, and in the full oppressive measure of the catastrophe; and if we otherwise do everything humanly possible to make good what happened materially, morally, and humanly.

The Costs of Reliability Despite the significance of the anti-­Semitic vandalism of 1959–­60, the most important event between the elections of 1957 and those of 1961 was clearly the erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961. For the previous several years, the East German government had been faced with an increasing tide of  people escaping to the West through Berlin; the problem was exacerbated by extensive collectivization programs (which had entered a new stage in 1959), by a food shortage in 1960, and by the generally belligerent posture of the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev. In contrast to the Berlin blockade of 1948–­ 49, however, the East German government took care not to block any of the transit routes from West Germany into West Berlin, and thus made it clear that this was not a grab for control of Berlin as a whole. As a result, as well as due

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to the desire for détente on the part of the new American President John Kennedy, the erection of the Wall caused the Western powers to make many heated rhetorical objections; but they went no further. In retrospect, then, it is easy to see how this moment—­and the Wall’s enduring concrete presence—­became associated with a general and growing dissatisfaction in West Germany with the Adenauer government’s policy of Western integration and a Cold War hard line. Though the erection of the Wall revealed the insidiousness of Eastern Bloc outlooks, for many it was also sufficient evidence that the West German and other Western governments had not dealt adequately with the postwar situation, and that perhaps it was time for some new ideas. Indeed, the 1960s were years of radical change all over the West, and more extremely so in West Germany for many reasons. But the Wall was an excoriating impulse for many, even for those at the center of  West German politics. In the 1961 federal elections, the CDU/CSU lost its absolute majority from 1957, though it continued to govern in coalition with the FDP—­albeit weakened by the rise of dissenting voices within the FDP. The Regierungserklärung of 1961—­delivered by Vice-­Chancellor and Economics Minister Erhard, because Adenauer was indisposed (though it was prepared under Adenauer’s normal control, and simply read by Erhard)—­was dominated by more Cold War rhetoric, understandably even more vituperative than normal, in light of the Wall. Nonetheless, the speech reads as rather hackneyed, with ritualistic-­ appearing condemnations and lamentations. With regard to residues of the past, the 1961 address referred to a number of administrative matters that had just about been taken care of. Adenauer (through Erhard) thus brought up, for instance, residual legal reforms: “With respect to legal matters [Rechtspolitik], a certain stage has been achieved in the last legislative period: it was possible essentially to complete the resolution of German law in relation to the time from 1933 to 1945, and the restoration of a German legal entity [Rechtseinheit] as much as the dissolution of the occupation law.” He noted that it was time to finish up other war-­related legislative matters: “It will also be attempted in the fourth legislative period of the German Bundestag to come to a final legislation of all legal matters of war consequences.” West Germany, it seems, had pretty much dealt with the mess left behind, even in the most delicate matter of reparations payments to Israel that had been agreed upon in 1952 and 1953: “The reparations [Wiedergutmachung] that are so important to all of us will, as far as can be predicted, essentially be brought to an end in this legislative period.” In matters of the past, imminent final legislation would about wrap things up.

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A bit later, the statement again came to the reparations issue. In the context of listing the efforts and progress West Germany had made establishing and maintaining friendly relations with other states, as well as the continuing Berlin problem, the speech brought up what West Germany had already done as restitution: In its efforts concerning friendly relations, the federal government views it, now as before, as one of its principal tasks to make amends for the National Socialist injustice. In addition to the legal provisions that I have already mentioned, treaties in the area of reparations have been entered into in the last years, and obligations of around one billion marks have been assumed to the benefit of injured citizens of a list of countries.

The speech followed this reference with a statement of past and continued support for the Founding Charter of the United Nations, and for all the principles implied in it. At the end of this solid record of German humanism, it mentioned once again the “right of self-­determination of the entire German people,” which would only make perfect sense in this context. Adenauer/Erhard also emphasized West Germany’s acceptance and immutable membership in the “community of free peoples,” thus establishing a direct connection between what Germany had done to make up for the past, and what attitude the world should take towards Germany’s problems. Proper memory perfor­ m­ance was the basis on which future claims would rest.

P e r p e t r ato r s a n d V i c t i m s i n t h e 196 0 s During the 1960s, the past was again and again brought before the German public, and perhaps in greater horrific detail than before—­at least for the new generation, who had been too young to understand the efforts of the occupation authorities to disseminate images of the concentration camps in the late 1940s. Four major events spurred special, even overwhelming attention to the Nazi past in German public discourse during these years, and posed the question of guilt anew. These were the Eichmann trial of 1961, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–­65, the parliamentary debate over the statute of limitations (set to come into effect in 1965), and the diplomatic crisis that led to official relations between West Germany and the State of Israel (also in 1965).5 5. In the realm of culture, the stage and film adaptations of The Diary of Anne Frank were also significant.

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It is ultimately not possible—­or even particularly important—­to say definitively whether these events were spurs to or products of world events, or whether they were the results of the dissemination of a new attitude towards and interest in the past in West Germany, of  broader social-­structural changes associated with a change of generations, or of legislative or simply chronological patterns. In reality, events are rarely solely the products or the causes of other patterns; they are mutually implicated in, constitutive of, and constituted by heterogeneous processes. Individual events form the parts of an age that both shapes and is shaped by them, and in which they are both indepen­ dent and essential. The point is that while each of these events, as well as the above-­mentioned trends, had its own history—­including the confluence of accident, external cause, and independent trajectory—­together they formed something of a frisson for West German society in the first half of the 1960s. Again, while it is impossible to say finally whether past-­oriented events were cause or effect—­the defining character of attitudes to the past in these years in Germany would have been different either in a different total context or without these particular events—­it is clear that they were important foci of attention in a period of important changes in West German society. The Eichmann Trial In May 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-­Gurion announced to the world that Israeli agents had located in Argentina and transported to Israel a little-­known individual who had been a central figure in executing the “Final Solution.”6 Adolf Eichmann, they announced, was to stand trial before an Israeli court for mass murder, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Though not one of the more widely known names in the Third Reich—­and this anonymity was essential to his role—­Eichmann had been the principal administrator of the transport and murder of Europe’s Jewish population. His cap­ ture and trial in 1960 and 1961 was a major point of  world attention. Though no one disputed who Eichmann was or what he had done, there were a number of points of contention surrounding his arrest and trial. First, there were those who referred to his arrest as a kidnapping, and who opposed 6. The scholarly literature on the Eichmann trial and the controversies it awoke is by now extensive. For reportage of the events, I have found Deutschkron (1991) particularly useful. The most famous (or infamous) account is, of course, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which began as a series of articles for The New Yorker. A more recent analysis is Lipstadt (2011). Statements analyzed in this section are documented in Vogel (1969b).

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it on those grounds. Public opinion polls indicated that a majority of Germans did not approve of this method of capture. On this matter, the government pointedly issued no official statement, though Bundestag President Gerstenmeier stated, in an interview with the American television network ABC, “Nobody can expect from me that I would praise the way that Eichmann was captured.” He added, however, “On the other side, I cannot regret that Eichmann was captured and that he will be subjected to a proper trial.” The second objection concerned whether Eichmann should have been tried in Israel or in Germany. Feelings were apparently mixed on this matter, though clearly the German government was rather relieved not to be faced with this prospect. There were those (mainly Eichmann’s lawyer Robert Servatius) who argued that as a German citizen, Eichmann had a right to the protection of the German state. One also recalls in this context the objections to the Nuremberg Tribunal that the Germans should have been allowed to confront their own past. Eichmann’s claim for extradition, however, was rejected by the Israeli court. Additionally, Adenauer, in an interview with the American television network NBC, argued, “Eichmann is not a German citizen, and we have no obligations towards Eichmann.” Adenauer was referring to the possibility that Eichmann’s legal citizenship was really Austrian (these were complicated issues). Furthermore, it was argued, West Germany had no extradition treaty with Israel, and any transfer of the prisoner would thus have been just as much outside the law as his original abduction had been. The German government, we can assume, could not have been truly unhappy with this outcome. An additional question was that of why the Germans themselves had not captured him in the first place. Was West Germany making an adequate effort to capture and prosecute war criminals? When this question was posed by the Social Democrat Karl Mommer in a session of the Bundestag, Minister of Justice Fritz Schäffer (CSU) replied that the West German government had not known Eichmann’s whereabouts (Deutschkron 1970, 134). When asked by ABC whether he thought West German authorities were doing enough to prosecute Nazi war criminals, Bundestag President Gerstenmeier responded: “I do not see what more the federal government could have done. The German public has over a long number of years become used to the undiminishing occurrence of trials against Nazi war and violent criminals. There passes hardly a week or even a day when the German press does not report on that sort of trial.” In the same interview, Gerstenmeier also remarked that West Germany had no death penalty, and that extraditing Eichmann would in this way have been the same as saving his life: “I do not believe we have the wish to save a notorious mass murderer like Eichmann from the gallows.” But he

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added, “Had Eichmann been apprehended in Germany, he would be faced with the maximum penalty just as in Israel.” Adenauer responded to questions about West Germany’s commitment to prosecuting Nazi criminals during an interview on NBC’s program Meet the Press on April 17, 1961—­also broadcast on German television. When asked about criticisms that West German youth were not learning enough about the recent past, Adenauer responded, “That was certainly true for a while, but I believe, however, that it is different now. Nevertheless, you must, may not forget that children who are now in school were first born after the Hitler-­history had already passed, after the war was over.” When asked whether he thought it important that the younger generation learn about the Nazi past, Adenauer replied, “I am of the opinion that one should not conceal anything and not put a good face on anything, but rather that one should make even these very ugly and frightful things clear as an historical incident, also in the schools, like other historical events, and that one should not in the process conceal the guilt.” In this last quote Adenauer seemed to be framing the Nazi period as being somehow like other parts of German history, deserving of equal but not special treatment, though the other events were historical rather than contemporary matters. At the same time, he also talked about not concealing the guilt, saying that it should be on the agenda, though it was not clear whose guilt he meant. Given the international audience, he could not have said much else. The major concern facing West German leaders was the possible damage the trial would do to West Germany’s international reputation. As Gerstenmeier put it in his ABC interview, I am prepared that the Eichmann trial will be a heavy burdening for the repu­ tation of Germany abroad, and that it will also in Germany bring the old question burning into the consciousness of everyone: How could it happen? I believe that whoever has not himself experienced that terrible violence and seduction of a totalitarian police state cannot give an answer. But for us too, the crimes that are bound up with the name Eichmann remain a terrible torment and burden until the end of our lives.

In a statement before the press on March 10, 1961, Adenauer also expressed his concern for Germany’s reputation: “The Eichmann trial worries me—­not the trial as such . . . I have complete faith in Israel’s administration of  justice. But I am worried because of the repercussions it will have and the judgment of Germans generally” (cited and translated in Deutschkron 1970, 136). As always, the possibility of yet another victimization of Germans by this Nazi past had to

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be be endured. With a tone of resignation, Adenauer responded to a question about the inopportunity of the trial in his Meet the Press interview, as follows: “It is not nice [schön], but it must sometimes be so. And therefore I am of the opinion that one should calmly and openly lay out these entire atrocities before the world public, and especially before the German people.” Yet Adenauer also brought up Israel’s dependence on West Germany for financial—­and, as would be revealed later, military—­aid. On April 11, Adenauer addressed the public (German and otherwise) in a brief televised statement before the beginning of the trial (Vogel 1969b). The statement included many of Adenauer’s standard tropes, while stating that he wanted the truth to come to light: “It is our wish that in this trial the whole truth should be brought to light and that justice should be done.” Nonetheless, Adenauer insisted again that most Germans were not implicated: After Germany’s collapse, all those who undertook the task of rebuilding were filled with shame and concern. We were filled with shame because we then became clearly aware, for the first time, of the terrifying abyss of National Socialism. We were concerned—­for how, we asked ourselves, would it be possible to remove this poison from the memories and the thinking of large sections of our community?

It is certainly true that most Germans did not recognize the totality of what had happened until afterwards, but what this meant is not clear. Of what were they not aware? That the Nazi regime was immoral and destructive? What the Nazis did at Auschwitz? Or what these things ultimately meant for them, namely destruction and defeat? This formulation thus conflated important distinc­tions. But it was—­and for many years continued to be—­the standard defense. Indeed, as usual, Adenauer denied—­even after the events of 1959—­that there was anything serious to worry about here: “Our anxiety proved to be not so justified as we had feared. In the German people, in their ethics, there is no longer any trace of  National Socialism; we are no longer sensitive to nationalist ideas. We have a constitutional government.” Adenauer went on to cite a vindicating remark made by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-­Gurion (the leading Israeli advocate of improved relations between Israel and Germany): President Ben-­Gurion said a few days ago that today’s young Germans cannot be made to bear the responsibility for the crimes committed by some members of a previous generation. He stressed his country’s concern that its relationship with the new Germany should be a friendly one. We are sincerely grateful

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to him for these words, spoken before the institution of proceedings against Eichmann.

In a statement before the press on that same day (Deutschkron 1970, 138), March 10, Adenauer added the following defensive remarks as well: “One should not forget that here, in Germany, National Socialist Germans committed the same crimes against the Germans as Eichmann had against the Jews. . . . Most of the Germans readily helped Jewish citizens wherever this was possible, and it would be unjust to condemn all Germans.” Inge Deutschkron (1952, 138–­39), the sometime German, sometime Israeli journalist, offered the following commentary in her presentation of these remarks by Adenauer: It is futile to discuss whether or not Dr. Adenauer truly believed what he said. For although Germans . . . had suffered in concentration camps, there is certainly no analogy between their plight and the Eichmann crimes, with the institution of the superbly organized machine of murder for the Jews built up in Auschwitz. Nor could anyone hold that “most of the Germans” had gladly been ready to help Jewish citizens, though it would have been right to say that there had been some ready to do so, and to do so at the risk of their lives. But Dr. Adenauer never forgot his role and his political purpose, which was to remain in power and to do anything to do this by pleasing the people. And what could be more pleasing to the Germans than to hear that they were not as bad as the world made them appear to be?

Whether it was, as Deutschkron argues, pure cynicism on Adenauer’s part—­or what proportion his instrumentalism comprised—­is impossible to say, probably even for Adenauer. We have seen enough evidence, however, of the deeply embedded cultural reflex to allow us to discount the cynicism charge at least somewhat. The question, of course, is: Which is more disturbing—­cynical manipulation or the controlling power of the trope? Moreover, the cultural frame is operative even if its deployment was a conscious choice. It was available, and seemingly necessary. Many other West German leaders also delivered important statements in the Eichmann matter. Federal President Lübke, for instance, offered a clear denial of any generalizations about Germany that might come from it (Vogel 1969, 129): A few days ago in Jerusalem there began a trial the name of which has become at once a symbol and stigma of the terrible crimes committed by Hitler and his

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supporters in the name of Germany. Even today we Germans, including former resistance workers and those who opposed Hitler, are still filled with deep shame that some of our fellow countrymen were accessories to such crimes. In spite of this we must establish, for the sake of that same justice that has brought Eichmann to trial today, that it is fundamentally incorrect to equate the term “National Socialist” with “German.”

This last sentence was the clearest indicator of Germany’s reputational damage-­control posture. In contrast to some other speakers, Carlo Schmid (SPD) accepted what the philosopher Karl  Jaspers (1946)—­who distinguished among criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical guilt—­might have called a collective political guilt, a guilt born of supporting or even not opposing a criminal regime (Vogel 1970, 130): There is little we can do, because we cannot bring back to life the people murdered in the gas chambers; the exiles will never return—­or at least only very few of them. And who can blame them? However, there is something we can and must do: whatever can be made good, we must make good. Whatever we do, it cannot buy our innocence, and we are all guilty, all of us who called ourselves Germans at the time without averting the evil—­or perhaps without being able to do so. Even those who are innocent in law must share the blame for everything that was done in their name. . . .

This was not, however, a widely held evaluation. All in all, though, the Eichmann trial turned out to have something of an ironic effect on West German–­Israeli relations; it may have actually brought the states and peoples closer together (Deutschkron 1970, 162–­63).7 In the first place, it was the first time that there was an official West German press delegation in Israel, and their presence there forced many Israelis to come to terms with West Germans as people. In the second place, West Germans gained new insights into Israel as a real, operating state. And, despite the above cited defensive reactions and concerns for Germany’s reputation, the trial brought before the West German public—­which now included a younger generation, grown up after the war—­a vivid and detailed picture of the Nazi crimes, and may in this way have encouraged a new introspection and awareness on the 7. The trial was also quite important for the development of Israeli identity and collective attitudes towards the past. See Segev (1993).

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part of the West German population, despite the fact that most Germans (58 percent) still said they felt no guilt for the annihilation of the Jews (Deutschkron 1970, 152). The detailed public presentation of and attention to the trial no doubt had some impact on broader public attitudes towards the past in West German society at large. This impact was rather different from that of the Interna­tional War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945–­46. At the time of that proceeding, right in the middle of the worst postwar devastation, the German public was more interested in the exigencies of day-­to-­day survival. The so-­called victor’s justice of the Nuremberg trials, while important, therefore did not approach the impact of the Eichmann trial, which took place when the German public was able to focus more directly on the horrors of the system. The testimony in the Eichmann trial, was also more extensive—­or at least more condensed and vivid—­in its gruesome details. The last act of this morality play, by the way, ended on June 1, 1962, when Adolf Eichmann was hanged. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials and the Statute of Limitations One way in which this impact of the Eichmann trial was achieved was through detailed presentations of the horrors and scale of the Nazi genocide. But the German public got an even closer look at life—­or death—­in the concentration camps in a series of trials that began in Frankfurt in 1963 and continued for two years. Known as the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, these prosecutions brought notoriously brutal concentration camp officials, including perpetrators of unspeakable medical experimentation, face-­to-­face with their surviving victims, and brought the utter gruesomeness of Auschwitz before the German public (Wittmann 2005; Pendas 2010). These trials, however, did not occasion especially noteworthy public commentary by West Germany’s leaders, most likely because they played out in a largely domestic context. Then again, what could one possibly say to such things?8 This question, of course, could be generalized to the entire subject matter of National Socialism. An additional significant moment of official confrontation with the horrors of Nazi crimes presented itself in a major legal and symbolic matter in 1965. According to the West German Basic Law, the statute of  limitations on capital 8. These trials inspired the noted play The Investigation by Peter Weiss (1965). The play was composed of direct excerpts from the trial transcripts, and can be read as a catalogue of defense mechanisms, repressions, and excuses by perpetrators of some of history’s most heinous acts of human cruelty.

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crimes came into effect after twenty years. By standard calculations, that meant that after May 8, 1965, it would no longer be possible to prosecute anyone for crimes committed under the Nazi dictatorship. This clearly posed problems. The issue was obviously quite complex, though not entirely new in 1965.9 Throughout the 1950s, the record of the federal government in pursuing and prosecuting Nazi war criminals was not, it is generally held, at all good. The government appeared more interested in convincing the world of West Germany’s solidity and democratic reliability; dredging up the darker aspects of its history did not seem especially well suited to those aims. As we have also seen, Adenauer was more interested in reintegrating disaffected factions into a new democratic consensus; this included the reappointment of civil servants who had served the Nazi regime, and indeed the government of the Federal Republic was filled, right up to the highest levels, with former Nazis. Aggressive prosecution of war criminals was considered antithetical to the reintegration of groups that saw themselves as persecuted by such inquiries (Diehl 1985). A significant institutional change occurred, however, in 1958, when justice ministers of the Länder (states) came together to establish the Ludwigsberg Central Office of the State Judicial Authorities for the Investigation of  National Socialist Crimes (Ludwigsberger Zentralstelle). The motivation for this innovation was more practical than ideological or explicitly political (Wittmann 2005). In 1956, a trial had begun in the city of Ulm against a Gestapo officer who had led a “special task force” or Einsatzgruppe in Lithuania. Such groups were the less sophisticated predecessors of the gas chamber; their task was to round up Jews and partisans and execute them in crude mass style by having them dig their own graves and then machine-­gunning them (Goldhagen 1997). During the Ulm trial, a witness came forward with vast amounts of evidence on the operations of the Einsatzgruppen in German-­occupied territories. Subsequent investigation of these materials made it patently clear that there were many crimes that had been insufficiently investigated and which had gone unpunished. One major problem was the collection and analysis of vast amounts of material, scattered throughout the world in many different hands 9. Indeed, the matter of these debates alone would make an appropriate subject for a monograph in its own right. Vogel (1969) provides a compilation of the relevant texts in the debate. See also the lengthy polemical treatment in Jaspers (1966). Additionally, this particular debate is just one small part of the total complex of  West Germany’s criminal prosecution of Nazi perpetrators. See Friedrich (1987), Steinbach (1981), Weber and Steinbach (1984), and Rückerl (1980). For debates over this issue in the Bundestag, see Dubiel (1999).

The Return of the Repressed  201

and from many different sources. It was largely in response to these and other administrative problems, as well as to the awareness of the insufficient record of prosecution, that the Land  justice ministers set up the Zentralstelle, though not without significant opposition and bureaucratic stonewalling (Wittmann 2005). Despite this rather mundane origin, as well as its apparent lack of harmony with other government strategies and attitudes with regard to the past, the Zentralstelle was to have a significant impact on the prosecution of war criminals, in bringing such issues before the public, and ultimately in framing the legal background to the Verjährungsdebatten (debates over the statute of limitations). The question of limitations on Nazi crimes first came up in 1960, when the fifteen-­year limit on all crimes except murder was set to run out. The Social Democrats proposed a temporary solution: to postpone the limit for four years, because, it was argued, the Federal Republic, having been founded in 1949 and not in 1945, had not yet had those fifteen years. The CDU/CSU, however, rejected these arguments; Minister of  Justice Schäffer (Vogel 1967) argued that “the German legal system has already done everything possible to prosecute the crimes of the Nazi period.” The limit therefore came into effect on manslaughter, though murder had another five years to go. During the years between the 1960 debate and its return in 1965, members of the federal government as well as administrators of the Ludwigsberger Zentralstelle realized that a lot still needed to be done—­especially including the gathering of additional materials—­before the limits were to come into effect and preclude any further prosecutions. The problem was that in the early 1960s, at the height of East-­West tensions, the West German government—­ operating under the principle, known as the Hallstein Doctrine, that it would not have relations with states that had relations with East Germany—­refused to have any dealings with Eastern European governments that might possess such documents. It even ignored overtures from the Polish government in this regard. In addition, offers or leaks of incriminating materials from the East were viewed as—­and indeed often were—­attempts to discredit the West German government. So when the complete issue was scheduled to come before the Bundestag in 1965, there was significant criticism: the likelihood of some of the most heinous Nazi criminals going unpunished was extraordinarily high. In a rather frantic attempt to counter these criticisms, the federal government changed its pol­ icy and issued a plea to the world at large to supply all relevant documents as soon as possible. Indeed, it implied that the East bloc was standing in the way of an eager West German justice system, a claim that was only limitedly true.

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As a result, representatives of the Ludwigsberger Zentralstelle met with Polish authorities. The result of this meeting was the realization that there was no way authorities in the Federal Republic could possibly examine the vast materials now available before the deadline was to run out. At the same time, public questioning of the Federal Republic’s record of prosecutions (includ­ ing questioning of the often startlingly low sentences handed out) had become an important part of public discourse in the first half of the 1960s. As a result, the 1965 debate was set to be a more evenly balanced one than in 1960. One problem with analyzing this 1965 debate is that party lines had become almost irrelevant as predictors of opinion (see especially Dubiel 1999). Thus it was a group of CDU/CSU deputies that first suggested extending the limitation from twenty years to thirty. And something not so different from this is what resulted. In a highly morally charged atmosphere filled with much personal testimony, confession, and acrimony, it was argued that the twenty-­year limit should not be considered to have begun until the Federal Republic was created in 1949. This went against SPD proposals for a constitutional amendment either eliminating the statute or, only as a second choice, for adding ten years to the limit. But the CDU delaying maneuver won out; in this way the entire issue was put off for four more years, after which it was extended for another ten. Not until 1979 was the statute of  limitations finally eliminated altogether. The issue of the statute of  limitations is thus a microcosm of the entire problem of the memory in the Federal Republic. They wanted desperately to be done with it, but it resisted being rushed. The government itself pretty much kept out of the debate and its preparation; this was to be a real discussion in the parliament. Perhaps this was because the leadership desired a genuine moral discussion, or perhaps because it viewed the entire issue as a dangerous minefield. Perhaps it was for both of these reasons. In any case, the result is that, with the exception of some pre­ sentations by the minister of justice, Ewald Bucher (FDP), there are no official government statements on the issue.10

10. Obviously much more could be said about the debate. But both out of concern for space and due to my primary interest in official government statements, I leave the issue at that. For transcripts of the debates, and important documents relating to them, see Vogel (1969b). For an analysis of the parliamentary debates, see Dubiel (1999).

Chapter 8

The Reliable Nation

To summarize: In the years between the end of the war in 1945 and the found­ ing of the Federal Republic in 1949, most ordinary Germans were concerned with the immediate exigencies of overcoming hunger, homelessness, and gen­ eral devastation—­personal, moral, and material. In such a situation, not sur­ prisingly, inquiries and arguments that blamed Germans for their own situa­ tion and worse did not fall on fertile ground with most people. Nonetheless, in these years there was significant debate in what remained of, or what was reborn as, German civil society about the causes of the war and about respon­ sibility. Whatever public or intellectual discourse there was to be—­and from some perspectives, there was a surprising amount—­it could not help but be preoccupied with explaining and confronting the Nazi period. In those years, as we saw in the prologues, many individuals from a diverse array of fields joined in discussing and working out positions on collective guilt and the course of German history. Most leading commentators at the time sought to revive earlier, pre–­National Socialist images of the German nation, its history, and its people. Despite this turn toward the past, there was a broad spirit of renewal; many people and positions emerged once again from hiding, exile, or silence, and there was a resurgence of public discourse and artistic production across many fields during those years. A general spirit of renewal also pervaded many of the new or revived political organizations, and charged emerging leaders with hope and a vision for the future. No matter how much currency such expressions as “zero hour” (Nullstunde) or “caesura” seemed to enjoy, however, most prominent views—­while breaking decisively with the National Socialist period—­did not sever all ties to

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the longer German national history. Among postwar intellectuals there was a deep interest in German history, both for where it had gone wrong and for what it uniquely could provide. In this context, the Nazi period was constructed as a discontinuity, an aberrant departure from the course of German history. The point was to get the nation back on track. As part of the return to purportedly German historical roots, the new state thus emphasized human rights as part of the Enlightenment tradition so pro­ foundly shaped by Germany. The Federal Republic was “finally” to accept integration with the West, its participation in a community of values as well as a military alliance with that world. It joined the Western democracies in fight­ ing totalitarianism of all kinds, be it of the Nazi or Soviet variety. At the same time, the Third Reich was portrayed as having been a variant of more general European epochal problems. All the nations of Europe had engaged in bellig­ erent and chauvinistic national power politics throughout the nineteenth cen­ tury. These battles constituted a so-­called “European civil war” in which all the major combatants were implicated. Germany’s participation was thus merely an example of a general trend associated with a period of European and world history, rather than a uniquely German national trait. This was a problem of a scale that precluded blaming general populations, who were all equally victims of the high-­level hubris of their leaders. Through­ out public occasions in the early years of the Federal Republic, speakers thus worked hard to separate the criminal leadership from the general population. The responsibility for war, genocide, and devastation lay with Hitler and his small group of criminal henchmen. Reversing the earlier veneration of Hitler, the Federal Republic had its own sort of Hitler myth: the all-­knowing evil se­ ducer, perhaps the devil himself.1 This evil had been visited upon Germany as much as on anyone else, and it had usurped the German name. This image, of course, did not come of a piece; it unfolded and filled in over the course of many public occasions and with many different facets. There were, for instance, varieties of moments for arguing against collective guilt. This started with the negative valuation of Allied policies of reeducation and denazification. A next step concerned the reintegration of Nazi civil servants into the new polity. At the same time—­for instance in special comments about the military—­the common soldiers were absolved of any responsibility or even association with their Nazi masters. They had simply been defending their

1. Not by accident was Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus an extremely important work for German self-­understandings in these years.

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nation; they were no different than other soldiers in the fulfillment of their pa­ triotic duty. This process of rescuing Germany’s reputation, as well as the reputations of various implicated groups in German society, might not have happened— ­at least not so quickly—­without the indulgence of the Western occupation au­ thorities, which began as early as 1950 or 1951. As a result of increased tensions between East and West—­especially after the beginning of the Korean conflict—­ many came to believe that an East-­West military confrontation was practically inevitable. And since the front of the potential military conflict would obvi­ ously be the tectonic edge that ran through the center of Germany, the new Federal Republic would be the West’s first line of defense. The West’s desire to secure the cooperation not only of the West German government but also the population at large for their security alliance led it to accelerate West Ger­ many’s rehabilitation greatly. The new Federal Republic was to become an es­ sential piece in the Western defense strategy, and all of its citizens—­especially those who might make up the ranks of a new military—­were needed for the effort. The challenges of the present and future seemed now to outweigh the burdens of the past. Indeed, the strategy worked well. The West’s apparent turn away from Ger­ many’s past helped to solidify support in the population not only for the new government, but for its Western integration preference as well. There were, of course, powerful interests in West Germany that were opposed to alliance with the West because they feared, among other things, that it would further en­ trench Germany’s division. These included former soldiers, who bore a large share of blame and disrepute; more nationalistically inclined factions (includ­ ing elements of the Social Democrats, extreme right-­wing groups, and some more “Prussian” elements within the CDU, led by Jakob Kaiser), who sought a so-­called “Third Way” for Germany between East and West; and expellee groups, who saw Western integration as a threat to their land claims. Enough members of these groups, however, were successfully wooed by the new atti­ tude and their own government’s olive branches, which included a declaration by General Eisenhower about the valor of the German soldier, the promise of a quick end to the official occupation and return of sovereignty, hard-­line anti-­totalitarianism (which blamed the East for the division and seizure of ter­ ritories), and the granting of significant power to expellee groups. The general image in this first period was thus one of Germany as the vic­ tim of power politics, both before and during the war at Hitler’s hands, and after the war at the hands of the vindictive and hypocritical occupation. The major term applied, as we saw, was “catastrophe”—­something that, as an act

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of nature, is beyond the control of the individual. Resistance had not been a real option, but a sacrifice for the noble countenance of the “other,” more real Germany. By the same token, certain aspects of German guilt were unavoidable, namely those concerning the Jewish genocide. Everything else, though, was part of nineteenth-­century Europe’s destructive chauvinism. The warring of nations had—­through increased technological capabilities—­become too hor­ rible, and had now to be eliminated; it had brought suffering so boundless and hitherto unimagined that it could no longer be abided. In its path, all the world had suffered. Within this context, however, another more specific ca­ tastrophe had occurred (always expressed in passive terms), one which was especially unspeakable; though part of the pathologies of the European order (anti-­Semitism being quite common all over nineteenth-­century Europe), the Holocaust had taken place “in the name of Germany,” and thus left an espe­ cially shameful debt for Germany to the Jews, though the specificity of that debt was not immediately acknowledged. In the view of Adenauer and like-­minded leaders, this debt had to be ab­ solved both financially and morally just as it had been committed—­by the Ger­ man state in the name of the German people. It was thus a problem to be dealt with mostly at the official level. The two aspects of this debt, we saw, were the reparations agreements of 1951 to 1953 and a general official philo-­Semitism (later to include secret arms support for Israel). So long as these matters were responsibly accepted and executed at this powerful symbolic level, the more mundane presence of the past in such matters as personnel (even at the highest levels) were characterized as spurious attempts by extremists to discredit and destabilize the new state. The “rule of  law” argument pervaded. Indeed, the defense against, and denial of, extremism was a main legitimacy claim of the new government, both domestically and internationally. Domesti­ cally, Nazism was portrayed as a phenomenon of the margins. The problems of the Weimar democracy led to too little support for centrist democratic val­ ues; the extreme left and extreme right perversely had helped each other to destroy any democratic consensus; they had led the Weimar Republic to a state of civil war, which prevented the government from functioning in the face of an extremely adverse economic crisis. Internationally, this producued an irresponsible and aggressive German state, one bridling perhaps too much under unjust burdens which served in that context to fuel aggressive impulses. Germany became incalculable and dangerous. Appeasement  just increased the danger by fueling this condition.

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Domestically, the new government had the task of convincing the citizenry that democracy was both defensible and capable of meeting the problems of the day. The government showed early resolve in this regard by outlaw­ ing the Communist Party and by monitoring the activities of extremist groups through the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz), the primary agency of what was called “militant democracy.” Of course, this policy of resisting extremism was more prominently directed against the left than against the right, while both, under totalitarian theory, were seen as mani­ festations of the same basic impulse. Adenauer and his associates treated the extreme right as totally discredited and without a real foundation in the popu­ lation despite the mischief of a few “uneducables”; they argued that the dev­ astation Germany had suffered at the hands of the Nazis had “cured” those who had supported the Nazis of their illusions. In contrast to Nazi “hysteria,” they provided sobriety. And the rapid recovery of the German economy (the “economic miracle”) apparently proved the capabilities of the new system. Regarding the state’s division, strong Cold War rhetoric was successful—­at least until the Wall went up in Berlin in 1961—­at refuting anti-­Western pan-­ Germanic impulses. Internationally, Adenauer’s government was anxious to convince the world that the new West German state was reliable. This involved at least two aspects. First, it was important to demonstrate to the world that West Germany’s do­ mestic situation was stable. Adenauer and other early leaders thus laid great emphasis on the apparent rejection of extremist positions in national elections. It was crucial to show that the West German citizenry had no taste for such ten­ dencies, that it had finally and firmly accepted constitutional democracy as the only viable political option. Another aspect of this was the importance of de­ nying that anti-­Semitism remained a potent force in West German politics and society. Adenauer and his associates thus responded to anti-­Semitic incidents by describing them either as the work of independent and confused youths or as Communist incitements; the claim they tried to make by repetition was that such incidents by no means reflected anything at all about West German society; the sentiments of the past, they claimed, had disappeared completely from the relevant political spectrum. The world need not—­indeed dare not—­ fear West German attitudes. The second aspect of international assurances involved proving that West Germany was a loyal and reliable partner and actor in the international arena. Adenauer’s Federal Republic would work hard for European cooperation; it would follow Western security policy even in the face of doubts concerning

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the short-­term effects on West Germany’s position. While seeking gradual in­ creases in sovereignty, it nonetheless demonstrated that this would not mean a decrease in the Federal Republic’s calculability. There were, of course, many other positions and images of the Federal Re­ public at the time, both within the official circles and within various opposi­ tional and unofficial ones. But this description of the Federal Republic as “the reliable nation” seems to me to capture the major features of the legitimation profile presented at the time. The rule of  law had been reestablished, and Ger­ many’s actions were now reliable and responsible. In this light, it might be possible to revive some discredited German traditions as well as begin to com­ memorate early successes. Early leaders of the Federal Republic portrayed the Nazi years as a bounded historical period that had to be viewed as an aberration in German national history. Their attitude towards the crimes of the past was defensive (often in­ cluding testaments of personal innocence, as well as of personal and collective suffering and victimhood), exculpatory (providing reasons why individuals could not be held responsible, and why the honor of the German soldier re­ mained intact), and repressive (speaking almost always in passive terms that distracted attention from individual active roles, as well as employing only the vaguest descriptions of the events). They recognized a specific debt to Jews and to Israel, though only occasionally referring directly to the Holocaust—­ and never with that or any other specific term, but instead speaking about the refugee problem Germany had caused for Israel). They sought to absolve this debt with a major symbolic and material gesture, and demonstrated the dif­ ference between the old Germany and the new Germany by adopting a philo-­ Semitic posture. In this first period, the lessons of the past included recognizing the need to propagate and support a popular democratic consensus, to provide solid constitutional guarantees of basic human rights, and to combat extremism. Images of the past also taught the importance of not being a “wanderer be­ tween the worlds”; enough West German leaders and citizens understood the importance of moral and military alliance with the Western world. The image of the past in this period—­that of a bounded historical aberration without a corresponding personal dimension—­thus worked mainly to shape institu­ tional outcomes and policy orientations in detail. It was these governmental features—­rather than, say, broader social and cultural orientations or the na­ tional identity as such—­that required reworking in light of this constructed image of the past. From the perspective of the sociology of retrospection, it is also clear that,

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while some of the discourse of the new state and its leaders inhered in the novel initial condition of the new state, much of the terminology was a long time in the making. Framing of the German problem was already present in the aftermath of the First World War, to say nothing of the wars of unification in the nineteenth century. While the Nazi period shook many fundamental be­ liefs about German culture, some aspects of German tradition—­namely those associated with culture rather than politics, as if the two were separable (and indeed the belief that they were separable was part of the issue)—­continued as a foundation for German identity. While historical theorists often debate the merits of continuist versus discontinuist perspectives, what is clear in this account is the extent to which continuities and discontinuities are complexly intertwined. At the same time, the foregoing account of official memory in the first pe­ riod of the Federal Republic—­multifaceted as the discourse was—­paints an overly uniform view of collective memory in this period. Within the halls of government—­as is clearly evident in some of the differences between Adenau­ er’s rhetoric and that, for example, of Carlo Schmid of the SPD—­there were important differences between the governing party and the opposition. More­ over, a wide variety of dissenting views from both left and right were part of the landscape of German culture more generally. From the left, there were those who argued with great disappointment that Adenauer’s government was resto­ rationist; from the right, there were others—­including some of the most promi­ nent ultraconservative intellectuals of the Weimar period, including Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger—­who rejected the entire discourse of guilt, shame, and responsibility as illegitimate (Van Laak 2002; Olick 2005). At the same time, the foregoing pages demonstrate the complexity of mne­ mohistory even within the particular field of official memory. Within the state­ ments I have analyzed in this period, we can see the official narrators of the nation struggling to answer the question, which I stated in the introduction, of how you speak for a nation held accountable for such atrocities. Their an­ swers were not the only ones, yet they were part of the emerging dialogue that constituted the self-­identification of the Federal Republic. This process might have had a more or less clear beginning, but it also had less clear breaks as it continued, and continues, to the present—­certainly less clear than the caesuras marked by the need for chapter conclusions.

* Part 3 * The Moral Nation

Chapter 9

Seeds of Change

Following a catastrophic scandal in 1962, Adenauer’s position finally became untenable. Adenauer had been elected chancellor in 1949 at the age of seventy-­ three. Now, fourteen years later, at the age of eighty-­seven, he stepped down. Age was only one factor, and certainly not the proximate one. The scandal was what came to be known as the Spiegel Affair. Following publication of supposedly secret, but obviously leaked, missile strength estimates by the leading West German news magazine Der Spiegel, Defense Minister Franz-­Josef Strauß had Der Spiegel’s editor, Rudolf Augstein, arrested and the magazine’s offices occupied by the police in a highly questionable and frankly illegal manner. Accusations of “night and fog” tactics associated with the Nazis were prevalent. Strauß was forced to resign, and the events brought enough discredit on the entire government so that forces pushing for Adenauer’s final resignation ultimately achieved that result. Adenauer’s replacement was the economics minster, vice chancellor, and architect of the so-­called “economic miracle,” Ludwig Erhard (CDU). Erhard had begun his political career in 1945, when the Americans commissioned his involvement in industrial reconstruction, and soon thereafter named him economics minster of occupied Bavaria. Before the war he had received a doctorate in business and economics, but was prevented from completing the second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) necessary for a university professorship because he did not join the relevant Nazi organization. During the war he worked as an economist, and in 1943 he founded an institute for industrial research. In that position, he produced a plan for managing the German economy after losing the war, and thus gained the attention of opposition circles involved in

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the Twentieth of July, 1944, conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. But Erhard also showed the plan to elements in the SS who also no longer believed in the possibility of  winning the war.1 Erhard was a consummate economic pragmatist, though Adenauer’s fears about his lack of political acumen proved fairly accurate, and relatively quickly. Moreover, by the time Erhard took over, Adenauer’s policies were already in disarray and disrepute. Adenauer had led West Germany into a position of relative power and respect, both economic and diplomatic, both domestic and international. Yet, as we have already seen, with the construction of the Berlin Wall, strict Western integration and the Cold War hard line seemed to have fulfilled the prophecies of his early opponents, and now many more were becoming skeptical of this agenda—­if not about its past appropriateness, then at least about its continued advisability. So when Erhard took over the chancellorship in 1963, the dominion of Christian Democratic ideas was already in decline, given that, among other things, the Western Allies had shown little willingness for confrontation with the Soviets over the Berlin Wall. While Erhard continued most of Adenauer’s policies, he was plagued by a splintering base of support, as well as by his own rather feckless attempts to manage disputes among all sorts of different factions (Niklaus 1988). Erhard, though, was clearly more eloquent than Adenauer (whose public vocabulary was quite limited, and whose message was often simplistic). His speeches included more substantial references to the past than Adenauer’s had, and more evocative ones at that. Additionally, Erhard included in his addresses more of the emotional language of German conservatism, which meant giving voice to the traditions genre. At the same time, his speeches were also filled with technical details, and were often extremely long. Erhard’s 1963 Regierungserklärung was mostly a rather extensive presentation of his philosophy of the “social market economy” and of the role of the state in it. As part of this excursus, Erhard referred to some general problems of the state, which nevertheless would not have been discussion topics if not for the legacy of the past. He warned about “manipulable masses,” and argued that “a free people requires a healthy national consciousness.” This would be especially so for Germany, he implied when he referred to the fault lines of German history: “We Germans require, after the ruptures of our recent history, new forms of expression in all manifestations of our collective life. We are called to conscious solidarity.” As part of this—­in the context of resolving state-­federal contradictions—­in some contrast to Adenauer’s wariness 1. This sketch of Erhard owes much to that in Grosser (1991), 37–­39.

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of nationalism, Erhard formulated a more elemental patriotism than that of the Fifties, one we will see prominently again in the 1980s: “It is also part of an awake national consciousness that we acknowledge even with every connection to and love of our narrower homelands [Heimat], only one fatherland, that is called Germany.” The emphasis was thus rather different not only from Adenauer’s, but from Heuss’s more federal conception of a nation preserving a diversity of local identities as well. Erhard also included an expression of the desire for a healthy German identity—­a plea for understanding the good parts of German history with the bad, and for getting on with life: The expression “land of poets and thinkers” is certainly hackneyed. Nevertheless, we should not forget—­and should also make it clear to the world—­that German history doesn’t only contain shame, but that we had ancestors through the centuries who bind us to the spiritual world. May the fruits of this work also slowly ripen, and may they not only be to our benefit.

German culture, as the humanists believed, could be a gift to the world. These German traditions could provide a firm foundation, and not just for Ger­ ma­ny. Erhard’s 1963 speech also included substantial calls to German unity, and calls to the world to enable and support it. It provided, as well, evidence of West Germany’s accomplishments and reliability, especially regarding “rapprochement with France,” which Erhard characterized as the overcoming of “original sin as a political tool.” Like other addresses of the mid-­1950s onward, this speech included an emphasis on the accumulated history of the Federal Republic, and on an implied long distance from previous epochs as well. Erhard thus praised his predecessor Adenauer as having accomplished so much over so significant a period of time, intending thereby to illustrate how far the Federal Republic now was from the “chaos.” He mentioned that West Germany had overcome the material consequences of the war. And in the context of  leftover legislative matters, he charted progress, even conclusiveness, especially in comparison to East Germany: “We may count it as a great gain, in view of the past time of the state of injustice, that the German people is open in high measure to questions of law. The view of the despotic regime on the other side of the zonal border makes us aware of how essential legal order is to our life order.” In a foreshadowing of a famous declaration he would make in his second Regierungserklärung (in 1966), moreover, Erhard said here that “not only the Federal Republic but the whole world is in the process of  leaving behind the postwar period.”

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The 1963 Regierungserklärung also included comparatively frequent mentions of “Fatherland” (Vaterland), as well as references to “the greatest catastrophe of German history,” to “collapse,” and to the “past time of the unjust state.” As usual, it was unclear what exactly the catastrophe was: the rise of Hitler in 1933, the start of the war in 1939, Germany’s defeat in 1945, the occupation, or (less likely) the extermination of the Jews. We have seen such vocabulary before. But there were also a number of characterizations more extreme than had appeared in earlier Regierungserklärungen. Like many other speakers, however, Erhard referred to “past barbarism” and to “guilt,” and more specifically said, “We have the guilt that was placed on all Germans during the twelve tragic years of tyranny [Gewaltherrschaft] in the name of Germany.” The reference to things that were done “in the name of Germany” was, of course, a well established element of the grammar of exculpation, but its placement here was relatively prominent for a governance speech, and there seemed to be some acknowledgment of the burdens of guilt. Two years later, in his 1965 Regierungserklärung, Erhard repeated many of these themes, expanding especially on the issue of time that had passed since the Nazi period. Early on in that speech, he thus referred to the growing generational distance from the experience of the early Nazi years: The fifth German Bundestag was elected in the twentieth year after the end of the Second World War. One hundred sixty-­seven of its 518 deputies first reached the age of electability after 1945. Two-­thirds of our people were children or not yet born in the year 1933. For nearly half the people in our land, the years 1933 to 1945 are historical past without personal memory. For nearly half of all peoples of the earth, the zero hour [Stunde Null ] of their national state history took place after the year 1945.

In a more final statement of epochal change that we already saw presaged in his first Regierungserklärung, Erhard announced the conclusion of the early period of the Republic and the decreasing connections to its founding situation: All generations of our people carry the consequences of the politics practiced in the German name from 1933 to 1945. The reference points in the work of the fifth German Bundestag and in the politics of the Federal Government may, nevertheless, no longer be the war and the postwar period. They [the reference points] don’t lie behind us, but rather ahead of us. The postwar period is over!

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Erhard thus drew a quite positive picture of the Federal Republic’s accomplishments, and of the essential correctness of its policy decisions. He refuted growing criticisms of Western integration by arguing that “in the postwar period, the foreign policy line was clearly indicated for the Federal Republic; a politics ‘between the blocks’ would have been utopian and in the end suicidal.” He praised “our German model of a modern economic and social order,” contrasting it to the vulnerable economy of the Twenties and Thirties: “Today we are, thanks to better insights and on the basis of a highly developed instrumentation, in the position to clearly recognize causes and—­when we wish to—­also to intervene.” The administrative lessons of the past had been learned. Erhard claimed that Germany’s historical accomplishments extended to the very nature of its society, which he said had entered a new stage after the proclaimed end of the postwar period. He named this the formierte Gesellschaft—­ roughly translated as “structured society,” though the expression is vague in German as well. According to Bark and Gress (1989, vol. 2, 40), this concept derives from the difficulties of conservative ideology in the Federal Republic: The formierte Gesellschaft, in Erhard’s view, was a strategy to save society as a whole from organized and self-­serving interests. This was particularly urgent in West Germany, he believed, because of the country’s exposed political situation and because the war and its aftermath had left the Germans with very little ballast, in terms of traditional state authority, to deal effectively with the conflict between disparate interests and the national interests. Because of the war West Germany had lost many of the legitimate social and cultural obstacles to rapid social change. . . .

From another perspective, the structured economy could be seen as the return of central European ideas for a centralized authoritative state, and thus as a rejection of the perceived dangers of American-­style interest-­group politics. The expression formierte Gesellschaft referred, moreover, to a structured society, not just an economy or polity. Erhard characterized this social form as the result of  historical experience, though he did not specify much about what this experience consisted of: “After the historical experiences of our people that woke and strengthened the consciousness of the dependence of all on all, German society lost the character of a class society.” The implication seemed to be that no Marxism, with its emphasis on class conflict, was necessary. In this 1965 address, Erhard also responded directly to a number of interesting domestic and international events bearing on the German past. In the

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first place, he commented on the impending invocation of the statute of  limitations, which would make it impossible to prosecute war criminals: Especially important, it seems to me, is the determination that the federal government will undertake every effort to secure the further investigation and criminal prosecution of  National Socialist crimes of violence before the end of the term of limitation. The federal government directs in this regard anew the appeal to the world, be supportive in this endeavor and especially make the extant evidentiary material available.

Indeed, he presented the situation as if West Germany had been desperately trying to prosecute war criminals, and had been hindered only by a refusal of international cooperation. On this point—­whether other countries were providing the necessary evidence—­there has been significant disagreement (see especially Friedrich 2007; Steinbach 1981; Weber and Steinbach 1984; Rückerl 1980; Wittmann 2005). It is also interesting, as we have already seen, that throughout the periodic debates on the subject of the statute of limita­ tions over the years, the various governments left the issue mainly in the Bundestag’s hands. This comment by Erhard, then, was actually quite a rare occurrence, as top members of the government normally avoided taking positions on this precarious issue; yet it fit well with the list of administrative tasks that were being handled. Additionally, in the previous several years West Germany had experienced a difficult episode in its dealings in the Middle East, resulting ultimately in the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel. As I will discuss in more detail at the end of this chapter, Egypt discovered a secret arms deal between the Federal Republic and Israel; it then sought to use this as a basis for politically blackmailing West Germany by threatening that if  West Germany did not totally capitulate to Egypt’s demands, Egypt would recognize East Germany. Egypt eventually came close to doing this, by inviting East German leader Walter Ulbricht to visit. In the eyes of  West German leaders, this violated the Hallstein Doctrine, which, as already noted, proscribed relations with any nation that recognized East Germany. With relations with Egypt thus destroyed, the way was clear for opening official diplomatic relations with Israel, which, at this point, was in the best interests of both Israel and West Germany, though for different reasons. In his 1965 Regierungserklärung, Erhard thus repeated West Germany’s commitment to and justification of the Hallstein Doctrine: “The federal govern­ ment has since its founding adhered to its sole right of representation for all

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Germans (Alleinvertretungsrecht). That means that we would view a recognition or an international revaluation of the Zone [the pejorative West German term for East Germany] as an unfriendly act directed against the restoration of Germany unity.” Erhard also directed an appeal to Arab leaders to understand the delicacy of Germany’s position: “The Arab states must show understanding for the position in which Germany finds itself due to its violent division. A further prerequisite [for good relations] is that the Arab peoples have understanding of how important it must be for us Germans to entertain normal relations with Israel.” The delicate position was thus not a moral debt to the Jews, but a power-­political issue. Of course, an argument about moral debt to Jews for the Holocaust would not have had a positive effect on Arab states. Then again, neither did the power argument. Despite these mentions of issues laded with the Nazi past, Erhard did not bring up the series of war crimes trials going on in Frankfurt. While these trials did not bear directly on policy in any immediate sense, as already noted, they were especially vivid, and they captured much attention among the German public, bringing home to many, especially of the younger generation, the brutality of the Nazi crimes in a more direct way—­certainly more direct than in any but the most specific political speeches (like speeches given in concentration camps, though, as we have already seen and will see again, many of those were often strikingly vague as well).

Recognizing Anniversaries As already discussed in the previous chapters, a number of specific anniversaries created rhetorical challenges for West Germany’s leaders (Kirsch 1999; Wehler 1983; Domansky 1992; Olick 1999; Reichel 1995 ). These included the anniversaries of Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938); the end of the war on May 8, 1945; Hitler’s seizure of power on January 30, 1933; and the beginning of the war on September 1, 1939. Nonetheless, during the first decade of the Federal Republic these anniversaries were not given their own commemorations. Each, of course, raised distinct issues and evoked particular responses, thus contributing to the development of distinct genres. As we will see in the final chapter of this book, tracing the contours of these genre discourses over the entire history of the Federal Republic can be quite revealing. Here we can begin this task of  bringing the specificity of genres into relief by comparing the commemorations of two of these occasions, which took place for the first time in 1958 and 1959. January 30, 1933, is the day Hitler became chancellor of the German Reich.

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And it was only a short time until the Nazis were able to consolidate their power into an absolute dictatorship, systematically eliminating individual rights and basic freedoms along the way. While this date did receive some commemorative notices over the years in the Federal Republic, these were neither as frequent nor as extensive as those for other war-­related dates, such as September 1, 1939, and May 8, 1945—­particularly not in later years, when May 8 especially became a focus for mnemonic controversy. Indeed, the only address by either a chancellor or president commemorating  January 30, 1933, was made by Helmut Kohl in 1983. Nonetheless, there were some precedents. A main feature of all the official statements on January 30 anniversaries was a focus on the path from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. Perhaps this is why the occasion was more significant in the earlier decades than later. How did Germany get from the First World War, through the Weimar Republic, to the Third Reich? Answers focused, not surprisingly, on the difficulties the Weimar Republic faced from its very inception. Such difficulties provided a ripe ground for the lies and seductions of Hitler and Goebbels. An important question, though, was how clearly one could foresee in 1933 what would take place in the 1940s—­both war and genocide. The first published statement commemorating January 30, 1933, was an unsigned article in the Bulletin of the Press and Information Agency of the Federal Government for the twentieth anniversary in 1953. This article characterized the Third Reich as a criminal seduction of the German people—­one that would not have been possible if not for the extremely destabilized ground of the Weimar Republic. It was something that was done to the German people: A flood of incitement, political slander, and demagogy brought him [Hitler] up out of a political and social chaos, the manifestation of which was mass unemployment. . . . The propaganda of a Hitler and of a Goebbels knew how to stir up a mass frenzy to which fell victim unfortunately all too large a part of the German people, for whom it seemed that the great “national emancipation” had come, and who thought that after years of discouragement the chains of the Versailles Treaty had fallen away from them.

The statement went on to refer to the Third Reich as a “swindle [Gaukelei ] without equal that was played on the German people, and which made it always more into the victim of a limitless dictatorship.” But the statement also went on to deny that the seduction was actually that great: “A large part of the German people remained nevertheless unaffected by the National Socialist

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arts of seduction. The more insightful and circumspect saw at that time, in the beginnings of the seizure of power, that with it a catastrophe found its beginning that had to end as a terrible finale of great smoke.” This was a stark contradiction: When the question was responsibility, the Third Reich was a great seduction; when the question was political culture, the valiant Germans were not taken in. Nevertheless, the statement ran, “The development after the collapse in the year 1945 has proven that the German people has in fact rejected everything that was connected with the name Hitler.” In 1958, on the twenty-­fifth anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power, Bundestag President Gerstenmeier delivered a radio address to commemorate the day. He too was concerned with the foundations of the Third Reich in the Weimar Republic: The suffering of unemployment, the economic misery, the world economic crisis and the despondence over the gray routine became widely connected with the slogans saying that Germany, undefeated in the field, had fallen victim to the sordid treason and vulgar intrigues of dark international powers. The stab-­ in-­the-­back legend became the counterpart to the war guilt lie forced on us in a crackpot manner in the Treaty of Versailles; and both together created, under the pressure of the ruined currency in the vacuum of broken-­off tradition and of the lusterless and politically insufficient constitution of  Weimar, a broad fertile ground for National Socialism.

In this framework, according to Gerstenmeier, many people had been willing to accept National Socialism as a temporary solution, even though they were skeptical of many points: “Without rightly becoming aware of it, a significant part of the conservatively oriented Germany fell into the seduction and foreign infiltration [Überfremdung] through a raging nationalism—­all water for Hitler’s mill.” This reference to foreign infiltration is similar to Wilhelm Röpke’s geneology of totalitarianism, mentioned already, in which the origins of National Socialism were traced to the French Revolution. Given this account, Gerstenmeier sought wider lessons in this history: “. . . these insights have an undeniable meaning for our personal and national orientation in moral and political regard.” The first and foremost of these, he argued, was that the sentiment “My country right or wrong” could no longer be accepted and defended with innocence, let alone letting “the judgment of one’s own conscience go down in the frenzy of the mass or in opportunism.” He made clear, though, that the lesson was individual rather than collective guilt:

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There is absolutely no doubt that not thousands but rather hundreds of thousands among the German people fell into Hitler’s following out of honorable motives, even out of pure desire for the Fatherland’s best—­just as many others became victims of his naked violence and were, along with many opportunists who wanted to benefit in Hitler’s undertaking, pulled into the corruption. Many of those who escaped this corruption carry the wounds of a disappointment that are still not scarred over.

Given this variety of relations to the Nazi regime, any policy of overly crude classifications was unjust: “The mechanism of denazification and the thoughtlessness of the well-­meaning occupation authorities’ reeducation have helped us little, but have made many things worse. The result of this [is that] our German history of the last thirty or forty years is directed in the first line towards the personal conscience of the individual and political maturity of our entire people.” But it was not clear exactly what Gerstenmeier could have meant; these are the years in which National Socialism occurred. He warned as well against “hasty justification,” warning once again against hypocrisy and self-­ righteousness abroad, a common theme from the occupation period. He thus argued that “the German people in its substance is neither dumber nor worse than other peoples.” He said it was not necessary to point at the mistakes of other peoples; it was, rather, necessary to accept that guilt is an individual matter: Collective arguments were of a piece with Nazi ideology. A further implication of this attitude, Gerstenemeier argued, was to avoid divisive arguments and assignments of blame by and among different groups in German society (though he did single out opposition members for their special courage). He said that the spirit of the “other Germany” was that “we all live from forgiveness,” though exactly what the logic of this statement might have been remains obscure. The anniversaries of the events of September 1, 1939—­the German invasion of Poland and thus the official start of the Second World War—­posed somewhat different issues for the Federal Republic. The task was no longer to explain, much less defend, the rise of the Nazi dictatorship out of the First World War and the ill-­fated Weimar Republic, but to acknowledge the more specific burdens of war. Like speeches about the seizure of power, these too were relatively few and far between; not all major leaders made statements on every major anniversary. Nevertheless, the date was commemorated more regularly. First, in 1959 and 1964 (the twenty-­and twenty-­five-­year anniversaries) there were

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statements by Chancellor Adenauer, Bundestag President Gerstenmeier (two of them), Defense Minister Strauß, and Chancellor Erhard dealing with matters of expiation and guilt. Second, there was a speech in 1969 by President Gustav Heinemann using the occasion to argue for the new Ostpolitik (policy toward the East). Third, in 1979 President Karl Carstens delivered a televised address, and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt published two newspaper articles. Fourth, there was a letter in 1989 by President Richard von Weizsäcker to Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski, and a major address in the same year by Chancellor Kohl, both defending a broader historical perspective. I will examine the first, earlier group of these here, and return to the others within their contemporary contexts, while calling attention to their genre connections with the earlier moments. The first speeches, from 1959 and 1964, claimed to acknowledge exclusive German responsibility for the war, though they defend against notions of collective guilt; but they also placed blame on the Soviet Union. One of the most prominent features in these explanations was the attention given to the role of the Hitler-­Stalin pact in paving the road for the German invasion of Poland. They often made the point that the war was not really over so long as the world lived in fear of new aggression (this time from the Soviet Union). In his very brief statement in 1959, for instance, Adenauer said, “The catastrophe of terror evolved after the suspension of fighting into a period of fear, called about by an armament more terrifying and horrible than humanity has ever seen before. A secure, a true peace has up until now, after twenty years, not returned on this earth.” He went on to acknowledge the suffering of Poland, though he characterized this as a longer-­term historical reality: “For longer than a century, this congenial people—­without having assumed any kind of guilt—­has suffered under the political and martial conflicts in Europe; three times it was torn apart and divided, and twenty years ago it became the first victim of this last war as Hitler-­Germany and the Soviet Union invaded the country and horribly destroyed it.” Though this particular term—­“Hitler-­Germany”—­was not all that widespread, it was emblematic of a general trend in these speeches: to identify the perpetrator of the Second World War not as Germany, but as some tiny minority or alien element. Other forms of this included simply referring to Hitler as the perpetrator, or to “Hitler and his henchmen,” or to “National Socialist aggression,” among other terms. Adenauer’s mention of Polish suffering also allowed him to highlight Soviet more than German crimes. He thus continued, much in his usual manner, by saying, “Today’s Germany is a different Germany than that under Hitler.” He spoke of the “deep change of attitude” in

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regard to all things associated with Hitler and Nazism. He also hypothesized a human communality between Germans and Poles by mentioning that he had been together with many Poles in a concentration camp. Bundestag President Gerstenmeier’s 1959 radio address was much more detailed than Adenauer’s brief statement. Indeed, it was quite complex, including many seemingly contradictory elements. It is a good example of a strategy—­ acknowledging responsibility, but then undermining the acknowledgment—­ that we have already seen on all sorts of occasions, and will see in other September 1 addresses as well, especially that of Helmut Kohl in 1989. That is, Gerstenmeier included many different arguments about the causes and motivations and support of the war, and then pointed to universal aspects of such motivations, or to the misdeeds of other countries. He claimed that he did not mention these issues for the purpose of mitigating German responsibility. But the effect, as we will see again and again, was the opposite; despite the disclaimer that one was not bringing up a particular argument for exculpatory purposes but instead for context, the argument for exculpation was nonetheless provided for anyone seeking it. Gerstenmeier began the 1959 address with the Hitler-­Stalin pact, and juxtaposed the German invasion of Poland in 1939 with the Soviet invasion of Berlin in 1945, depicting in numbers the horrors that occurred in the meantime. He continued by announcing that “Germany thereby has to assume the guilt for the Second World War.” He followed by providing the context from and comparison to the First World War: “The peace of Versailles, which was supposed to liquidate the First World War, was poisoned with a war guilt lie. This poisoned peace did more than a little to pump Hitler up and to provoke the Second World War.” This being said, though, he added a disclaimer: But it would be false, historically and morally false, to consider the Second World War only the consequence of the Versailles peace. For this war was not planned in order to correct the mistakes of the Treaty of Versailles—­gullible people believed that. No, this war was born from the National Socialist intoxication with power [Machtrausch] and from Hitler’s mania for a Europe-­ dominating great German Reich.

In this regard, the implication seems to be that the Nazis were just like the Soviet Union, and vice versa. The overall strategy, moreover, was very effective: Put the mitigation argument (Versailles) on the table and then claim not to be supporting it. The result, of course, was that the argument stuck anyway, but any charges of supporting it could be denied.

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Gerstenmeier went on to claim that most Germans had not wanted the war, and indeed had been filled with terror at the idea, in contrast to 1914: “That it [the German people] nevertheless marched was the consequence of the fact that six years earlier it had lost its freedom and self-­determination to Hitler’s henchmen.” (Recall the unsigned commemorative statement, which referred to thirty years of individual responsibility and argued that, by and large, the Germans had remained immune to Hitler’s and Goebbels’ seductions.) Gerstenmeier argued that, though understanding how this was possible was difficult, it was essential to the proper attitude towards the Germans, which was one of sympathy: It took a long time until the victors from the West began to grasp how a people in the capture of a modern authoritarian state, numbed and confused by the perpetual bombardment of state propaganda, tried to make a virtue out of the compulsion. No, the German people did not decide for the war. It was deceived, seduced and with plain violence driven into the war.

Gerstenmeier added, “That changes nothing about the fact that we Germans now are not only the burned children, also not only the twice defeated, rather in the consciousness of  many are also the morally condemned.” The Germans, thus, had suffered not once but twice. Remarkably, the commemoration of Germany’s invasion of Poland has taken place as an occasion of German suffering and victimhood. What is perhaps most interesting, however, is the comparison to later such efforts—­namely Jenninger’s—­which generated significant controversy, while Gerstensmeier’s was unremarked. Foreshadowing arguments in the 1980s about the relativization of  National Socialist crimes, Gerstenmeier argued here in 1959 that though the impulse, in the face of such accusations, may be to seek strategies of “trivialization [Verharmlosung] or the balancing off of foreign horrors . . . it helps us in regard to the context of guilt as little as the simple denunciation of Himmler’s Death’s Head Troops.” Gerstenmeier argued that everybody, including those who had “blood-­free personal records,” had to stand up to the responsibility of the crimes. Nevertheless, he then argued directly against any notion of collective guilt. By the same token, he then said, “This does not mean wallowing in the dec­laration of a collective innocence.” The moral morass was too complicated for any sort of black-­and-­white judgment: “For in that which lies behind us, fate and guilt, complicity and sacrifice, weakness and innocence in the structure of the life of the individual as of the entire people are so inseparably intertwined that it leaves human view and human judgment, and remains

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given over to the judgment of God.” Faced with the variety of experience and the shadings of guilt, responsibility, innocence, and victimhood—­he himself had been a member of opposition circles—­Gerstenmeier was unable to come to any judgment about Germany as a whole, and felt that no one else could do so either. Defense Minister Franz-­Josef Strauß also published a statement in 1959, one in which he used the occasion to argue for a strong and unified defense position as the only way to resist totalitarian aggression. Strauß began by assigning direct blame to Hitler and his helpers: the war did not “break out—­it was brought about by the National Socialist leadership under Hitler.” Nevertheless, Strauß also emphasized the essential contribution made by Stalin, though also implicitly blaming those who had appeased Hitler and were now tempted to do the same with the Soviets: Hitler nevertheless first came to the decision of war when he had secured the support of the Soviet Union through his pact with Stalin on August 23, 1939, and—­in light of the prominent pacifist propaganda in England and France—­ was able to believe that the Western powers would not fight. Germany, the entire world, had to pay expensively for this mistake of the brown demon.

For Strauß, this context was key. He argued that it provided a “negative lesson for handling dictators.” The attempt of the Western powers to appease Hitler only “strengthened his appetite and made him believe that the ‘decadent plutocracies’ were not capable of resisting a German expansion.” Strauß asserted that a strong military alliance, like NATO, would have been able to stop Hitler. The essential lesson for him, then, was unity in resisting the expansionist posture of the Soviet Union. For Strauß, stability, security, and integration were the most important priorities. There were two major addresses on the twenty-­fifth anniversary of Septem­ ber 1, 1939, the start of the war, in 1964: one by Chancellor Erhard, and another one by Gerstenmeier, which was fairly different from his address of five years earlier, at least in topic if not in posture. In his statement, Erhard included all the classic elements we already saw in the first period (the reliable nation): We Germans are reminded with special emphasis of the calamity of 1939 because in our name a brutal dictator was let loose who carried the self-­presumed responsibility for the politics at that time of  what was named by him the “greater German Reich,” and who since his so-­called seizure of power was prepared in his blind frenzy to push all Europe into the abyss.

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Erhard acknowledged that Germany “carries the main guilt” because of “its power hunger and a criminal race-­mania (Rassenwahn), its hysterical fanaticism to fight for living space (Lebensraum) for Germany . . . .” He included as well a description of the post-­Versailles situation of Germany—­the “mistakes of the Treaty of  Versailles”—­as well as a reference to the Hitler-­Stalin pact. Like Gerstenmeier‘s 1959 speech just examined, Erhard also provided mitigating arguments while saying that such mitigations changed nothing—­though in fact, again, there seems to have been no other reason to bring them up in this way other than to mitigate. For instance, Erhard said, It changes nothing, however, about the guilty verdict against the Hitler-­regime that other governments also failed, that Hitler after the acceptance of  his aggres­ sive acts by the Western powers deceived himself about the defense willingness of those democratic countries, and that the hitherto slandered Soviet communism of Stalinistic form practically encouraged Hitler to further attacks, until the year 1941 actually supporting him.

In statements such as this, Erhard was likely significantly influenced by his advisor Wilhelm Röpke, whose interpretation of “the German problem” I have mentioned several times (for a more detailed analysis of  Röpke’s argument, see Olick 2005, 168–­74). While Erhard said these factors did not change anything about the guilt, in actuality pointing them out seems to have done just that. Here we also see again the identification of the entire system with the person of Hitler—­an interesting parallel to the frame of mind that Hitler worked so hard to propagate, though for different purposes. Erhard also repeated the assurances that Adenauer before him had given about the new attitude in Germany. Erhard argued that West Germany’s faithful role in NATO was the best proof against any claims about revanchist tendencies in Germany. The general lesson he drew was that violence could not be a political means. In his 1964 radio address, Bundestag President Gerstenmeier also took on several of the major social scientific and historiographical arguments about the rise of National Socialism in Germany that had emerged since the instant diagnoses of the very first years after the war (summarized in chapter 3), thus hinting at—­even rejecting—­the emergence of a new political cultural profile. By this time, several important theories had been developed about German history and society in the attempt to understand why National Socialism had occurred in Germany and not elsewhere. Like the first attempts, these debates included arguments about the developmental path of German social structure,

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about a belligerent so-­called German national character, and about the claim that Germany’s political aggressiveness could be traced back to before the First World War and that Germany thus bore the guilt for that war too. But the newer works seemed to be moving in critical directions beyond what had been offered at the beginning. Gerstenmeier thus began his 1964 statement by complaining that in many places around the world, the main characterization of September 1, 1939 was one of German guilt. He asked, however, for more careful distinctions: “Perhaps some will take the trouble to distinguish and to more exactly—­and more justly—­say: Hitler and his regime are the guilty ones.” For Gerstenmeier, Germany’s guilt was “that we, much like other peoples under established dictators, were too weak to topple him.” Gerstenmeier mentioned the Versailles and Weimar contexts, though he made clear that he was aware that these perhaps sounded like excuses. Recognizing these circumstances did not release Germany from its burdens, he admitted, though he never really characterized those burdens as involving anything more than a general will towards reconciliation and world peace (in this way also indicating the coming profile shift). He said that the most important thing was to recognize the truth, even when it sounded like an excuse: The determination of the fact that the attack on Poland, and with it the Second World War, came about because Joseph Stalin, at that time master in the Kremlin, said yes to Hitler’s Polish undertaking for the price of East-­Poland and the Baltic is, however, no excuse. The Soviets can twist and turn all they want. But it is a significant mistake to believe that this releases us Germans.

So which was it, excuse or warning? It was both. Gerstenmeier also responded to the arguments by the British historian A. J. P. Taylor (1961), mentioned already, that National Socialism was simply the manifestation of Germany’s late development (see also Dahrendorf 1967). Gerstenmeier argued that while this “attempt to somewhat normalize Hitler” might be reassuring, Taylor’s explanation missed all the horror that made what Hitler accomplished important. In this, according to Gerstenmeier, Taylor shared the blind spot that many in the 1930s and 1940s also had: “Hitler could fool millions of Germans and millions of others for years exactly because many upright people simply could not imagine a being like him.” Gerstenmeier also took on the historian Fritz Fischer, who had presented evidence that belligerent war aims could be found among the Prussian gener-

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als in the era leading up to the First World War, and thus that Germany did indeed bear the guilt for that war.2 Gerstenmeier dismissed Fischer simply by saying, “I cannot here go into the newly polished up old war guilt thesis of the Hamburg academician. I consider it [the thesis], in its Versailles as well as in its Hamburg version, false.” More important for Gerstenmeier, however, was the argument that often accompanied accusations of historically rooted German guilt—­namely, arguments of a psychological or moral nature, concerning a purported German national character. According to Gerstenmeier, the essence of these positions was that “Hitler and his followers, their ideas and brutality, are in fact not an accidental, unique occurrence, a misfortune that other peoples might at one time suffer. No—­this way, exactly this way, as it manifested itself in Hitler and his time, this is the German people in its foundation and being.” Against this, Gerstenmeier argued that We of course certainly do not have, less than other peoples, our particular national sins and serious menaces from ourselves. But those analysts of the soul who try to convince us that Hitler and his war, his mass murder and his other crimes, are the revelation of the German being purely and simply—­ they stand directly in the way of the self-­evaluation and atonement of the Germans.

In these arguments, Gerstenmeier was clearly participating in the pre-­1949 dis­ course reviewed in the prologues: echoes of the Jung-­Kästner debate, to say nothing of the wartime propaganda of  Vansittart and numerous others. By focusing on national character, Gerstenmeier argued, we miss the real dangers of the age. This is therefore a good example of the dialogical nature of the discourse: Gerstenmeier was clearly responding to challenges from that moment in which his own thinking on memory was clearly formed: the occupation.

2. Fischer’s work occasioned significant public controversy in the 1960s. Fischer’s major book, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Grasp for World Power), argued that the origins of the First World War could be traced directly to a long history of belligerent planning by the Prussian military. Fischer’s arguments were met with vociferous attack by historians and politicians of the time; he had challenged an important central myth of German history and politics. Ultimately, though, it seems that the historical community, if not public opinion and politics, accepted most of his claims. See Moses (1975) and Iggers (1983). See also footnote 13 in chapter 1 above.

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Israel Politics As already discussed in chapter 7, the first half of the 1960s witnessed a series of events that made the Holocaust—­and the problems of guilt and expiation—­ an unavoidable topic for public and official discussion. These included the 1959–­60 wave of anti-­Semitism, the Eichmann trial, and the series of notori­ ous concentration camp trials. A fourth major issue that focused West Ger­ man attention on Holocaust-­oriented matters in the 1960s was the international crisis that led to diplomatic relations with Israel. The history of these events and the subsequent relations is complex, and is not necessarily relevant to my concern with the presentations of the past made by West German leaders.3 I will, therefore, tell only a bit of the background before examining the language of the past used on the occasion of assuming relations. The relationship between West Germany and Israel was obviously one in which the Holocaust loomed overwhelmingly. This was certainly the case in the first official contacts between the two governments in the early 1950s, when the issue was reparations. But it was also clear that West Germany’s feeling of a responsibility for, and therefore a special relationship with, the Jewish state pervaded most of the two governments’ dealings at least until the mid-­to late 1970s. The background to the assumption of relations was rather complex. The outlines are as follows. Up until 1955, it was the West Germans who wanted diplomatic relations with Israel as a sign of their new legitimacy, while Israel was hesitant to embrace the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Beginning in 1955, though, the balance turned around. West Germany became more and more a slave to the Hallstein doctrine, and was very worried about the possibility that Egypt and other Arab nations might formally recognize East Germany. West Germany thus became increasingly concerned with appeasing the Arabs. The most certain way not to do this was to improve relations with Israel. At the same time, however, unofficial relations between West Germany and Israel—­as well as behind-­the-­scenes diplomatic maneuvers—­were bringing these two states closer together, and had propagated a greater willingness on the part of many Israelis to contemplate official relations. This was especially so when West Germany did not cave in to Arab pressure to break off all payments to Israel after the Sinai campaign of 1956 (Deutschkron 1970, 165). 3. There are many excellent treatments of the diplomatic relations between West Germany and Israel. See especially Segev (1993), Feldman (1984), Feldman (1989), Wolffssohn (1988), and Deutschkron (1991).

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Additionally, following the Eichmann trial in 1961, cultural, tourist, and student exchanges increased between the Federal Republic and Israel. This included a number of official trips by second-­level West German leaders to Israel, like Bundestag President Gerstenmeier and West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt. However, with East-­West tensions at a high point in the early Sixties, those voices supporting the strictest adherence to the Hallstein doctrine held more sway in the policy realm. Additionally, there was a general Western interest in maintaining a working relationship with Arab states in the face of their increasing contacts with and support from the Soviet Union. Of all the Western governments, West Germany had the strongest relationship to the Arab world: what was frequently referred to as the “traditional friendly relations between the Arab and German peoples.” So there was pressure from West Germany’s allies to keep doors open to the Arab leaders. Nevertheless, following a clandestine 1960 meeting in New York between Adenauer and Ben-­Gurion, West Germany began secretly supplying Israel with arms.4 In the discussions between Adenauer and Ben-­Gurion (Vogel 1969, 115–­29), this was framed as a result of West Germany’s “special responsibility” for the existence and security of the State of Israel. Matters remained under control until November 1964, when the secret weapons deliveries became known. The Arab states, predictably, objected strenuously. The Federal Republic agreed to suspend deliveries after February 1965, insisting, however, on completing unfulfilled contractual promises. The Arab states threatened all sorts of retaliation against West Germany, and flirted with inviting East German leader Walter Ulbricht to visit. In response, West Germany offered additional aid to Egypt, and pleaded for the Arabs to understand West Germany’s “special responsibility” to Israel deriving from the Holocaust; but it also emphasized that it would not tolerate continued discussions between Egypt and East Germany. When the Egyptians nonetheless went ahead and invited Ulbricht, West Germany announced its commitment finally to establish official diplomatic relations with Israel. This was concluded on May 11, 1965, almost exactly twenty years after the Third Reich’s unconditional surrender to Allied forces on May 8, 1945. Throughout the discussions over and preparations for establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, West German leaders emphasized the moral framework in which such relations had to be understood, despite the power-­political 4. The initiative and responsibility for implementing the arrangements came from Defense Minister Franz-­Josef Strauß, who worked mainly with Yitzhak Shamir in Israel.

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run-­up. For instance, in a statement made to the Bundestag on February 17, 1965—­that is, directly in the midst of the crisis—­Chancellor Erhard emphasized the role of the Holocaust in shaping Germany’s official attitudes towards Israel.5 “Our relation to Israel and to the entire Jewish world is now, as before, overshadowed by the fact of a tragic and not yet forgotten past,” he said. “Our relations to Israel . . . [in comparison to West Germany’s traditionally friendly relations with the Arab nations] are most heavily burdened. Germany stood and stands under the guilt that the Third Reich piled on it.” Interesting to note here is that it was guilt, with its implication of debt, and not shame. To Israel, guilt; at home and abroad, shame. At the same time, Erhard also rejected criticisms—­especially from Israel—­ that West Germany’s failure to have established official relations sooner was a moral one: We owe no one an explanation for our support of Israel in the struggle for its existence. But we also owe no one a renunciation of the life of our nation. Our sympathies for our former Jewish citizens [Mitbürger] are based on a centuries-­ old community of fate [Schicksalsgemeinschaft]. The reparation of  what happened in the twelve years of National Socialist dictatorship is for us Germans a value that we highly esteem for the sake of our own peace without regard to political relations. . . . We have always understood our payments to Israel as a duty; but after more than a decade of faithful fulfillment, we believed that we had grounds for hoping that one would recognize our upright disposition in our actions.

After all, it was Israel that had not wanted relations earlier. In a press statement on March 17, State Secretary Karl-­Günther von Hase made it clear that the conclusion of diplomatic relations with Israel was also seen in the Federal Republic as a first step in “normalizing” the relations between the two states, a condition that could not be achieved until the discussion moved away from solely attending to the past: No one can deny that in the area of relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel there exists a great backlog for normalization. The current condition, having lasted more than a decade, of nonexistence of diplomatic relations and of a disequilibrium of representation—­Israeli representation in 5. These remarks are to be found in the Stenographic Report of the Bundestag, February 17, 1965, p. 8103.

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Cologne, but no German representation of any kind in Israel—­has brought no one advantage: neither Israel nor the Federal Republic nor the Arab states.

Of course, establishment of diplomatic relations included the exchange of ambassadors. On the West German side, the career diplomat Rolf Pauls was given the delicate job. Pauls—­being free of a difficult personal past, and having worked for State Secretary Hallstein during reparations negotiations in 1952—­was seen to be qualified as well as acceptable on both sides. Pauls presented his credentials to Israeli President Zalman Shazar in Jerusalem on August 11, 1965. His brief speech on that occasion of course included some remarks on the Nazi past (Vogel 1969a, 175): The establishment of diplomatic relations between our two countries is regarded as of the greatest importance by the entire German people [emphasis added]. It is with sorrow and revulsion that the new Germany looks back upon the ghastly crimes of the National Socialist regime, crimes which brought such a heavy burden of suffering to the Jewish race in particular. Since that time, there have been many people of good will on both sides who have worked with patience and perseverance to prepare the way for this fresh start that we are making in the relations between our two peoples. We hope that the exchange of ambassadors will help us to continue successfully to tread this same path of progress.

Given the location, the acknowledgment of Jewish suffering was obviously required, as was the expressed desire for a new start. Pauls also wanted to portray the issue as something that transcended politics but was a matter between peoples; hence the reference to the entire German people—­meaning the people rather than just the government, and Germans as a whole rather than just the West. Soon after these events, Federal President Heinrich Lübke participated in a twentieth anniversary commemoration at the concentration camp at Bergen-­ Belsen, and delivered there a major address, as had his predecessor Heuss in 1952 (Vogel 1969a). Whatever reservations one may have about Heuss’s formulations, one can see why they were so highly praised in comparison to Lübke’s speech, which from the point of  view of the present seems like it should have caused a scandal, but instead went largely unnoticed. This contrast indicates the very different toxic potential of such speech in this earlier period in comparison to the 1980s. In this 1965 speech, Lübke responded directly to public discussions of the series of war crimes trials that the German public had

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been both watching and conducting with substantial trepidation. He claimed to be arguing for accepting full responsibility—­often in clearer terms than many of the other speakers we have discussed—­and sought to characterize the memory of the deaths as a forward-­looking “watchtower for the conscience of mankind.” Nonetheless, he also presented every conceivable mitigating circumstance, and argued against any association of Germany as a whole with the crimes. The overall effect was that of an exculpatory hodgepodge that attempted, but failed, to provide something for everyone. Lübke began by describing the Nazi past as “a part of German history which no one who lived through it and suffered during it will ever be able to understand.” He went on to list the names of notorious concentration camps, saying that “no one in this century will ever be able to mention these places without conjuring up the memory of the crimes committed by Germans against Germans at home and by Germans against foreign peoples abroad.” While Lübke thus referred—­in contrast to many other speakers—­to Germans in general as perpetrators he also gave German victims the rhetorical pride of place. Indeed, he added the implication that the horrors had been unknown to the German public: “It is twenty years since the veil, behind which Hitler and his underlings hid their infamous activities, was torn aside, and still this memory has lost none of its horror.” However, Lübke also addressed arguments against remembrance directly: “No good is done by those who seek to persuade our people that the time has now come to lay the ghosts of our dreadful past to rest. It is not we, my friends, who conjure up the ghosts of the past, but it is the ghosts that come to haunt us, and it is not within our power to exorcise them.” Of course, as already argued, mentioning the effort even to refute the position also confers some legitimacy on it. Lübke was also clear—­again, in contrast to many other speakers, as well as to himself elsewhere—­that the real defeat happened before May 8, 1945: “The person who cannot comprehend this simple truth has not grasped the historical significance of the total defeat of Germany in 1945; it was the result of the moral defeat which was already complete when the National Socialist regime was at the height of its power.” Others argued, however, that the moral defeat had begun not when the National Socialist regime was “at the height of its power”—­presumably meaning the late Thirties and early Forties—­but in 1933. In this context, Lübke brought up the trials that were bringing the horrors of the past so clearly before the German and world publics. Like others we have already seen, Lübke was concerned with the damage the trials might do to Germany’s reputation. Yet he did not accept arguments against probity:

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Here and there in public debate the opinion has been expressed that we can now wipe the slate clean. . . . My answer is that these continual investigations and trials, these radio and television programs, might just be the very factors which once more destroy our good name, which we have, in the meantime, regained with so much diffi­ culty. But this leaves out of the account the fact that it has not been the hushing up of truth, not silence, not the suppression of memories that have restored the confidence of others in our sincerity and honesty. It is only because we proved by our actions that we were seriously prepared to do all in our power to make amends for wrongs committed in the name of the German people, that the world is now prepared to trust us again.

Lübke concluded from this that it was essential to continue such inquiries: “However shaming and disheartening these court proceedings, of  which we read and hear every day, may be, and however evident the problematical nature of human rights and justice may become in the process, we must let them go on. If  we do not, it will seem as though we are leaving the job half done. . . .” Here, Lübke was crediting reactionary arguments that the evidence by this point was shaky, and that the rights of the defendants were not being safeguarded because of the political (so the claim went) nature of the charges. His main concern, however, was that Germany’s reputation will suffer if we do not prove by our actions that we are ready to be purged of our sins. And we must all play our parts, for a house is not fit to be lived in if only the first floor rooms are spotless, while dirt prevails in the attic and in the cellar. There can be no “co-­existence with evil.” Anyone nowadays wanting to curtail the political and historical argument over the National Socialist regime and its crimes is merely healing the surface of the wound, which will not prevent the festering beneath it from continuing and gradually poisoning the whole system.

Though this argument may seem correct, it is an indication of growing pressure to “let the past be the past.” Such arguments appeared again in the 1980s with renewed force. As one provocative newspaper article put it, Germany suffered from “a past that will not pass away.” And to many, this was highly lamentable. Lübke claimed as well to be refuting arguments that sought to add up crimes on the other side in order to alleviate German guilt. Yet, in what was by then an established procedure, for every step ahead he also took a step back.

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Even though he was bringing up the arguments in order to refute them, it almost seemed as if bringing them up was enough to lend them some credence. He often said that the fact was correct but the implication was wrong. In one example he even mentioned the Allied bombings of  Dresden, something rarely mentioned at that point: A further objection is frequently made that the other side was also guilty of serious misconduct. This is so, and is frequently admitted to be so by our former enemies. We have only to think of the bombing of Dresden and so many other towns and cities, and of the terrible privations that millions of Germans had to endure as refugees and exiles after the guns were silenced.

Only after thereby establishing the legitimacy of these facts did he offer more careful distinctions: I am convinced that the critical distinction here lies in the fact that the breach of justice, the total disregard of  human dignity, and finally the methodical buildup of a murder machine were not the forerunners of conflict with an external enemy. It was not individuals or even groups who chose to ignore the natural laws of justice and humanity. Hitler and his trusted few systematically murdered, tortured, and destroyed millions of people in the name of the state.

Again, this was the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-­Belsen. Echoing Heuss’s disdain for the vulgarity of  National Socialists, Lübke also argued that Hitler attracted the “dregs of society,” that “people of integrity and intellect did not feel themselves drawn to him,” and that “the things that were done, were done neither on behalf of nor with the consent of the Ger­ man people—­but they were done in our name.” On the basis of these vitiated distinctions, he concluded nonetheless that “those who remain silent, who do not take up arms against such a disgrace with all their might, must be prepared to accept that their silence may be falsely interpreted.” Not that the silence would be wrong; only that it might have been misunderstood. In this speech, Lübke thus included an array of fine distinctions (not necessarily valid ones) to argue simultaneously for memory and against any blame. For instance, he told his listeners about the mother of a soldier lost on the Eastern front who argued that further criticisms of the Wehrmacht dishonored her son. Lübke argued that openness about the past did not dishonor soldiers, because they were innocent:

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But do we vindicate the honor of these millions of innocent people by remaining silent? Is it not rather our duty, for the sake of their name, to tell the world, as plainly as possible, that they had nothing to do with these crimes and have no share in the guilt of those who ordered and carried out the death sentences? That, again, is part of the treachery of the National Socialist regime, that it stabbed in the back those soldiers who were out on the battlefield. It made them contemptible in the eyes of the enemy, although they were only doing what they considered to be their duty. . . . They had nothing in common with the criminals who plunged our fatherland and countless numbers of people into misery.

In a memoir of  life among German expatriates in the Soviet Union during the war, the journalist Wolfgang Leonhard (1990) describes a different outlook: he recounts the incredulity among German expatriates that the German common soldiers offered no resistance whatsoever, but indeed fought until the very end faithfully and enthusiastically. Additionally, I already mentioned in chapter 4 the controversy engendered by the Wehrmacht photography exhibit of the late 1990s, which revealed the role of ordinary German soldiers in atrocities. Lübke’s exculpation within the purported context of accepting full responsibility also included a description of mitigating circumstances. He referred to the insuperable burdens placed on the Weimar democracy by the Treaty of Versailles, and claimed that the majority of Germans did not support Hitler in the 1933 elections. This was technically true, but it did not account for the vast popularity the Nazis enjoyed in the subsequent years, even if this is hard to measure because there were no free elections. Even so, indications are fairly clear that free elections would have resulted in a Nazi majority in the mid-­Thirties. In contrast, Lübke romantically portrayed the activities of the Twentieth of July opposition activities, and even included the communist opposition as evidence of Germany’s innocence. He characterized the German nation as a people who were willing to go to great extents to save their Jewish fellow citizens, and to oppose Nazism generally: “It is not difficult to prove that the German people were, in fact, prepared to combat the barbarity of National Socialism and, if need be, to die for their cause during those twelve disastrous years. The number of Germans who were either executed or imprisoned exceeds by many times the number of their executioners . . . .” Lübke’s next sentence, however, the value-­free sociologist cannot help but point out critically: “These ties of suffering and pain unite our nation with the six million Jews, whether German

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or of other nationalities, who were murdered, and furthermore with all those on whom suffering was inflicted in the name of the German people.” This must certainly be one of the baldest conflations in the history of official memory, though we saw some similar arguments from intellectuals in the mid-­1940s. Lübke had thus come a long way from the statements he made at the beginning of the speech about the importance of remembrance, to what in sum seems to be his main point: “I wish to make it perfectly clear that the phenomenon of National Socialism cannot be taken as a manifestation of the German national character.” It seems, then, that Lübke’s main goal at Bergen-­Belsen was to unite Germany with the Jews and everyone else in the community of victims. In many ways, his solution was an early version of the relativizing arguments we will see again in the 1980s. There are important similarities, as well as differences, between this speech by Lübke, and the one Heuss made in the same place thirteen years earlier. Heuss had been defensive too, within a specific debate about collective guilt. But his address—­partly due to his more poetic style, as well as to the times—­ came off more as a lamenting moral charge. Lübke’s speech appears to have been more rationalistic. Speaking in a concentration camp, Lübke had to be clear about the need to remember; yet his exculpatory arguments were also clear and ordered. It was as if by this point in West German history, the repertoire of such arguments had been clarified and established. Lübke’s speech thus reads like a fairly complete recital of the worst that repertoire had to offer. However, it also represented something of a last gasp from the declining “reliable nation” profile and its demands for exculpation.

Chapter 10

The Grand Coalition and the Wider World

P r e pa r i n g t h e C h a n g e o f P o w e r Despite his occasional eloquence, which was counterbalanced by the high philosophical abstraction as well as the length of  his speeches, Chancellor Er­ hard was not able to stem the tide of dissatisfaction that reached into his own party with the policies of  Western integration. These policies had seemingly yielded nothing tangible in terms of bringing the two Germanies closer to­ gether, and indeed they appeared to many to have made things worse. Nor was Erhard able to manage skepticism over his own leadership abilities. A reces­ sion in 1966 did not help much, either. Emerging conflicts over government fiscal policy in 1966—­such a univer­ sal issue as whether the government should meet budget shortfalls by raising taxes or by cutting spending—­combined with longer-­term and more general dissatisfactions.1 As a result, perhaps few were really surprised when the FDP resigned from the governing coalition in October 1966, leaving Erhard with a minority government that lasted only ten days. For a long time, there had been talk about a so-­called “grand coalition” between the CDU/CSU and the SPD. Since their 1959 congress in Bad Godesberg, SPD strategists had imagined a temporary grand coalition as a good way to introduce the SPD into power for the first time. To be sure, some critics were skeptical that a grand coalition ful­ filled the requirements of  democracy, which they believed demands a vigorous opposition. A grand coalition, for some, was too close a jump to single-­party rule. Nevertheless, the CDU/CSU viewed it as a time to regroup, and indeed 1. The CDU/CSU advocated raising taxes, which was also the position of the SPD. The FDP—­the party of  laissez-­faire liberalism—­advocated scaling back.

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hoped that it would mean the permanent demise of the FDP. So when Kurt-­ Georg Kiesinger (CDU) assumed the chancellorship of  a coalition government made up of  the CDU/CSU and the SPD in November 1966, virtually everyone viewed it as a temporary solution. Though he had, during the founding years of the Federal Republic, gained a reputation as a gentleman and committed democrat, Kiesinger’s past proved to be a significant stumbling block. Kiesinger had joined the Nazi party in 1933. And unlike others whose early membership was explained as idealism, and exonerated through a break with the regime, Kiesinger had remained in the party and been active in government throughout the Nazi period. Dur­ ing the war he had worked in the Reich Broadcasting Corporation, ultimately as deputy division leader of the Political Division, as well as in the Foreign Ministry under  Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had been condemned to death at Nuremberg. Though originally interned by the Americans for his connec­ tion to Ribbentrop, Kiesinger was quickly released, and he began his politi­ cal career in the CDU in the southwestern region of Germany. From 1949 to 1959 he served in the Bundestag, and then he became minister-­president of Baden-­Württemberg. In an interesting analysis, Alfred Grosser (1991, 43) has argued that Kie­ singer and his SPD foreign minister, Willy Brandt, complemented and indeed absolved each other symbolically. That is, Brandt had impeccable credentials as an opponent of the Nazis, though he was accused by some of  being a traitor because he had spent the war years in exile. By contrast, nobody questioned Kiesinger’s patriotism, though his connections to the Nazis were a clear liabil­ ity. By their mutual willingness to work together closely at the helm of the government, Grosser argues, they provided each other with the necessary absolution and thus legitimation. Brandt and Kiesinger, however, also made an effective combination in the foreign policy arena. During the 1950s, Kie­ singer had been one of the few conservatives who had questioned Western-­ integrationist policy lines; his interest in recognizing the European status quo thus fit well with the SPD’s ideas about Ostpolitik (policy towards the East), and were a strong indicator of the important changes that the grand coalition engendered or at least foreshadowed. The new administrative challenges at this point thus included concerns about the democracy of a grand coalition, as well as concerns about the division of Germany as a legacy of the war. In his only Regierungserklärung, Kiesinger thus began by reassuring his audience that the grand coalition would only be temporary. He did this in re­ sponse to fears that such an arrangement would concentrate power too much:

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The concerns of  many apply to the dangers of  a grand coalition, to which only a relatively small opposition is opposed. . . . In this coalition, no power and ben­ efits will be divided between the partners, no deplorable state of affairs covered up, nor will the power of parliamentary life be crippled through behind-­the-­ scenes deals. . . . The strongest defense against a possible misuse of power is the solid will of the partners of the grand coalition to carry on this arrangement only until the end of the legislative period.

In an interesting harbinger of an argument for the normalcy of politics in the Federal Republic that prevailed later in the rhetoric of the “normal nation” of the 1980s, Kiesinger grounded the reason for forming the coalition in ordinary problems of  governance that Germany shared with other countries: “These are all requirements of private and public good in our country as in every other.” Nonetheless, he also pointed out the unusual burdens borne by the German economy due to the war: “The Federal Republic employs more of its gross national product for social payments than any other country. This is not the bravado of  being well-­off; we have to devote billions for war victims, expellees, and refugees—­a consequence of war losses and of the great birth deficiencies during both world wars and the economic crisis of 1932.” He warned as well about the dangers of overspending for past-­oriented matters: “The legislation over the settlement of war and postwar consequences must be brought to an end. The financial situation of  the Federation proves that important matters of provision for the future would be severely neglected if the coming years were burdened by new payments for the past.” This was in stark contrast to the early Adenauer years, in which initiatives to administer the legacies of the war were at the top of an aggressive legislative agenda, though similar to them in the effort made to limit the length of  time during which such legacies would be consequential. In terms of  administration, Erhard’s earlier declaration that the postwar period was over was clearly consolidating. The major new initiative of the grand coalition under Kiesinger, though, was the new policy towards the East, and the new philosophy of how to se­ cure Germany’s collective national future. In his Regierungserklärung, then, Kiesinger focused much of his attention on this new Ostpolitik. Interestingly, he couched this issue partly in an older geographical language: “Germany was for hundreds of years the bridge between Western and Eastern Europe. We would like to fulfill this task in our time as well. It is therefore very im­ portant to us to improve the relationship with our Eastern neighbors, who have the same wish, in all areas of economic, cultural, and political life, and,

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wherever this is possible, to take up diplomatic relations as well.” In contrast to Adenauer’s strategy, this sounded as if the “third way”—­a concept with a long and complicated history, especially in the Nazi lexicon—­had gotten fresh energy. Revisiting but also revising older tropes of German victimhood, Kiesinger grounded the desire for improved relations on the basis of Germany’s special understanding of Eastern Europe’s painful history, which it got from its own painful division. Of  Germany’s own involvement in Eastern Europe’s dark his­ tory there was no mention. “In wide circles of the German people there exists an active desire for a rapprochement with Poland,” Kiesinger said, “whose sorrowful history we have not forgotten, and whose desire to finally live in a state area with secure borders we understand better than in earlier times, in light of the present fate of our own divided people.” In regard to Czechoslo­ vakia, Kiesinger balanced its suffering (inflicted by Germany, though that was mentioned only in passing) against the suffering of  German expellees from the Sudetenland (German-­speaking regions of Czechoslovakia), to argue that it was time to put all of this into the past: The German people wants to reach an understanding with Czechoslovakia as well. The federal government condemns the policies of Hitler which were di­ rected towards the destruction of the Czechoslovakian state federation. It ag­rees with the interpretation that the [1937] Munich Accords, which came into being under threat of  violence, are no longer valid.

Nevertheless, there were important matters of  injury to Germany that required attention: At the same time, there are still problems that require a solution; for example, that of rights of citizenship. We are conscious of, and take seriously, our guard­ ian duty towards our Sudeten-­German countrymen, as towards all other ex­ pellees and refugees. These expellees have, like the Czechoslovakian people before them, experienced bitter suffering and injustice. It is important to the federal government to end this dismal chapter of the history of our peoples, and to bring about a relationship of trusting neighbors.

German responsibility for the divisions in Europe and the suffering of East European peoples was thus once again negated through an equal and opposite suffering of  the German people. Indeed, in 1990, after the fall of  communism in Czechoslovakia, Czech President Vaclav Havel met with West German leader

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Helmut Kohl and apologized—­against the will of most Czechs—­for the expul­ sions. This later event, however, was tied up with very different circumstances and issues than were at play during the grand coalition of the mid-­Sixties. As we will see later, the Ostpolitik of the social-­liberal era to follow would be a bit more remorseful than this. We will also examine the shifting importance of the ethnic expellee associations in West German politics, which were a major force at times, and whose claims often served as an occasion for leaders to portray Germany as a victim. In his speech, nevertheless, Kiesinger entered a geographical discussion again in the context of relations with France and the coming together of Europe: Out of the facts of European geography, and out of the balance of the history of our continent, there arises under the conditions of the present an especially high measure of agreement of interest of both our peoples and countries. . . . With France we support a reconstitution of the historically grown European family of peoples, a goal that includes the ending of the contrahistorical and unnatural tearing apart of our people.

One is reminded of the older catastrophe trope: The process appears here as an ineluctable force of nature. In order to further justify the pursuit of rap­ prochement with the East, Kiesinger raised concerns about public percep­ tions of  German collective identity in light of  political realities. After more than twenty years of division, the concern that the citizenries of the two states (East and West Germany) would lose their sense of shared identity was not an unreasonable one: “We want to prevent, as much as it is in our hands, that the two parts of our people grow apart during the division. We want to relax and not harden, to overcome trenches and not deepen them. We therefore want to support with all powers human, economic, and spiritual relations with our countrymen in the other part of Germany.” Thus, in contrast to Heuss and other earlier speakers for whom national identity was obvious, even a conser­ vative like Kiesinger was forced to recognize that this identity was a contingent social product. Kiesinger also mentioned relations elsewhere in the world. In regard to Arab states, he invoked the formula of “the traditional cooperation” that had recently broken down so badly. He also mentioned relations with Israel, start­ ing with the standard incantation: “Under misuse of the name of our people, horrible crimes were committed against  Jewish people.” Kiesinger continued, “This made our relation to Israel problematic and difficult. It was improved

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and advanced through the establishment of diplomatic relations. The federal government will continue on this path.” The concern for German unity and, as part of this, the desire to break out of the East-­West division—­as well as an emphasis on Germany’s geographi­ cal situation between East and West ( perhaps implying that Germany was not part of the so-­called community of  Western values)—­had often been associated with varying degrees of nationalism. Kiesinger was therefore careful to quell fears that the new Ostpolitik was anything of the sort. “This is not the birth hour of a new nationalism in Germany,” he said; “not in this government, not in this high house, and not in our people!” But he did not explain why not. He followed this statement with validating election results.

Value Shift In 1969, the Federal Republic and its Basic Law became twenty years old. This anniversary was important not only because of its numerical roundness but because the voices of fundamental criticism in the Federal Republic were be­ coming louder, better organized, and more persuasive. These were the early years of a so-­called great value shift—­from concerns like material and military security to “post-­material interests” like lifestyle, environment, and health—­ that was observed across the entire Western world (Ingelhart 1990; Baker, Dal­ ton, and Hildebrandt 1981). Of course, any shift of this sort required sufficient prosperity, such that material interests were already reasonably satisfied: it is hard to think about ecology and similar issues when one is starving. But these cultural changes were not just a reflection of increasing material well-­being; they involved the younger generation challenging the moral status quo of the world their parents had built. And it is easy to understand how much more divisive such challenges would be in West Germany, where the world of the older generation was even more clearly suspect—­for its early guilt (the Nazi period) and for its later imputed continuities (the Adenauer years). Indeed, Kiesinger’s years as chancellor were marked by frequent and in­ creasing student and general unrest, often in the form of sharp criticisms that the Basic Law reproduced earlier social structures, and was thus a continua­ tion of trends that were seen to be essential causes of the Nazi regime, rather than the break with that regime it was claimed to be (Huster 1972). To be sure, the charge that the early Federal Republic represented more of a restoration of than a break with problematic German traditions had already been artic­ ulated—­and not only by Kurt Schumacher—­at the founding of the republic (Olick 2005), as already mentioned repeatedly in earlier chapters.

The Grand Coalition and the Wider World  245

One particularly contentious issue was that of emergency powers legis­ lation, which leaders of the Federal Republic had been debating for years, though the Spiegel Affair had certainly revived concern. The problem was that many on the left were concerned that any such legislation would lead to the same window of opportunity that had enabled Hitler to seize power. Despite continued protests, this act was finally pushed through during the grand coa­ lition. As a result of criticisms surrounding these measures, speeches on the twentieth anniversary of the Basic Law were especially defensive. In his twentieth-­anniversary speech, for instance, Minister of the Interior Ernst Benda (CDU) repudiated criticisms that because the Basic Law had been approved only by the Land (state) parliaments and not by a plebiscite, it was therefore illegitimate. Benda argued that this argument had no basis because the Basic Law had been overwhelmingly approved by the popula­ tion at large by their participation and choice of democratic parties in five fed­ eral elections. Furthermore, Benda argued, criticisms of the Basic Law were inconsistent: In the first years of its applicability it was occasionally complained that the fathers of the Basic Law, under the impression of their own experiences with the rise of the NS [National Socialist] domination, in part distanced themselves too far from the Weimar Constitution, while recently the criticism has become public that they remained Weimarers in too high a measure.

The founding generation of the Federal Republic seemed caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of  Weimar’s positive (democratic) and negative (unsta­ ble) valuations. Kiesinger, in his speech on the Basic Law, therefore argued, “Never has our people had a more just constitution than this one. And who­ ever would want to damn it as a whole would first have to prove that he has a better one ready.” In contrast to the bulwark mentality that informed the founding speakers of the Federal Republic in contexts like the Parliamentary Council and immedi­ ately after, various speakers on these occasions now argued for the acceptabil­ ity of some forms of continuity. For instance, Minister for Affairs of the States and of the Bundesrat Carlo Schmid (SPD), some of whose statements we have already discussed, talked about the continuous sovereignty of the people, not destroyed or discredited through Nazi acts: “The sovereignty of the German people—­that is something different from the sovereignty of a state apparatus arising out of it—­did not in its substance perish, either through the collapse of the National Socialist power apparatus, or through the military capitulation, or

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through the assumption of the exercise of supreme power in Germany by the occupation authorities.” This is certainly a rather abstract understanding of sovereignty! At the same time, in his statement Chancellor Kiesinger referred to the desire to lose German identity in a European identity: “Some at that time may have wanted in this turn towards Europe to escape their own national history, which was perceived as being misguided, as well as a dismal present.” Nonetheless, Kiessinger asserted, “These twenty years of the Federal Republic of Germany are only a short segment in the long history of our people.” A new view of  history, and new demarcation of ruptures, was thus underway. In his speech on the twentieth anniversary of the Republic, Foreign Min­ ister Willy Brandt went one step farther. In a direct comparison to the found­ ing fathers of the Republic, he said: “They looked into the past and tried to arrange for a Germany that would take its place in the peaceful community of peoples, that would value the international law higher than national power—­ for a Germany in which basic rights and basic freedoms would be respected and could be realized.” But he added a momentous admission: “In this regard we have to work as though the Federal Republic were final; for only then will we who have the luck, the chance, the task of freedom give the nation and Europe the best that we have to give.” If the demand for reunification was not entirely given up with this admission, it was certainly widely displaced. No longer characterized as temporary, the state thus required longer roots.

T h e A dv e n t o f t h e M o r a l N at i o n According to the historian Eberhard Pikart, presidential elections in West Germany had a “seismographic character” (Baring 1982, 27). This is not be­ cause the position of president itself was so powerful; its power was mainly symbolic, and though very important, it only indirectly impacted or broadly framed day-­to-­day political debates. Nor were these elections just moments, as Baring (1982) described them, where current or new political tendencies revealed themselves. Presidential elections could also, in the process of mobi­ lizing new factions, actually produce or increase their power. This observa­ tion fits well with the understanding of the state’s political culture outlined in chapter 2 of this book. Perhaps the most extreme, and arguably the most important, example of this “seismographic character” was seen in the 1968 presidential election. As Baring’s authoritative account shows (Baring had unprecedented access be­ hind the scenes), the months leading up to this election were a watershed for West German politics and society, though key aspects of it occurred behind

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closed doors. The main issue was how members of the Free Democratic Party (FDP, or Liberals) would vote. The party was torn between at least two fac­ tions: one leaning towards their traditional concerns for free-­market economics, and thus towards reestablishing connections with the conservative CDU/CSU, and another more concerned with libertarian values and a new détente with the East, which was leaning toward possible association with the SPD. The election for the third federal president also came a bit ahead of sched­ ule, due to President Lübke’s early retirement. Lübke had never been very popular, and his increasing age, illness, and concomitant feebleness of mind and body were becoming greater and greater. And there were the claims about his past as well. These combined factors were solid reasons for him to retire early, though he had resisted the idea for a long time. When he finally announced his retirement, he gave as his reason the importance of keeping the elec­tion of the president separate from the general federal elections for the Bundestag, as both had been originally scheduled for 1969. While quite interesting, the details of the FDP’s decision making process are too complicated to go into here. The main point is that the FDP’s new leader, Walter Scheel, managed to assemble a small but sufficient number of FDP votes for the SPD candidate, Gustav Heinemann.2 In the process, the ba­ sis for FDP cooperation with the SPD was established. The election of  Heine­ mann marked an important change in another more substantive respect as well. In comparison not only to his predecessor Lübke but to many other political leaders in the first decades of the Federal Republic, Heinemann represented a highly moralistic position, sometimes even to the point of impracticality. Ac­ cording to Bark and Gress (1989, vol. 2, 140), “Heinemann, as head of state, represented the victory of the new moralism and the new faith in atonement and guilt as the way to pursue reconciliation and a just society.” In exactly what ways this was true, however, remains to be seen. As Willy Brandt later wrote in his book People and Politics (1976), Heinemann distinguished himself, and fit with Brandt’s own views, in his “desire to face up to the facts of history and the need for reconciliation.” But which facts of  history, and reconciliation with whom? 2. This required going to the third round of voting (in which a simple majority was finally accepted), and included the defection votes of a number of CDU members. Within the CDU there had been significant debate over whom to nominate. The choice was between a so-­called grand coalition candidate (the Catholic Georg Leber) and a more traditional candidate (Ger­ hard Schröder, who had been Adenauer’s foreign minister). As voices opposing the continua­ tion of the grand coalition won out, so did Schröder.

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During the first years of the Federal Republic, Heinemann was a prominent member of the CDU and was minister of the interior until October 1950, when he resigned from both his position and his party in protest over the Adenauer government’s ideas about rearmament and a strong unified Western defense. Heinemann had been a prominent lay figure in the Protestant church, and was motivated by a strong conscience about the failures of the past and the dangers of the present, and was therefore both a neutralist and a pacifist. In order to oppose Adenauer’s policy, Heinemann had joined with other Protestant moral leaders, like Pastor Martin Niemöller, to found the ill-­fated All-­German Peoples’ Party (GVP), which advocated neutrality.3 But when that party did badly in the 1953 federal elections and fell apart, Heinemann joined the SPD and lobbied vociferously against nuclear weapons of all kinds as being immoral for all purposes. In the grand coalition he was appointed minister of justice, and he remained in that office until his election to the presidency. In his memoir, Brandt (1976, 227) pointed to a major benefit Heinemann produced for the SPD: “He was accounted a symbol of  liberal constitutionalism and, as such, won the sympathies of our restive and uneasy younger generation.” In his inaugural address on  July 1, 1969, Heinemann’s moral message came through in subtle but important differences. More so than either of his prede­ cessors or, for that matter, any other leading figure in any such general address to that point, Heinemann called for contemplating the burdens of the past. And he argued for a sense of personal responsibility: Our people can look to a lot from our history that can fill us with joy and self­confidence. It is not a little that we have contributed to the enrichment of mankind. But under the misuse of the name of our people, the calamity of the Second World War was unleashed. Only when we do not release ourselves from the question of how it could have come to this most horrible chapter of National Socialism will other peoples no longer be able to hold this chapter against us.

Immediately noticeable, of course, is that despite the ostensibly different mes­ sage and prominence given this issue, the grammatical forms and essential tropes remain the same. Though Heinemann was arguing that domestic intro­ spection was important, the implication here and in so many other speeches was once again that the ultimate reference was Germany’s reputation. 3. Mark Cioc (1988, 15) has argued that one reason for Heinemann’s concern over the divi­ sion of Germany was that “it caused a de facto division within the Protestant Church.”

The Grand Coalition and the Wider World  249

Though Heinemann’s formulation pushed a bit harder on the importance of German introspection, and though it included a rare direct mention of the Jews (rare for such a context—­an inauguration), Heinemann added the by now stereotypical balancing glance at German suffering as well: For the sake of the millions of  Jews and the further millions of war dead all over the world, in addition to those from our own people and those belonging to the victims of the National Socialist terror, of war, and finally of the expulsion from house and land, this history cannot be repeated. When the war was fi­ nally over in 1945 and, following the words of  Theodor Heuss, the paradox oc­ curred that we were simultaneously saved and destroyed, the occasion should have become one for renewal.

But Heinemann stuck to the main message, despite these de rigeur defenses, saying that “even after all the material reconstruction and, above all, progres­ sive generational change, enlightenment from our own history is still needed for the sake of our own future.” But that enlightenment was a guide to future action, not a mourning of past actions. Heinemann thus outlined the moral impulse to new postures, both inter­ nationally as well as domestically. “Twenty-­four years after the Second World War,” he said, “we still stand before the task of bringing ourselves to an un­ derstanding with our Eastern neighbors.” In the spirit of the times, but also consistently with his own history, he encouraged fairly radical questioning of ba­sic values: “Everywhere authority and tradition have to submit to questions about their justification.” Also, he said, “Some are still attached to the authori­ tarian state. It was our misfortune long enough, and it led us ultimately into the fate of the Third Reich.” Heinemann thus seemed to be subtly crediting not only arguments about a continuity from Bismarck to Hitler, but arguments about a continuity to the Adenauer era as well, referencing those still attached to the authoritarian state. In a statement that foreshadowed an important comment made later by Brandt, Heinemann argued further that his election, or at least the broad social changes of the time, marked the real break in German history, implying again that the Adenauer era had been significantly continuous with the past. “We stand only at the beginning of the first truly free period of our history,” he said. “Free democracy must finally become the life element of our society.” All in all, however elliptical the formulations may have been, he acknowledged that the importance of the past was as a moral lesson to the present and future. Hein­ mann was certainly not a doomsayer, but much more the moral progressive;

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introducing a term that later would become quite common (e.g., Greiffenha­ gen and Greiffenhagen 1979), he continued, “There are difficult fatherlands [schwierige Vaterländer]. One of them is Germany. But it is our fatherland. We live here and work here. We therefore want to make our contribution to the one humanity with this and through this, our country.” A country, it seemed, was the place where one lived and worked; the moral context was “the one humanity.” This was a significant departure from the still-­Romantic notions of the nation we saw in the first two decades after 1945 (though not in Adenauer’s rhetoric, which expressed an unusual disdain for nationalism). We notice here as well, however, Heinemann’s implied comparison with other “difficult fa­ therlands.” The acceptance of German moral problems was tied up—­even for Heinemann, the supposed great moralist—­with a defensive posture of unwill­ ingness for Germans to face unique guilt alone as a people. Always, there was a relativization.

Heinemann’s Humanism The speech Heinemann gave on September 1, 1969, the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the war, was markedly different from those given on previous anniversaries. Early on, Heinemann said, in contrast to previous speakers, “It is no longer necessary to go into the history of the origin of the Second World War. It is obvious.” Nonetheless, he did provide a brief sketch. Like the previ­ ous speeches given on this occasion, it identified the problem as having been Hitler. But it referred to rather different elements of Hitler’s intention: Since the Twenties, Hitler had spoken, agitated, incited, and written that so­ lution of the Jewish question and German domination over the neighboring Slavic peoples all the way into Russia were essential for him. Danzig and the corridor were only a prelude to the greater German Reich’s program of plac­ ing Germanic masters over the so-­called Slavic low-­lifes [Untermenschen].

Thus it finally was not Hitler’s effect on Germans that took pride of place, but his racism. The  Judeocide, Heinmeann implied, was clearly not an unfortunate by-­product of other plans. Heinemann also referred to the Hitler-­Stalin pact, saying that at the time it provided clear evidence that “our people was being led into a misadven­ ture.” After having introduced these essential points—­while claiming that it was not necessary to go into them—­he added that it was also “superfluous to speak about the result of the war.” This sounded more like an argument than a

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statement of fact. For earlier speakers for whom “the German catastrophe”—­ the postwar devastation of a once great nation—­was central, this was a real departure. Like his predecessors, Heinemann grouped all the victims together, though, as was usual for German commentators, he culminated in the German suffer­ ing. Different here, however, was the claim that the suffering continued, while also being of a piece with earlier suffering: “But we do not want to forget that more than fifty-­five million people in the whole world lost their lives in the Second World War. Even more people all over the world lost their homelands [Heimat] as expellees and emigrants. Just from the areas behind the Oder and Neiße and the rest of Eastern Europe, seventeen million German people were met with this fate.” As long as this and the division of the German people and of Europe continued, he said, the “final end of the National Socialist misad­ venture is not to be foreseen.” Unlike previous speakers on this occasion, Heinemann did not spend se­ rious attention on issues of context, guilt, or responsibility for the past; and this raises the question of why he was conventionally seen as a great moralist about the past. The answer is that his moral message was at the highest, most general level. He was much more concerned with the future; questions about the future of world peace, he said, would not be answered if “we do not come to a rapprochement with all of our neighbors and produce new trust in each other.” He said that whatever the past suffering in Poland and in Germany may have been—­in Poland at the hands of the German invaders, in Germany as a result of expulsions—­“in this way nothing can get around the fact that it can­ not remain as it is between Poland and us. It is also necessary here to finally close up the trenches so tightly that no one can break in anymore.” One way in which Heinemann proposed to create a solid foundation for world peace was to inquire scientifically into the nature of peace and hostility. He called for setting up large-­scale peace research projects. According to him, the is­ sues were of the most general human nature. Thus, Germany’s problems were humanity’s problems.

Daring More Democracy The federal election results from September 28, 1969, were by no means deci­ sive. The CDU/CSU lost about two points, the SPD gained about three, and, most dramatically, the FDP lost four (about 40 percent of its vote). To the relief of  many in West Germany and elsewhere, the ultra-­right-­wing National Demo­ cratic Party (NPD) received only 4.3 percent of the vote, thus barely missing

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the 5 percent of votes required for getting seats in the Bundestag. So almost any sort of coalition was numerically possible. But through decisive, if risky, maneuvering, Willy Brandt (SPD) worked with Walter Scheel (FDP) to put together a shaky agreement that would give an SPD/FDP coalition government a tiny majority of five votes.4 On October 21, 1969, the reins of government thus shifted to a completely new constellation in the Federal Republic. The central legitimacy claim of West German governance also shifted, from an emphasis on reliability to an emphasis on a generalized morality—­about the past, but also about Germany’s present place in the world, and the special insights it had gained from its own experiences. From all sides it was acknowledged as a momentous change in the history of  West Germany. The SPD referred to it as the real beginning of West German history, as the real break with the past. According to Brandt, the coming to power of the SPD meant that Hitler had finally lost the war (Glaser 1990, vol. 3, 90). The conservatives, of course, viewed it with more suspicion, but as something  just as significant. In general political language, it came to be known as the Machtwechsel or “change of power.” In response to the earlier election of  Heinemann as president, the conservative leader of the CSU, Franz-­ Josef Strauß, caused quite a stir in this new context by substituting the word Machtergreifung for Machtwechesel. Machtergreifung means “power grab,” and was of course the usual term for Hitler’s rise to power on  January 30, 1933, through invocation of the Enabling Act. The play on words was considered more than inappropriate because the due and legal election of a president in a democratic state was surely different from Hitler’s rise, and also because it implied an analogy between Heinemann and Hitler, which was surely absurd and intended as a vicious provocation, particularly from the architect of the Spiegel Affair. Brandt’s first Regierungserklärung, delivered on October 28, 1969, was markedly different in tone as well as content from those of his predecessors. Its main message was the call for the Federal Republic to “dare more democ­ racy” in all spheres of political and social life. As part of this, it laid out a wide-­ ranging progressive agenda for reorganizing West German society (or at least

4. In addition to dissenting voices in the FDP, SPD leaders Herbert Wehner and Helmut Schmidt were wary of the deal, both because of the coalition’s potentially paralyzing fragility and because they were hesitant to compromise with the FDP. There were also concerns that the narrow majority might fail at the actual vote in the Bundestag, and that such a defeat would irreparably damage the reputation of the SPD and its leadership.

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for acknowledging the changes that had already occurred), as well as for in­ creasing opportunities for grass-­roots participation in power. Brandt began by saying that the policy of his government would “stand under the banner of continuity and under the banner of renewal.” As far as continuity, he was referring both to the Ostpolitik overtures of the grand coali­ tion (which were mostly SPD initiatives with Brandt as foreign minister) and to the democratic traditions he associated with German social democracy. In regard to the latter, he said, “The strict regard for the forms of parliamentary democracy is obvious for political communities that have fought for German democracy for a good hundred years, defended it at great sacrifice, and rebuilt it with great effort.” Brandt was clearly talking about the Social Democrats, echoing the views of their postwar leader Kurt Schumacher. As we saw, Schu­ macher believed that because the SPD was the only party that had continued from the time before the Nazis and that had earned a solid reputation for its costly opposition, it was entitled to lead the government in the Federal Repub­ lic. As its accession to power had become possible only after twenty years of conservative leadership, Brandt argued, “We stand not at the end of our de­ mocracy; we are  just correctly beginning.” Brandt also took a somewhat different tone than previous leaders in refer­ ring to the dangers of extremism. The ultra-­right wing had become a greater problem during the grand coalition, with the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) winning seats in state parliaments and again, in 1969, missing election to the Bundestag only by a small margin. Brandt addressed this: “I thank the voters for the unambiguous rejection of extremism, which it is still necessary to fight.” While acknowledging that extremism could still be a problem—­something Adenauer had always absolutely denied—­Brandt nev­ ertheless called the voters’ rejection of extremism “unambiguous.” By the same token, Brandt’s acknowledgment of the work still to be done was in fairly di­rect contrast to Adenauer’s claims, particularly the ones made in 1959 and 1960. The overwhelming message of Brandt’s address, however, was one of change, indeed a celebration of the very possibility of change, for the peaceful transfer of power is an achievement for any young state: “Our parliamentary democracy has, twenty years after its founding, proven its ability to change, and has thereby stood its test.” Part of the change, according to Brandt, re­ sulted from straightforward temporal social-­structural processes. And the most important such process he pointed to was the generational shift that im­ plied an altered relation to the past: “We turn to the generation that grew up in peace, and which is not and may not be burdened with the obligations of the older generation.” This, then, was a new form of exculpation, though there

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had already been hints in Adenauer’s earlier references to youth, as well as re­ visions of the rules about who was subject to denazification in the late Forties and early Fifties. Nonetheless, Brandt used these burdens of the older generation, the lega­ cies of Nazism, as a formative  justification for the new foreign policy towards the East. In the context of a call to peace with Eastern European neighbors, he thus asserted that “we are ready for an honest attempt, so that the conse­ quences of the evil [Unheil ] that a criminal clique brought over Europe can be overcome.” Here again is a disclaimer of responsibility by assigning it to a narrowly identifiable group. Also, here all of Europe is grouped together as victim. But the view is intended as a progressive one that leads to a new order for the future: “I want to say just as unmistakably that we are prepared for the agreements, in regard to our immediate neighbor Czechoslovakia, that lead beyond the past.” The challenges of administration that at first had been domestic were now clearly international, a logical next step for a state with reemerging sovereignty. Another new element was that Brandt appeared for the first time to ac­ knowledge that Germany’s activities in the Third Reich had played some role in the division of Germany, rather than implying, as had his predecessors, that the division and population resettlements were somehow unrelated or were inexplicable acts of revenge for Germany’s aggression: “This govern­ ment assumes that the questions that arise for the German people out of the Second World War and out of the national betrayal through the Hitler regime may be finally answered only in a European peace arrangement,” Brandt said. “Nevertheless, no one can convince us that the Germans have no right to self-­ determination like all other peoples.” Indeed, Brandt, like Kiesinger before him, expressed a concern about the endurance of the sense of peoplehood that would serve as a foundation for such a claim to self-­determination. Unlike in earlier speeches, in which that identity was grounded simply as a category of nature, the continued integrity of a German identity concept now required more detailed defense. This idea had already found expression at the beginning of the grand coa­ lition (1966) in the establishment of an annual speech to be delivered by the chancellor to the Bundestag entitled “Report on the State of the Nation in Divided Germany.” From the time Brandt took over in 1969, the last three words were dropped, to avoid the air of complaint they raised. They were returned, however, when the Christian Democrats under Helmut Kohl re­ turned to power in 1982. Another manifestation of concern for the basis of collective German identity was the series of reports the Brandt government

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commissioned in connection with these speeches, which sought to investi­ gate social-­scientifically the foundations of  German identity. In these materials, there was again a turn from more traditional ideas about the naturalness and inevitability of German identity—­grounded in very Germanic concepts of the Volk and the cultural nation (Kulturnation) associated with nineteenth-­century Romanticism—­to an emphasis on the attitudes of individuals toward collec­ tive identities measured through survey methods, more associated with the Western, liberal tradition of consensual democracy derived from the French Revolution. In his Regierungserklärung, Brandt thus argued for the importance of main­ taining national identity, which could no longer be assumed since he did not derive it from nature: It is the task of practical politics in the years that now lie in front us to preserve the unity of the nation by releasing the relationship between the parts of Ger­ many from the present tension. The Germans are bound not only through their language and their history, with their brilliance and misery [Glanz und Elend]; we are all at home in Germany. We also still have common tasks and common responsibilities for peace between ourselves and in Europe. Twenty years af­ ter the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR [German Democratic Republic], we must prevent a further growing apart of the German nation, so as to try to move from regulated coexistence to cooperation.

Brandt’s solution, however, was not simply to keep asserting the West’s right to speak for all Germans, but to work with the realities of division. Recogniz­ ing East Germany now seemed like a way of  preserving national identity, not abandoning it. Ostpolitik was not merely an obligation from the past, but a way to preserve the nation in the present and future. Here it is also important to note that, beginning in the grand coalition and increasing in Brandt’s government, West German leaders were relaxing the vocabulary they used in referring to East Germany. So terms like the “Zone,” “Pankow regime,”5 or “powers in the East” receded, and West German lead­ ers for the first time began to use the name “German Democratic Republic (GDR)” or refer to “East Germany.” In the process, they symbolically con­ ferred some legitimacy or at least recognition on the de facto other German state, much to the chagrin of their political opponents. 5. Pankow was the borough of Berlin in which the offices of the East German regime were headquartered.

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The New Ostpolitik Following solidification of peace with the West—­beginning with rearmament in the context of rapprochement with France, through the end of occupation and the granting of sovereignty, to the faithful support of  Western integration even at the possible cost to national unity—­West Germany thus turned to­ wards the East, though it took a change of government to make this possible. Relations with the East, in turn, involved somewhat different historical bur­ dens than relations with the West, due both to the different outlook of the new leadership and to the different historical realities. While Adenauer and his ministers could deploy images of a European civil war—­of an arch-­antipathy between France and Germany, with aggression on both sides over a long historical period—­Nazi Germany’s attack on Poland and its invasion of the Soviet Union were now viewed more unequivocally as being in the category of  “unprovoked.” One could not so easily discount them as mere episodes in a long-­standing mutual belligerence. Indeed, the Nazis had broken an explicit nonaggression treaty with the Soviets. Also, during the Adenauer years it was often argued that while Nazi Ger­ many’s attacks were certainly unprovoked and unjust, their burden was miti­ gated both by the subsequent expulsions of ethnic Germans from the East and by the Soviet Union’s continued belligerence after the war. The new turn eastward, however, precluded such arguments, strategically as well as morally. Strategically, the continued deployment of such arguments about the guilt of the East would have proved counterproductive; and morally, the Federal Republic’s leaders seemed more willing at this point to accept the guilt of German history in and of itself, without an accompanying glance at everyone else’s misdeeds. A crucial element of the new attitude towards the East, again, was the ac­ knowledgment that there was a causal connection between Germany’s aggres­ sion in the Second World War and its subsequent division, which reversed the outrage against the occupation of the immediate postwar period. This too marked an important difference between the reliable nation, which minimized causal connections, and the moral nation, which was ready to accept them. Adenauer and his colleagues had emphasized the injustice of  Germany’s treat­ ment at Soviet hands, as if it were a completely isolated matter. Brandt, how­ ever, acknowledged again and again that Germany’s postwar division—­and thus its attitude towards the East—­could not be divorced from its own mis­ deeds. As part of this, Brandt recognized the necessity of assuring Germany’s Eastern neighbors that they had nothing to fear from Germany. Unlike Ade­ nauer, he was not quick to assert Germany’s peaceful reliability as something

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obvious. For instance, Brandt said in a 1967 speech, when he was still foreign minister, that “one may pose the question of whether the Federal Republic of Germany has not given enough proof in the past twenty years of its reliability and its stability. And I would answer this question in the positive. But we may not deceive ourselves over the fact—­whether or not it is justified and obvious to us—­that the ice of trust is still thin.” Where earlier speakers had argued that any suspicion of  Germany was a scandalous outrage, Brandt thus brought understanding for those who were still skeptical, even though he was speaking fifteen years later than the others. It was in this spirit that he called for recog­ nizing “realities,” and for working from them. Indeed, in contrast to agreements with France and the other Western Allies, discussion and treaties with the East were prefaced with acknowledgments of Germany’s aggression and the East’s security interests. The treaty with Poland thus began as follows: “In consideration that more than twenty-­five years have passed since the Second World War, whose first victim Poland became and which brought heavy suffering over the peoples of  Europe . . . Recalling that in the meantime in both countries a new generation has grown up that should be secured a peaceful future . . . .” In his radio and television address from Po­ land, Brandt said that the treaty “should close a dark chapter of  European his­ tory. It should introduce a new chapter. The time has come for the Schlußstrich [final line] and for the new beginning. More than thirty years have gone by since the Second World War began with the German attack. The Polish peo­ ple had to suffer beyond all words.” This term Schlußstrich, of course, was a popular term that had been floating around since right after the war. It usually referred to drawing a line under the past—­that is, to letting the past be the past, and moving to a future unencumbered by it. It was often used to imply that too much attention was being paid to the past, and that it thus encumbered contemporary positions to an excessive degree. Of course, many had been us­ ing this term since the very beginning of the Federal Republic. Many in Ade­ nauer’s government had claimed that 1949 was the real Schlußstrich or zero hour. The time for Schlußstrich was always clear. It was also always changing. Another important feature of the treaty with Poland was West Germany’s acceptance of existing borders, something that no West German leader had yet offered. Vast segments of the West German public, as well as many politi­ cal leaders, especially conservatives, were of the opinion that the Potsdam Ac­ cords had unjustly denied Germany of approximately one-­third of its prewar territory. They found this unacceptable, especially in light of the fact that so many people had lost their traditional homelands and property—­to say noth­ ing of the many lives lost—­when Germans were expelled from these Eastern

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territories. The treaty thus included the following assurance for Poland of its territorial integrity in the eyes of the West German state: it recognized that “the inviolability of borders and the respect for the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of all states in Europe in their present borders are a funda­ mental condition for the peace.” Of course, the border between Germany and Poland was between East Germany and Poland, so the Federal Republic was pronouncing on borders that were not technically its own. This question of the border assurance figured prominently in a CSU court challenge to the treaties. The CSU, under Franz-­Josef Strauß, argued that such concessions violated the Basic Law’s call for no act of government that would compromise Ger­ many’s national unity. It lost this challenge. Nevertheless, Brandt had to somehow acknowledge the vast numbers of expellees for whom this treaty meant the end of all hope of recovering their homelands and properties. He therefore addressed in his speech the suf­ fering of these groups, and asked for their understanding and cooperation: The war and its consequences demanded from both peoples, us Germans too, boundless sacrifices. Now a peaceful future between the two countries and peo­ ples is at stake. Whoever lost their relatives, whoever had his homeland [Heimat] taken, will have a hard time forgetting. And we must have understanding and respect for a burden that is carried for all of us. Nevertheless, in this hour I must specifically ask the expelled [Heimatvertriebenen] countrymen not to persist in bitterness, but rather to direct their view to the future . . . . The treaty obviously does not mean that injustice is being legitimated after the fact. It also does not mean a justification of the expulsion.

Brandt went on to characterize the treaty as an attempt to end the “chain of injustice,” a chain whose links Brandt’s predecessors had strongly denied. The treaty did not, he said, demand new sacrifice: “This had to be made long ago as the result of the crimes of  Hitler.” Brandt said elsewhere in regard to the ter­ ritories the treaty was giving up, “We could not lose and have not lost anything that Hitler had not already gambled away.” The major point to observe here is that the status of specific German victimhood—­perhaps the overriding trope of the postwar decades—­had now been conspicuously displaced, though as always, this was as much a reaction to the earlier image as it was to the demands of the present.

Chapter 11

Social-­Liberal Guilt

While they would become very important in the 1980s, speeches concerning the end of the war on May 8, 1945—­central suffering occasions—­were, like those on other war dates, not given very often in the early years of the Federal Republic. Yet it was a very early speech—­technically one given before the founding of the Federal Republic—­that identified the basic issue for Germany arising out of the May 8 surrender. We already saw the trope in Theodor Heuss’s 1955 speech celebrating the return of soveriegnty, in which Heuss referred to the paradox that May 8 was simultaneously a defeat and a liberation. We also saw that Heuss had already put it this way in his concluding speech to the Parliamentary Council on May 8, 1949, when he said: “In essence this eighth of May remains the most tragic and most questionable paradox of history for each of us. But why? Because we were at once saved and destroyed . . . .” Later speakers varied in the degree to which they embraced this paradox or inclined towards one side or the other, though they were always in some way responding to Heuss’s formulation. At the beginning of  West Germany, however, there was no official marking of the occasion, certainly no celebration. In the context of postwar depredations, few saw May 8 as an occasion for commemoration, despite Heuss’s careful assessment. Moreover, the third reading and final approval of the Basic Law coincided with the anniversary, overshadowing any urge towards commemoration. This is only one example of  what Peter Reichel (1995, 276) has referred to as “the grace of the calendar.” The tenth anniversary, in 1955, also saw no official commemoration. The political leadership was preoccupied with the end of the occupation and the return of sovereignty, which had taken place three days earlier, on May 5, 1955.

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Once again, contemporary events overshadowed the pull of recollection, though Heuss did link the two issues. As we already saw, moreover, the 1955 anniversary—­linked as it was to the return of sovereignty—­provided unique opportunities for synthesizing both defeat and liberation into a narrative more productive for the Federal Republic. The year 1945 had been a defeat, but 1955 could be seen as the beginning of  liberation. In his memoirs, for instance, Adenauer wrote of the 1955 occasion: “I considered the day of winning back sovereignty to be a great day in German history. Ten years before, Germany had collapsed and ceased to exist as a self-­governing state. It was the darkest hour of our fatherland” (Adenauer 1966: 432). This formulation preserved the advantages of defeat while implying the coming benefits of liberation. By separating the two sides of the trope onto different dates, it allowed for a proud place in the Western alliance and a new history of  West German diligence with­ out precluding complaints about the occupation years and the benefits of a victim identity. This formulation of the Federal Republic’s origins as a liberation (albeit a liberation from postwar occupation as much as from the Nazis) provides an important history for later May 8, 1945, speeches that de-­emphasize German suffering. The first official published statement of any size about May 8, 1945, after Heuss’s—­and the only one before the coalition changes of the mid-­1960s—­ was an unsigned article in the Bulletin in 1965, on the twentieth anniversary. This article also presented Heuss’s paradox as the defining feature of this date for Germans: “Re-­winning of freedom, and national collapse with all its consequences—­both are connected to this day.” It pointed out that the implica­ tion of the collapse was universal for all Germans, no matter what their rela­tion to the regime: “Whether victim, whether opportunist of the regime, all carried the legacy of Hitler.” The statement went on to argue that “no good German could have wished for the victory of the National Socialists. But the approval of the defeat as prerequisite for a worthy continued existence demanded the readiness to accept that all the hate fomented by the crimes of the regime also falls upon the innocent.” An interesting point made here was that “the actual defeat of Germany did not take place in 1945, but twelve years earlier . . . .” This acknowledgment, however, was not interpreted to mean that those who enabled January 30, 1933, were responsible for May 8, 1945. Rather, the two dates were separated so that Germans could be held responsible for the former but not the latter: “Dispassionate analysis acquits these people of criminal intention, but no one relieves them of the humiliating defeat of  January 30, 1933, and the eighth of May, 1945, confirms it simply for everyone to see.”

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Nevertheless, this unsigned statement also praised the turnaround that the leaders of the new republic were able to effect out of the ruins of their country. This reconstruction, it was argued, was founded upon values and a tradition that “had survived the fall,” thus supporting the claim that some German traditions were unsullied. With the re-­rooting of democracy, “the overemphasized centralism that was alien to the German essence disappeared whence it came.” In what way this centralism was alien to the German essence is oblique. Was the reference to the diversity of German regions? Just a few pages ago we heard President Heinemann refer to the Germans’ long-­standing propensity for authoritarian rule. As far as willingness to confront the crimes of the past, however, the commemorative May 8 statement argued it was a great accomplishment that the new leaders had confronted them calmly and without reverting to collective judgments, thus reminiscent of the debates surrounding denazification: And if the condemnation of war crimes also immediately remained reserved by the Allies, the German people showed themselves, in the areas in which they could act independently, decisively in favor of self-­purification [Selbstreinigung]. It is to the credit of the men and women entrusted with it that they resisted the attempt to punish the political mistake in addition to the criminal guilt and thereby to dig a trench through the entire people.

Again, “the political mistake” was the term used to describe—­and defend—­ voting for the Enabling Act in 1933, though here the reference seems to have been not to the act of a few parliamentarians who bore responsibility, but to the entire German people, and hence to have been a denial of collective guilt. The accusation that reeducation had gotten in the way of the more appropriate German confrontation with the past, while long-­standing, would receive renewed attention in the years to come. Nevertheless, this unsigned statement was very much within the earlier profile. The first major credited address to May 8, 1945, was the one made by President Heinemann in 1970, on the twenty-­fifth anniversary. In Heinemann’s pre­ sentation, however, May 8 appeared unequivocally as a day of liberation for the first time, thus moving away from Heuss’s ambivalence: We had to bear uncounted dark hours before the criminal tyranny of the National Socialists was taken from us. In the process, the entire measure of misdeeds that were committed by the National Socialists and the suffering, injuries,

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and meaningless death it had brought over millions of people in numerous nations became visible. We have had to live since then with this knowledge and to seek a new beginning.

Despite the move to an unequivocal liberation standpoint, the sense of  victim­ hood and the assertion of innocence was clearly maintained. Heinemann thus referred in passing to the many Germans who were “beguiled with devilish demagogy.” And he added a reference to the courageous members of the opposition. But his focus was on the present and future. Since the end of the war, according to Heinemann, Germany and the world had been pervaded by instability and insecurity, including the counterposed armaments of East and West Germany. Although West Germany had succeeded in a remarkable rebuilding and had decidedly rejected extremism, Heinemann found the job incomplete: “The largest task that was posed to us at the end of the Second World War remained [in the context of the balance of power] half undone. No one can regret this more painfully than the German people in their totality.” Heinemann therefore pointed to the future tasks for Germany and the world, in the process rhetorically moving away from the past: We know today that it does not lead forward to mourn what is lost, that it is now above all a matter of  bringing the task of reconciliation with the East to com­ pletion. This applies to those who themselves experienced the Second World War, with its horrors, as well as to the members of our young generation for whom this is only an historical memory but no longer a personal one.

Without spending significant time on attributing causes or describing histor­ ical realities that might be raised by what the anniversary commemorates, Heinemann pointed to the general imperatives of pursuing a politics of peace, and said that “war may never again arise from German ground. Only in that way can we stand up in the face of the meaningless death of all victims of the last war and the terror.” Here Heinemann grouped together the victims, as was common, though in a different way than conservative speakers did. Conservative speakers, both before and after Heinemann’s presidency, had always worked to establish that Germans were also victims, rather than just perpetrators (perhaps seeking some gain from this status, both in being released from burdens and in receiving benefits). Heinemann did not really seem all that concerned with the particularities of victimhood, taking from it only the broadest moral and policy imperative. Both strategies, however, had their exculpatory effects.

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Chancellor Brandt also delivered a significant address to the Bundestag on this occasion in 1970. And like Heinemann, he spoke much less about the past than about the present and future. Brandt began by stating the basic topic: The war begun by Hitler demanded the sacrifice of millions of people, of children, women and men, of prisoners and of soldiers of many nations. We commemorate them all in reverence. The suffering that their death brought, and the suffering the war had as a consequence, warn us not to forget the lessons of the past and to see the securing of peace as the highest goal of our politics.

Brandt then turned directly to this general goal of peace by discussing the pressing situations in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, thereby making clear that he saw the warning of the Second World War in many more dimensions than its German ones. While not quite as unequivocal as Heinemann, Brandt saw May 8 as predominantly a day of liberation: “What was felt by countless Germans in those days twenty-­five years ago, alongside both personal and national affliction, was for other peoples the liberation from foreign domination, from terror and fear. For the majority of Germans too there grew the chance for a new beginning, for the creation of a constitutional and democratic relation.” Nonetheless, said Brandt, 1945 was a most difficult time for Germany. He thus echoed Heinemann’s description of Germany as a “difficult fatherland,” and added, “Seldom was Germany a more difficult fatherland than in the year 1945.” One of Brandt’s main concerns while pursuing rapprochement with East Germany—­a policy that included admitting the existence of a second state—­ was again what implication the recognition would have for German national identity. While rejecting naturalistic categories of the “German people” or “nation,” as we saw, Brandt nonetheless placed great emphasis on the continued perception among the populace that some German national identity persisted. Indeed, in 1974, as already mentioned, in connection to its Report on the State of the Nation, the Brandt administration commissioned a thoroughgoing social-­scientific inves­tigation into how strong the sense of a common German nation was, a study that employed survey methods rather than interpretations of the German tradition (Schweigler 1974). Brandt thus characterized it as an achievement—­rather than a natural or historical inevitability—­that, despite the difficulties of 1945, the national perception was still strong. Brandt’s assertions of a continued national identity also went to his argument about the importance of rapprochement with the East. He argued that

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it was “just as necessary in the interest of peace as that with the West. In this perspective, we must apparently begin where we stood in 1945 or 1949 in regard to the West.” Said Brandt, “The two world wars of our century had their origins in the rivalries between the European powers.” This view he shared with his predecessors. The Federal Republic had therefore vigorously pursued European cooperation. Brandt called this pursuit “the most promising result of the tragic occurrences of the year 1945.” Ending the rivalry between West and East, he added, was “one of the most important prerequisites for the European peace order.” As a result, “it must be the goal of all European states, in the West and in the East. I [therefore] hope one will understand correctly when I say: Only a European peace order will be able to draw a final line [Schlußstrich] under the history that is, for us Germans, connected to the year 1945.” Brandt thus used this memorial occasion to argue for his general foreign policy agenda. And he constructed the anniversary as something of a resource for his position. It is interesting to note here that, despite assertions that it was the Adenauer period in which efforts to close off memory carried the day, here we have seen more prominent use of the Schlußstrich idea, at least in the administrative and policy realm. For Brandt, however, the Schlußstrich idea indicated a task yet to be completed rather than an already completed task that was continually being brought up.

Heinemann, Brandt, and the Jewish Question For purposes of comparison—­to earlier such speeches, to other May 8 speeches, and between Brandt and Heinemann—­it is interesting to examine Week of Brotherhood speeches by Heinemann and by Brandt, which, as always, required specific expiatory gestures. In his 1970 address, Heinemann spoke much more of general values than speakers in previous years had done. In the process, specific attention to the past receded, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. On the explicit side, Heinemann spoke again of generational changes, an increasingly common trope by this point: A thousand-­year-­long sorrowful history stands between Jews and Christians. Its worst chapter falls in our near present. While the progressing change of generations may also gradually let the immediacy of the occurrences in the Third Reich recede, these occurrences nevertheless remain an inextinguishable component of the history of our people, out of which those born after the fact cannot escape.

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265

Implicitly, the move away from the Nazi past came in the form of Heinemann’s theoretical generalization of the brotherhood principle. Instead of characterizing brotherhood as the specific overcoming of  Jewish-­Christian or Jewish-­ German antipathies, he said that “the demand for brotherhood has become almost a common property of humanitarian and political movements.” He placed this in the context of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789, which called for freedom, equality, and brotherhood. While freedom and equality can be legislated, he said, brotherhood is more complicated: After the experiences that lie behind us, we must doubt whether in practice there will ever be social orders and legal norms that will make brotherhood into a general and obvious behavioral norm of people. The task is thus so much more urgent to promote a better understanding and the consciousness of responsibility for fellow citizens and fellow people, and above all for the minorities who think and are different.

This formulation was emblematic for Heinemann: the lessons of the moral na­ tion were the most general. Heinemann’s call was thus for a broader-­reaching brotherhood than ever before, one including sympathy for and attention to minorities of all kinds—­so­ cial, political, religious, or otherwise. Dangers still existed, even if legal changes guaranteed freedom and some equalities: “In a free constitutional state, crimes and misdeeds—­as they occur in a regime of National Socialistic character with the approval and on the order of the rulers—­are impossible. But the guarantee of  basic rights through the constitution and free laws cannot prevent that also in a free society groups and above all minorities become pariahs of  public and nonpublic opinion.” The lessons were no longer about Germans and Jews, but about humanity in general. Willy Brandt’s 1971 Week of Brotherhood address also advanced such a generalized notion of brotherhood—­one which focused on and unequivocally accepted responsibility for the Nazi past, but which also looked beyond it to more general inequalities and injustices. Brandt’s speech, which was much longer than Heinemann’s, was quite broad in scope and addressed a large array of issues. It can be seen as a major statement of Brandt’s positions on a number of important topics, general ones as well as particular current events. That such a major statement would come on a guilt occasion was significant. Like Heinemann’s, Brandt’s notion of brotherhood was the most general one. Brandt began his speech by talking about the fight against racism, quoting

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the United Nations resolutions against it. He also described how this principle was part of his broader program of thoroughgoing spiritual and practical reform, which, he said, included an emphasis on “more humanity,” “equal life chances . . . more social justice [and] more freedom of the individual . . . .” He claimed that, in comparison to other countries, West Germany had already achieved a great deal in this regard, though it still had a long way to go. He also said that he was against “pointing the finger” at others before examining what must be done at home. While he spoke about Africa, the Third World generally, and Eastern Europe as problem spots for human rights, Brandt nevertheless criticized those who would say that racial discrimination and suffering were no longer problems for West Germany. To them he said: “Africa is far away, and many of our fellow citizens may be of the opinion that racial discrimination is no longer a problem for us, or at least only an abstract one.” He went on to remind them why the problem seems abstract: “It is true, it became abstracted in the million count of the victims, in which the individuality of fate was lost. The minority question at that time—­if it was one—­was ‘solved’ through expulsion and murder. But the problem remained.” Brandt was not clear as to what exactly he was referring here: the Holocaust, ethnic expulsions, or something else. The specifics of the suffering seemed less important than their cumulative legacy. Brandt’s call was for the most general self-­examination possible. In contemporary Germany, that included attention to guest workers and to the ill, handicapped, and homeless. A second form of general self-­examination came in terms of foreign policy, particularly towards the East. As elsewhere, Brandt characterized the program of rapprochement with the East as a moral imperative to pursue brotherhood through whatever means available—­what he called “the art of the possible.” In the context of this discussion of general humanization, Brandt described a major moment related to the past that had just occurred, one of the most fa­ mous of all such moments in West German history. In December of the previous year, as we saw, Brandt had undertaken a trip to Poland in order to sign a treaty for mutual cooperation. Poland had officially been Germany’s first victim in the Second World War; as we have seen, September 1, 1939—­the date on which the Wehrmacht invasion force attacked Poland—­was the commonly acknowledged starting point of the war. The entire complex of Ostpolitik (policy towards the East) in this period was laden with a substantive delicacy deriving from Eastern Europe’s historical victimization by the Germans. Again,West Germany’s new leaders portrayed the new Ostpolitik as a logical second stage of reconciliation after Adenauer’s rapprochement with the West.

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Eastern Europe, and especially Poland—­being the location of so many of the Final Solution’s victims as well as of its more notorious apparatuses, such as Auschwitz—­was a place symbolically charged not just by the war but by the Holocaust as well. During this 1970 trip to Poland, Brandt made a gesture that may be considered a response more to the Holocaust than to the war, though their confusion in this moment was perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the event (Krzeminski 2001). The state visit included two wreath-­laying ceremonies in Warsaw: one at the tomb of the unknown soldier, and one at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. The Warsaw Ghetto was, of course, one of the more notorious examples of  Nazi horrors. It is best known for the basically hopeless up­ rising that took place there in 1943 against the Nazi oppressors. The memo­ rial to the ghetto, sculpted by Nathan Rapoport, depicts the heroic martyrs of the Jewish uprising there. When Brandt came to the memorial, instead of simply placing the wreath, and at a loss for words, he fell to his knees in a gesture of remorse. The photograph is without a doubt one of the most famous in twentieth-­century history. Brandt later claimed in his memoirs (Brandt 1992, 199–­200) that the gesture was wholly spontaneous: “I had not planned anything, but I had left Wilanow Castle, where I was staying, with a feeling that I must express the exceptional significance of the ghetto memorial. From the bottom of the abyss of German history, under the burden of millions of  victims of murder, I did what human beings do when speech fails them.” The gesture was especially poignant because Brandt himself had about the most unquestionable past one could imagine. His personal integrity was clear in his record of having actively resisted the Nazis and finally emigrated to Scandinavia, thereby losing his German citizenship. By the same token, this cut both ways: emigrés faced great suspicion for disloyalty. In his memoirs (Brandt 1992, 200) he therefore accepted a report­ er’s description of the gesture: “Then he who does not need to kneel knelt, on behalf of all who do need to kneel but do not—­because they dare not, or cannot, or cannot dare to kneel.” In his 1971 Week of Brotherhood speech, Brandt referred to this event and described its humanitarian impulse: As I stood at the beginning of December in Warsaw, the burden of recent German history lay on me, the burden of a criminal race politics. I then did what people do when words fail, and I remembered—­for my countrymen also—­the millions of murdered. But also contemplated the fact that fanaticism and oppression of human rights—­despite Auschwitz—­have not found an end.

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Numerous critics charged, however, that kneeling was not an appropriate posture for a German—­or any other—­leader. In response to those who criticized his gesture—­those who saw open remorse as delegitimizing German sovereignty, in addition to those who simply did not like the imagery—­Brandt argued, Whoever wanted to understand me could understand me; and many in Germany and elsewhere understood what I wanted to say without words. Some also had only derogatory commentary, but I ask: Where, if not there, where the Warsaw Ghetto stood, would it be the place for a German federal chancellor to feel the burden of the past and make the attempt from this responsibility to atone guilt?

Later in this speech, Brandt paid some attention to the complaint—­rising in these years from conservatives uncomfortable with the new posture of more vigorous repentance—­that Germany berated itself too much, both over the past and in regard to the contemporary self-­reflection he had called for, by saying, “We do not have to wallow in masochism.” He praised the Federal Republic’s accomplishments to date, but called again for continued reform and introspection. In this Week of Brotherhood speech, Brandt also addressed questions about his government’s posture towards Israel. Questions had been raised about the possible detrimental effect of the new Ostpolitik on relations with the Jewish state (see Höpker 1973). The argument was that continued unmitigated sup­ port for Israel was not so easy in the context of improving relations with the East, and that West Germany was therefore seeking to change the nature of the rela­tionship from a “special” to a “normal” one (Feldman 1984). Doubts about West Germany’s absolute commitment to Israel were also raised in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, when awareness of and support for the Palestinian position surged in West German public opinion. In response to these criticisms, Brandt ostensibly reaffirmed the special character of relations with Israel, but even as he did so, it was easy to see the beginnings of mitigation: “Let me now come to speak about what is occasionally said against us, that this federal government—­in contrast to the previous one—­emphasizes not so much any more the special, but rather the normal relations to Israel. And some add that this has something to do with the Ostpolitik.” In the first place, he argued that all the treaty partners in the Ostpolitik understood West Germany’s commitment to Israel, and that they entertained no expectation and made no demands that the relationship would change as a quid pro quo for the agreements. Secondly,

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Brandt responded to criticism about West Germany’s relations with the Arab world by arguing that the objective-­thinking leaders of the Arab peoples do not overlook what specific factors there are that shape our relation to Israel. It indeed still carries the sign of a specialness—­the inextinguishability of millions of murders of the Jews of Europe—­and for us and those subsequently born even more so, because under the spirit of the Enlightenment, the symbiosis of  Jewish and German culture proved such an astounding productivity.

He added the following characterization of the burden of the past: “The name Auschwitz will remain a trauma for generations. Illusions are not allowed; the injuries that in those twelve dark years were done to the souls of the victims and to the souls of the perpetrators will not heal so rapidly. For the image of man was injured—­man, whom we understand as the image of God.” Brandt thus drew specific as well as general lessons: “This experience—­it is actually humanity’s catastrophe, more than all wars and their horrors—­burdens  Jewry, not only in Israel; and it burdens us Germans. Here, the reference to young people given the freedom of not being affected does not help. No one is released from the responsibility of history.” This last statement is in contrast to those from earlier and later speakers who always qualified their remarks about the younger generation with assurances that they could not possibly be burdened. That may have been true, but Brandt, emblematic of the moral nation, seemed to be emphasizing responsibility where others were rejecting guilt. In this way, Brandt seems to have followed the concept of national iden­tity ar­ ticulated a quarter century earlier by Karl Jaspers, in which the net­works of relations in which we live include benefits and responsibilities that are not necessarily our doing. The progression was clear: from guilt, to shame, to responsibility. By the same token, the problem of the Judeocide belonged to all of humanity, not just to Germans and Jews. This is part of what sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006) have called the “globalization of the Holocaust.” Brandt characterized the State of Israel as the attempt to provide this oppressed people a secure home, but went on to speak also of the Palestinian sit­ uation: “Who would want to silence the suffering of the Palestinian people?” Brandt actually assumed some German responsibility for this, and in this way sought to silence those who criticized West German support for Israel: “We are also not entitled to the role of the arrogant world moralist, especially here. We have much more to recognize in its [the suffering of the Palestinan people]

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origins the chain of causality and injustice here in the heart of Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany, the happier of the two German states that grew out of the wreckage of the year 1945, took upon itself the obligation to the survivors.” Once again, Brandt’s rhetoric emphasized causal connections and the chain of history, whereas earlier rhetoric had emphasized boundaries, disconnections, and discontinuities. In an additional novel move, Brandt also directly criticized the churches in this speech: “The churches have now finally included Jewry with the realism and the openness—­yes, with the brotherhood in their discussion of faith—­ that would have saved us from the tragedies of this century, had they earlier been prepared to do so.” This was a fairly radical indictment of organized religion. Criticism of the churches and of their role in the Third Reich had until the mid-­Sixties been an almost absolute taboo, as we have seen in previous Week of Brotherhood addresses. One important spur to greater criticism of the churches was a highly controversial stage play by Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy, first produced in 1963. The play focused on the activities of the papal nuncio in the Third Reich and his failure to speak up against the Nazi horrors. (We might also recall Adenauer’s first interview with Karl Marx, editor of the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, immediately following his inauguration, in which Adenauer appeared perplexed by Marx’s question about whether calling a political party the Christian Democatic Union implied any exclusion.) What, then, was Barndt’s conclusion for the choice between “normalization” versus “specialness”? “I admit that one must be careful with the expression ‘normalization,’ ” he said. Brandt’s moral position notwithstanding, though, it was clear that the very possibility of discussing the place of the relationship between West Germany and Israel in an international calculus did imply some de facto normalization.

Brandt in Israel Questions about the relations between the Federal Republic, Jews, and Israel, and of possible changes in them, came up again in 1973 when Brandt accepted Israel’s invitation to pay the first official state visit by a German head of government to Israel. Clearly, the Holocaust would be a major presence in any such meeting. The interesting question for us here is how Brandt framed that presence. In preparation for his visit, Brandt gave an interview to Israeli television on July 1, 1973, in which questions about the nature of the relation between

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West Germany and Israel and about Brandt’s understanding of the past figured prominently. The very first question went directly to the issue of normalization and whether Brandt viewed the impending visit as an important step towards it. Brandt responded by accepting the term “normalization,” and added that the relationship included more: “Naturally the visit is a sign of normal functioning relations between two countries, but it is also an opportunity for the discussion of matters that exceed the boundaries of what one would call good normal relations between two governments.” He characterized the relation with a compromise formula he attributed to Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban: “Good relations with a specific historical and moral background.” Brandt was also questioned about his reaction to the Six Day War, when he had said that while the Federal Republic had to remain diplomatically neutral, for him there could never be a “neutrality of the heart.” In this interview he backtracked a bit by saying that he would not be in the position to speak about a neutrality of the heart in regard to any war or conflict anywhere in the world. In this way he regeneralized his statement, implying that he was bothered by the war not because it was against Israel, but because it was a war. This was a hallmark of “the moral nation”: its obligations were to all of  humanity. In a question directly about the memory of memory, Brandt was then asked whether he thought German public opinion considered the reparations payments to have absolved the guilt. Brandt gave a clear no, but he also reminded his audience that we more and more are dealing with people of a young generation, whose outlooks sometimes differ from those of the elder. Already now, the majority of the population in the Federal Republic was born after the war, and I am trying to make clear to these people that—­even if they carry no personal responsibility for the occurrences of the Second World War—­it would not be clever to want to separate oneself from the history of one’s own people.

Striking here and elsewhere in Brandt’s rhetoric is that he drew no distinction between the Second World War and the Holocaust, two events which, more in his statements than in those of earlier speakers, were seen as being of a piece. There was also a contradiction between the mnemonic cliché—­ common among later commentators—­that it was the younger generation of the Sixties who finally accepted responsibility for the past and what Brandt said in this context: here Brandt was pointing out the special difficulty of convey­ ing that responsibility to that younger generation, against the assumption that they were the ones who finally understood that responsibility intuitively.

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The interviewer’s final question concerned whether Brandt thought the past or the future would play a greater role in the upcoming visit. Brandt was, of course, a progressive, so while he accepted the role of the past, he invariably looked forward: I am of the solid opinion, at least I hope, that the future will play a greater role than the past, though not in the sense that I would want to release myself from the past . . . . But I am, as I said, convinced that the future offers the best possibility to usefully apply at least some of the lessons of the past. That is important for the new generation.

This formulation is particularly interesting: Where earlier speakers worked to make it clear they were not bound by or personally responsible for the past, Brandt here was careful to refute the impression that he might be trying to do so, thus making clear his desire to distinguish his position from that of his predecessors. Like any diplomatic state visit, Brandt’s trip to Israel of course occasioned a large number of speeches, both long and short, in a number of different settings. Yet they were all characterized by this balance between an open accep­ tance of the past and a progressive view towards the future, as well as between the special relations of the present and the strived-­for normal relations of the future. Upon his arrival at Lod Airport, Brandt’s first substantive remarks concerned the Nazi past: “We cannot make un-­happened what happened,” he said. “The sum of the suffering and the horror does not allow itself be repressed in the consciousness of our peoples. The cooperation of our states remains shaped by the historical and moral background of our experiences.” However, he also referred to the “new epoch of German statehood,” and added that it was important to “pose the demands of the present against the power of the past.” Brandt continued on this theme in his address during a dinner in the Knesset that evening: “The peoples do not draw the right lessons from the past if they make themselves prisoners to yesterday and the day before yesterday.” At the same time, he argued that the acceptance of responsibility for the past was an essential moral experience for the German people: As a German, and in the name of the great majority of my countrymen, may I say: the recognition of co-­responsibility [Mitverantwortung] for the crimes for which the Nazis misused the name of Germany was for us the decisive act of

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inner freeing, without which our outer freedom would not be believable and reliable. The three decades that distance us from the terror have not let us forget what must not be forgotten.

Notable here is that this rhetorical form is a constant throughout the forty years of West German history, appearing even in such an open acknowledgment of responsibility (or, as interestingly put here, co-­responsibility). Brandt was, moreover, careful to remind his listeners again of the generational change that had occurred: “In the meantime, new self-­confident generations have grown up.” But he argued that “no one, even if he be young, can be allowed out of the responsibility of history.” He added an interesting reply to those student protesters who would claim that, in their rejection of everything the older generation stood for, they were freed from the burdens of the past: “Here also, idealistic rebellion does not help. History, as bitter as it may be, is reality that daily continues to affect our present and our future. This reality, too, demands acknowledgment.” Upon his return, Brandt took one more opportunity to advance the ambiguous formulation of normal special relations: “Our purpose was to make clear that we entertain normal relations,” he said in an interview, “but that these normal diplomatic relations have a special character that arises from the unique historical and moral background about which I now need say nothing further.” In sum, then, Brandt portrayed the impact of the past on the relations between West Germany and Israel, accepted it as a first assumption, and argued clearly for general moral lessons from it; but he also sought some kind of normalcy for the new generations. This distinction is thus a key turning point in the guilt genre: accepting guilt, but doing so perhaps because it is no longer quite so toxic, given that a new generation has come about. Then again, according to the sociology of generations (Mannheim 1923; Schuman and Scott 1989), it is precisely such a difference in relation to the past that defines generations in the first place. Especially relevant here were Brandt’s claims that he “now need not say anything further.” It is interesting that neither Brandt nor Heinemann ever delivered significant addresses at concentration camps. Brandt did not visit Auschwitz on his Poland visit, choosing instead the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, where he famously did not speak in words. In Israel he visited the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, and rather than delivering a speech, read verses 8 through 16 of the 103rd Psalm, which include: “The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his

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anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. . . . As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” Brandt’s failure to speak at a concentration camp, however, does not necessarily indicate a suppression of the past. Quite to the contrary, Brandt seemed to accept the past more fully and openly than had most of his predecessors. The difference was that Brandt and Heinemann sought a more generally humanitarian lesson—­the property of the whole world—­from the Holocaust and the war than a narrowly circumscribed debt to the Jews. While Brandt sought to take nothing away from that specific debt, however, loss of specifity may have been the de facto result. The generality of the lessons drawn underlay the entire reformist profile, directed both domestically and internationally, of the Brandt-­Heinemann years.

T h e A cc u m u l at e d H i sto ry o f t h e Federal Republic: A New Tradition In a 1970 speech on the twenty-­first anniversary of the Basic Law,  Justice Minister Gerhard Jahn (SPD) articulated the change in the West German state’s self-­understanding more clearly than it had been expressed before. It was of a mature, solid, and permanent state that he spoke: Politically, out of the provisional state [Provisorium] through a transitory state [Transitorium], a continuum has come about. Twenty-­one years after the proclamation of the Basic Law, we must assume that two German states exist. . . . The Basic Law has become the constitution of a sovereign state . . . Today, on the twenty-­third of May, 1970, our constitution comes of age—­certainly as mea­ sured on the scale of applicable civil law. With it, so does the Federal Republic.

What of the preamble to the Basic Law, requiring all West German governments to pursue reunification, and certainly to make no law hindering it? Conservatives were definitely worried. The years 1970 to 1973 were dominated by Brandt’s striking foreign policy successes. As promised, the new Ostpolitik resulted in treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland, and in the Basic Treaty with East Germany. And on the ba­ sis of those treaty initiatives, less than thirty years after the fall of Hitler, after the nearly universal worldwide disgust with the seemingly proven German ca­ pacity for war, destruction, and unspeakable horror, West Germany’s third chancellor, Willy Brandt, was awarded the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize.

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By the time of Brandt’s second Regierungserklärung, in 1973, the SPD and its leader were thus at their most secure. This security, however, was also a result of the failed machinations of the CDU/CSU under the leadership of Rainer Barzel. Due to the narrow and faltering nature of the Bundestag majority held by the SPD-­FDP coalition since 1969, conservative leaders felt the time was right to try to take control. Brandt’s Ostpolitik, as well as his progressivism and tolerance for popular dissent in general, were all too much too soon for the conservative bloc. Local elections since 1970 had produced increasing gains for the conservatives, and victories in a number of states had changed the balance of power in the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the population supported Brandt’s Ostpolitik. The conservatives therefore concluded that their best bet was to try to topple the fragile coalition majority through a constructive vote of no confidence, which they attempted in 1972. Much to the surprise of many, the measure failed by two votes, which by all calculations must have come from dissenters in the CDU.1 And it is perhaps lucky that the measure did fail, for the maneuver was viewed with deep suspicion by many West Germans. After all they had heard about their new democracy, with its claimed attention to the voice and will of the people, it seemed outrageous that a chancellor could fall against the wishes of the majority—­that is, without an election. Though this arrangement is a feature of most parliamentary democracies, it seemed a perverse and objectionable possibility to many observers, evoking comparisons with the parliamentarianism of the Weimar era, and it might have resulted in significant disruptive protests. By the same token, ten years later, when Helmut Kohl’s CDU came to power in this way, the transition was perfectly orderly. Because his position was still weak, Brandt wanted new elections, which could be seen as a plebiscite on both him personally and on the treaties he had negotiated. He proposed a motion of support in the Bundestag, and arranged for its failure by having cabinet members miss the vote. Federal elections were scheduled for November 19, 1972. Involving as it did a choice between the new government of change—­including the treaties as well as the entire progressive image of Brandt’s program—­and a return to conservative programs and style, the election was highly contested in the press and in the public. With a voter turnout of 91.1 percent (the highest such figure in West German history, and

1. One CDU member actually claimed later that he had sold his vote, though investigations turned up no convincing proof, and the claim had a decidedly dubious ring.

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stunning in comparative perspective of other Western democracies),2 the SPD and FDP both improved their lot, while the CDU/CSU had its worst showing in 20 years. The coalition’s power was thus secured, and the CDU/CSU effort to return to power was discredited. When Brandt delivered his second major Regierungserklärung on Janu­ ary 18, 1973, he was thus at the height of his power—­able to push further on the themes he had laid out in 1969, claiming four years of solid successes approved by the populace. “Never,” he said, “has a German state lived in comparatively good accord with the free spirit of its citizens, with its neighbors and global partners.” It is interesting that though reforms in Ostpolitik under Brandt were seen as a pragmatic accommodation with an untenable situation, Brandt managed to present his position as one motivated by moral justification over practical concern. As he put it in the 1973 Regierungserklärung, “Politics is in essence always a product of spiritual and moral decision. That applies domestically as well as internationally. In the daily work, the spiritual orientation of our program must continuously remain apparent.” Brandt was clear that this moralism was forward-­looking, and of quite broad reference: “Many observers assert that the postwar period is at an end. That must not obstruct our sensitivity to discord, violence, and suffering.” He listed such diverse world problems as tensions in Europe, suffering in the Third World, and the Vietnam conflict. It was thus clear that the moral impulse of West German politics was no longer uniquely directed inward to German state forms or Holocaust-­related debts; it had turned outward as well, in a universalized striving for world peace. To emphasize this, Brandt added: “At the danger of still being misunderstood by some, I will limit myself at this moment to a forward-­directed statement.” He did, however, still direct attention to particular historical debts, though these were now just examples among many in a general moral initiative for world peace. In regard to Israel, for instance, Brandt said, “In the Near East, at Europe’s door, a conflict that does not leave us indifferent drags on—­one that cannot leave us indifferent, because in the month of  January forty years ago, that which called itself the Third Reich began. Specifically against this background, the right of the State of Israel to exist is for us indisputable.” Brandt also based a call for tolerating popular protest in the context of  the welfare state on an image of the past, and described in the process a profound change—­a 2. This included even more voters than before; part of the SPD-­FDP program of increased democratization was to lower the voting age to eighteen.

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fundamental Westernization—­that had occurred in the German conception of politics: The state, which the people encounter in the administrations of the cities and counties, states and federation, should be in the service of good neighborliness and quality of life; for, their [people’s] reality is decidedly determined by it [the state]. In our history, the state for all too long faced the people like a foreign power. Since the time of dictatorship, a changed type of citizen has developed: one who wants to claim his freedom within the fabric of social and economic interdependence. In this process that reaches into the depths of our social exis­ tence, there gathers, among other things, productive unrest from the ranks of the young, as well as the insight of the elders . . . . We need people who critically take part in thinking, deciding, and carrying responsibility [mitdenken, mitentscheiden, und mitverantworten]. . . . It is the apolitical citizen who is inclined to bend before authority. We want the citizen [Bürger], not the bourgeois. We have moved spiritually towards the Anglo-­ Saxon citizen, the French citoyen. And one can perhaps say that the Federal Republic has become in this regard more Western—­even in a time that stands under the sign of the so-­called Ostpolitik.

Even in the context of Germany’s division, the concept of the nation lived on, though now less taken for granted than in traditional German notions of the people (das Volk)—­a term we see much less often in speeches during these years. As already noted, identity was now seen, with the tools of social science, as a voluntaristic rather than an essentialist category. National identity was now something rooted in both history and consciousness, in both nature and culture; it was therefore something that had to be propagated rather than assumed, cultivated rather than exploited: Our state cannot truly be the property of the individual if he does not recog­ nize his home [Heimat] in the history that is distanced from him through the catastrophes of the century. For in this history the solidarity of the German people is rooted. In it—­as in the indestructible communality of  language, of art, of everyday culture, and of spiritual inheritance—­the nation lives on, even in division. The meaning of a sorrowful history flows together for many of us after the war, not in betraying the national identity, but in developing the will to a Europe in which there is and increasingly will be a new home for the people.

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The past came up in one more reference, in which Brandt expressed the wish to extend the Polish treaty work to Czechoslovakia. As we have already seen in Kiesinger’s Regierungserklärung there was a residue of  bitterness about Czechoslovakia’s handling of ethnic Germans after the war that exceeded, at least in its potency in legitimate discourse, the bitterness heard in references to Poland. Brandt thus said, “The Federal Government hopes to be able to reach an agreement in the not-­too-­distant future through which the [1937] Munich accords cease to burden the relations of both states.” Brandt was even less specific about the nature of the past than his predecessors had been. While Adenauer, for instance, had acknowledged the failures of Weimar, Brandt mainly spoke generally of peace and dictatorship. While Erhard and Kiesinger had used somewhat evocative language about the pain of the past, there were almost no such formulations in Brandt’s addresses. Jewish suffering had become a world suffering that required action more than commemoration. Another difference was the position of expellee organizations in the power structure and, concomitantly, in the speeches. While all Brandt’s predecessors had mentioned the ethnic expellees and “homeless” (meaning those who had lost their homeland), Brandt did not mention them at all. Indeed, in 1969, one of his first symbolic acts was to eliminate the Ministry for Expellees, subordinating it to the Ministry of the Interior. A continued focus on the expellees and “homeless” would have been detrimental to negotiations with Eastern Bloc governments. Perhaps enough time had passed so that many of these groups’ original hardships had been eliminated, not to mention the fact that the older generation was dying off, and the younger generation could not stand in the same relation to the lands of their parents as their parents had done. The expellees had moved from being an administrative issue to a commemorative one. Nonetheless, as we will see later, expellee groups underwent a political revival within the neoconservative environment of the 1980s, in which a more strident German nationalism emerged along with a retrenchment against cooperation and compromise with the East.

The End of an Era Brandt’s fall from his 1973 high point, however, was swift. There was growing dissent from the FDP over Brandt’s supposed neglect of domestic economic affairs at the same time as division between radical and conservative factions was growing within the SPD. The situation of the SPD-­FDP government was further exacerbated by the worldwide oil price shocks, which, combined with

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slow economic growth rates, inflation, and increasing social conflict (including terrorism), were associated in many intellectual circles with a more general crisis of progressive ideology. This was the beginning of the so-­called Tendenzwende or “change of tendency” in many intellectual circles, associated with the rise of neoconservative thought (Sontheimer 1983; Dubiel 1985). Through all of this, Brandt’s leadership was seen as ineffective. And also through all of it, the pragmatic minister of finance, Helmut Schmidt, a representative of the SPD’s conservative wing, consolidated his position and demanded either more leadership from Brandt or a change in leadership—­ namely, to himself. The ultimate lever for Schmidt’s demands finally arrived in the revelation that one of Brandt’s top aides, Günter Guillaume, was an East German spy. Brandt thus resigned on May 6, 1974, with Helmut Schmidt taking over the chancellorship. Schmidt actually opposed Brandt’s resignation on this occasion because he believed that allowing a spy scandal to topple a West German chancellor was inappropriate. This was emblematic of  Schmidt’s demeanor, to which I turn next. Nevertheless, in terms of his basic legitimacy claims, I will show, Schmidt had at least as much in common with neoconservatives who would follow. If one must draw a break between eras, it seems to me that there is as much argument for drawing it here as for drawing it between Schmidt’s government and that of Helmut Kohl, the conservative who would follow; the change in tendency was already underway, and many were tiring of the era of protest.

Chapter 12

The Moral Nation

To summarize: if it were necessary to pick a date, the “moral nation” may be said to have officially begun with Willy Brandt’s election as chancellor in 1969; but powerful changes had already been underway in the legitimation profile of the Federal Republic since at least the very early 1960s. At that time, the older legitimation profile—­that of the “reliable nation”—­was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of its failure to redeem its promise and the broader social-­structural and cultural changes taking place in West German society at large. In the first place, the Federal Republic’s strict adherence to Western hard-­ line Cold War policies did not appear to have yielded much progress on the German question. This was demonstrated most forcibly in 1961, when West German leaders had to stand noisily but essentially powerlessly by as the Berlin Wall went up. And after the Wall’s construction, it seemed as if the West as a whole wanted a relaxation of tensions—­a first try at détente that was not centrally or even peripherally shaped by German concerns. The West appeared to be opting for mollification over confrontation. This left Germany more solidly divided than ever. In the second place, a new generation had come of age in West Germany, one whose formative experiences had come after the Nazi period, or at least one not old enough to have witnessed the rise of  National Socialism as adults. The world of  this new generation was fundamentally different from the one in which the older generations had grown up. The chasm of understanding between the generations that was becoming a flash point all over Western Europe and the United States was perhaps felt even more deeply in West Germany;

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members of the younger generation there saw themselves as having even more to reject in their parents, who had, in their eyes, been responsible for the worst crimes of human history. The first epoch of the Federal Republic had been built largely by people who had come of  political age before the Third Reich. So their achievements in the Federal Republic were also seen as being implicated in and inherently continuous with that regime’s incomprehensible crimes. Partly because the new generation did not see itself as personally responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich, and partly because it was receiving such stark images of the Nazi horrors in such forums as the Eichmann trial, The Diary of Anne Frank, and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, among others, the issue was no longer a straightforward one of  accepting or rejecting collective guilt. It was easier for this new generation to ask about individual responsibility in the older generation. Not being burdened themselves, they worked in abstract and condemnatory principles. At the same time, the younger generation’s rejection of their elders and of the entire complex of  guilt was in itself  a kind of defensive distancing mechanism. In making such an absolute break, they made it clear that responsibility came to them in only the most abstract form. Perhaps the best example of this is the abandonment of popular philo-­Semitism following the 1967 Six Day War. Up until that point, the student left had vigorously supported the Israeli underdog. But as soon as Israel could be portrayed as an aggressor, the West German left adopted the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian keffiyeh (checkered scarf) became part of  any good leftist student’s habiliment, because the youth of the day did not see itself as being as constrained as their parents by the specter of anti-­Semitism that such a gesture might be seen to imply. The complexities of this position, however, would become clear after 1989, when it was revealed that some major figures in the critique of the older generation were themselves rather compromised. As part of the general climate of challenge, moreover, the term “fascism” became the catchall for everything wrong with German history and with West Germany society, rather than a specific reference to the politics of the 1930s. Social-­scientifically, fascism theory was an alternative to totalitarian theory. While totalitarian theory identified extreme antidemocratic systems of both the left (communism) and the right (Nazism) under one rubric—­thus defending democratic market societies—­fascism theory saw Nazism as an essential outgrowth of  capitalism’s supposedly inherent destructive tendencies. In ideological discourse, this meant that fascism could not be seen as an aberration, or as the imposition of  something alien on Western societies, but as a tendency in all capitalist societies, including the Federal Republic. Conservative positions

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in the Federal Republic could thus be seen as protofascist as well as postfascist. In the practice of student jargon, though, “fascism” simply meant anything they saw as vaguely conservative in the political system, and members of the older generation who had produced that system or who supported it were referred to with the blanket derogation “fascist.” While not an official position, this New Left ideology did have an impact on, and correlates in, the official discourse of the government. In the first place, Willy Brandt’s call to “dare more democracy,” which was to be achieved by a “march through the institutions,” along with his claim that with the ascension of the Social Democrats West German history was  just beginning, reflected one idea: that in important ways the conservative policies of the Adenauer era were of a piece, if not with Nazism per se, than at least with the elitist and authoritarian capitalist nation-­state of the nineteenth century. The concept of fascism, as opposed to totalitarianism, was also helpful in opening the road to the East; fascism theory highlighted National Socialism’s putative emergence from capitalism, while totalitarianism theory emphasized its similarities to communism. The Social Democrats and their intellectual supporters thus referred again and again to the failed revolution of 1848, but they were clear that it was a failure—­a tendency and a tradition, but one that had been suppressed through the authoritarian state form of  Wilhelmine Germany. The year 1968, many on the left claimed, was the real caesura in German history. This emphasis on the continuity of the “reliable nation” with nineteenth-­century authoritarianism created significant sympathy in government circles for both new and old critical positions in German society. Chancellor Brandt was in close alliance with such notable critical literary figures as Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, and under his government the image of the opposition was opened up to include laudatory mentions of communist, socialist, and other circles. While a new generation of social scientists researched the corporatist na­ ture of the Nazi regime, the government sponsored the establishment of so-­ called peace research institutes through such agencies as the Max Planck Institutes. In the official presentations of the past, an image arose of Nazism as having polycratically included such elements as industry and finance, thus partly discounting the image of the Nazis as a unitary criminal aberration brought upon the unwitting German people, and depicting them instead as a more fundamental outgrowth of German society. With this image of the past, the fate of the Jewish genocide in collective memory was mixed. Within fascism theory, the Holocaust lost at least some of its standing as an essential element of  National Socialism, or the heart of its disease—­a centrality that had been acknowledged as much in its avoidance as

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in its commemoration. Instead, genocide was more of a by-­product of capitalist pathologies. In the face of inevitable cyclical economic downturns, a diseased society had sought scapegoats to avoid seeing the true nature of its own pathogenic social structure. In more overtly ideological circles, the genocide of  the  Jews was thus viewed as more of an afterthought. But a less explicit version of this view can also be found in the official presentations. So while the new generation was often associated with “second guilt” arguments, in many ways the Holocaust became a mere tool in the arsenal for critiquing the older generation. At the same time, the Holocaust was addressed with increasing explicitness and frequency, so its fate in memory was paradoxical. While there was a call for greater openness about the past—­both for greater admission of responsibility and for introspection about residual traces of fascism in West German society—­there was also something of a turn away from the previously established specificity of Germany’s crime against the  Jews. The destruction of the Jews was viewed, rather, as one particularly horrible example of a more general trend. In some ways, this was similar to the previous era, in which speakers emphasized general trends such as “massification,” centralization, and a turn away from Christian values as causes of National Socialism; in another sense, however, it was distinct, namely with its emphasis on fascism as an outgrowth of capitalism. On the one hand, this led to a greater inclusiveness of such victims as Gypsies, the handicapped, the mentally ill, and, more marginally, homosexuals. On the other hand, it meant that guilt towards the  Jews and Israel lost some of its special power, and in the process, so did the mandate on official philo-­Semitism. This may be one explanation for the simultaneous increase in avowals of responsibility for the past and decrease in official visits to concentration camps and the like. This systemic view of the Nazi past also lessened the distinction between responsibility for the Holocaust and responsibility for the war that had characterized the “reliable nation.” An especially striking demonstration of this was Brandt’s famous kneeling at the Warsaw Memorial. As we saw, the memorial combined the two issues of war and Holocaust better perhaps than any other. The gesture was in this way a perfect opportunity for Brandt—­himself a symbol of greatest moral character—­to articulate the universal rather than parochial moral lesson of German history. In the “moral nation,” the two crimes appeared as more of a piece, and the war in many ways as the more central of the two. The debt Germany had incurred in the process was thus a much more general one, including not just a moral obligation to the Jews and the lesson of  Western integration to end the “European civil war,” but the renunciation

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of violence entirely, the assertion of responsibility for the Third World, and a demand for peace with all of Germany’s neighbors, not just with the West. I do not mean to imply that the impetus for Brandt’s Ostpolitik derived wholly from a different vision of the Nazi past, but only that those two things fit together well. The sense of a generalized responsibility to the world as a whole provided Germany with an appropriate context for its new attitude towards the East. In the first place, the generalization of German debts fit well with its interest in rapprochement with the East. And in the second place, viewing Poland and the Soviet Union as victims of German fascist aggression, rather than dismissing them out of hand through antitotalitarian arguments, made those overtures more plausible. The Federal Republic therefore approached Poland and the Soviet Union with acknowledgments of what those nations had suffered at German hands. The Ostpolitik made sense within the context of universal peace and rapprochement implied by the new image of the Nazi past, and the new attitude towards the Nazi past was also affected by the practical interest in improving relations with the East. In other words, these concerns came together nicely in a relatively coherent legitimation profile. This legitimation profile of the “moral nation” (in both its domestic and international contexts) may therefore be characterized as follows. Beginning in the early 1960s, gaining steam through the grand coalition, and culminating in the social-­liberal coalition under Brandt from 1969 to 1974, a startlingly new tone grew out of discontent with old policies and structures, and it took center stage. With all its emphasis on renewal, reform, and progress, the new rhetoric also involved a conscious reworking of images of the past. Unlike during the “reliable nation,” however, the Nazi period was now seen as the culmination of a specific set of long-­term trends—­those involving conservative German social and national traditions of the nineteenth century—­ rather than just a product of the long-­standing pathologies of the West. The National Socialist dictatorship therefore could not be dismissed as an aberration after which Germany could return to older forms and traditions. Those years had been an essential experience that revealed the true nature of Germany’s social forms. As a result, a lot more than faulty legal and policy controls required reworking; there were more fundamental questions to be asked about social structures that persisted in the present. The historiographical style of official discourse in this period—­influenced by, and a version of, fascism the­ ory—­was thus predominantly structural and very general, reaching into a diffuse range of matters. On the basis of this understanding of the Nazi past and of German history

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in general, the new government purveyed a broadly moral tone (hence the label “moral nation”), extending to both domestic and foreign policy issues. At home, there was to be radical democratization and broad social reform; abroad, there was to be a policy of universal rapprochement and world peace, pursued through an opening towards the East and through aid to the Third World. As part of this broader moral tone, however, the previously accepted specificity of German crimes against Jews was now portrayed as being just one in a longer list of crimes; good relations with Israel were no longer the overriding interest, but were now seen as just one among many pressing moral impulses for the Federal Republic. From the perspective of collective memory, a new set of conditions was also now in play. In the first place, in addition to the Weimar and Nazi pasts, the Federal Republic itself now had a past that could be recalled. To be sure, this newly accumulated past was already marked by the Adenauer regime in the 1950s, and had been asserted most clearly with Erhard’s insistence that the postwar period was over. In the second place, the basic existential conditions for memory had changed from those of personal implication to those of generational distinction; the struggle between individual and collective conceptions of guilt thus rested on a different foundation. Where collective guilt had once been rejected vigorously for what it implied about possible individual responsibility, now collective guilt was, if not acceptable, at least less difficult a concept to carry, because it did not implicate individuals in personal guilt. In other words, collective guilt was taking on much broader contours. Wheres in 1946 Karl Jaspers had distinguished among criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical guilt, with the first two of these being perhaps the most delegitimating in the postwar period, by the late 1960s acceptance of guilt seemed to be increasingly metaphysical—­a sense that we lived in a world tainted by the universal possibility for evil. It was not that the meaning of guilt was parochial in the Forties and Fifties and universal in the Sixties and Seventies, but that the universal had taken on a different set of meanings. Where in the immediate postwar period references to the universality of guilt were meant to exculpate Germany from specific burdens, in the Sixties they claimed to be calling for an acceptance of greater and greater responsibility. Of course, the list of things to which this greater responsibility referred—­world peace, humanity in general, the environment, and so on—­was less specific than the thing for which responsibility had been avoided in the earlier era. Hence, it sometimes seemed as if there was greater acceptance of responsibility, but for less specific and less constraining conditions.

F i g u r e 1 . SPD Leader Kurt Schumacher in Frankfurt, June 1, 1947 (© AdsD der Friedrich-­ Ebert-­Stiftung).

F i g u r e 2 . Voting for the Basic Law, May 1949 (BArch, B145 Bild-­P103896).

F i g u r e 3 . Konrad Adenauer steps onto the carpet, September 1, 1949 (BArch, B 145 Bild­00014318 / Georg Munker).

F i g u r e 4 . Text of  Theodor Heuss speech.

F i g u r e 5 . CDU election posters and the specter of totalitarianism.

F i g u r e 6 . David Ben-­Gurion and Konrad Adenauer in New York City, 1960 (BArch, B 145 Bild-­00009354 / Benno Wundshammer).

F i g u r e 7 . Willy Brandt at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, December 7, 1970 (BArch, B 145 Bild-­00004655 /Engelbert Reineke).

F i g u r e 8 . Monument in Warsaw commemorating Brandt’s kneeling (photo by Adrian Grycuk).

F i g u r e 9 . Helmut Schmidt delivering a speech at the Cologne Synagogue, November 9, 1978 (BArch, B 145 Bild-­0032096`1 / Detlef Gräfingholt).

F i g u r e 1 0 . Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand in Verdun, 1984 (BArch, B 145 Bild­00012935 / Richard Schulze-­Vorberg).

F i g u r e 1 1 . A record album of President Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech on the fortieth anniversary of  May 8, 1945.

F i g u r e 1 2 . “Forty years of expulsion: Selesia remains our future in the Europe of free peoples.” Chancellor Helmut Kohl speaks on June 15, 1985, at the Silesian Convention in Hanover (DPA/LANDOV).

F i g u r e 1 3 . Bundestag President Philipp Jenninger after his disastrous speech, November 10, 1988. At right is the actress Ida Ehre (BArch, B 145 Bild-­00192390 / Lothar Shaack).

F i g u r e 1 4 . Chancellor Helmut Kohl at Auschwitz, November 13, 1989. At right are Heinz Galinski, chairman of the Central Council of   Jews in Germany, and Menachem   Joskowicz, chief rabbi of  Warsaw. Kohl’s inscription in the visitors’ book: “Here we vow once more to do everything to ensure that the life, dignity, rights and freedom of all human beings, regardless of what God they worship, what nation they belong to, and of what extraction they are, remain inviolable on this earth” (BArch, B 145 Bild-­00019681 / Arne Schambeck).

* Part 4 * The Normal Nation

Chapter 13

West Germany’s Normal Problems

The striking differences between Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt were apparent almost from the very first paragraph of  Schmidt’s Regierungserklärung of May 17, 1974. However little evocations of the past had figured in Brandt’s Regierungserklärungen, they would have seemed even more out of place in Schmidt’s. Schmidt also left behind almost all traces of  the ideological enthusiasm and rhetoric of  regeneration that had characterized Brandt’s presentation. Schmidt was the technocrat par excellence, and he adopted a sometimes sterile pragmatic posture. This posture, however, seemed to belong not only to Schmidt’s personal style but to the climate of the mid-­to late Seventies, in which the progressivist spirit of renewal and forward-­looking reformism had been taken over by a sense of the limits on growth—­symbolized most prominently by the perceived pessimism of  the 1972 Club of  Rome Report, as well as by the costs of an ever-­increasing welfare state in an age of cyclical economic downturn and international oil price shocks. Schmidt’s self-­presentation was that of the professional manager tackling the normal problems of unemploy­ ment and security in a normal nation. His eloquence was limited to the frequent deployment of acronyms, as well as to his apparent profound understanding of the complexities of  international agreements of all kinds. Schmidt began his first address as chancellor by saying, “In a time of growing problems, we concentrate ourselves in realism and sobriety on the essential, on what is necessary, and we leave other things to the side.” (As the famous newspaper editor Marion Dönhoff [1992, 219] put it, “Most guess what that means: the end of all reform.”) Schmidt then listed many difficult management tasks for the government. A new term that emerged here was “risk.” This was

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a reference to the complex problems that arise in a tightly interwoven international economic and political order, one that required careful monitoring and competent handling.1 Along these lines, Schmidt’s rare references to the past were issues of management and rationality, very much matters for administration. Thus, it was with regard to cooperative relations between unions and government that he was at his most eloquent: “Economic privation and mass unemployment once unleashed the fire in which the first German republic was burned. All governments have this lesson to follow. It is their duty to realize progressively that the workers can come to an indentification with their state only on the basis of social security and justice.” In regard to leftover matters of payments for the burdens of the past, he was all business and economics: With the twenty-­eighth amendment brought by the federal government to the equalization of burdens law that is currently being considered, and with probable minor changes that necessarily have to do with the history of the Germans, the federal government considers the complex of this war consequence burden [Kriegsfolgelast]—­especially including compensation for prisoners of war, equalization of burdens, reparations, and laws related to article 1312—­as concluded. The Federal Republic of Germany—­that is, the taxpayers of the Federal Republic—­have in the past years levied 220 billion marks, and they will, following the applicable law, have to levy another 174 billion marks in the future for these war consequence burdens. Over and above that, the federal government sees no more possibility of placing further burdens on the taxpayer.

1. “Risk” was also becoming a buzzword of sorts for social scientists of  the time. The anthropologist Mary Douglas and the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky published their important book Risk and Culture in 1980. The sociologist Ulrich Beck published his well-­known treatise Risikogesellschaft in 1986; the English version, Risk Society, first appeared in 1992. 2. In the first years of the Federal Republic, the Adenauer government had undertaken an extensive program of “equalizing burdens’ ” (Lastenausgleich), not only for the expellees from Eastern territories but for war damages more broadly. The term “equalization of burdens” refers to a complex arrangement whereby those who lost property in the war, or after the war by expulsion from their homes, were compensated by the federal government to some proportional degree for their losses. In addition, Article 131 of the Basic Law reinstated civil servant pensions for those who had served the Third Reich, including soldiers and widows. See Schillinger (1985) and Hughes (1999).

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Most remarkable here was not the administrative task being dealt with, but the change of reference from “the German people” to “the German taxpayer.” In this address we also see an increasing concern with terrorism and with radical leftist opposition. Schmidt echoed Brandt in supporting the general value of engaged citizens, but he invoked the government’s right to control challenges to the basic democratic order. The emergent concept here was called “inner security” (innere Sicherheit), and was the 1970s incarnation of “militant democracy” (streitbare Demokratie) that we saw in debates over the Basic Law. As part of this, Schmidt supportively referred to the prohibition against radicals in public service (Radikalenerlass) that had been passed in 1972 (in radical circles this was known as the “career prohibition” or Berufs­ verbot; Braunthal 1990). These issues would become increasingly prominent a few years later, in the so-­called German Autumn (Deutscher Herbst) of 1977, when the so-­called Red Army Faction undertook a number of violent actions, most prominently kidnapping and murdering the industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. In that context, conservatives accused Schmidt and the SPD of ideological sympathies with the terrorists. Yet Schmidt’s support for the security state was fairly clear in this first speech.

The Beginning of the End Another important change in 1974 was the election of  FDP leader and Foreign Minister Walter Scheel to succeed Gustav Heinemann as federal president, nine days after Brandt’s resignation and one day before Schmidt’s election. For the first time, the election of the president by the Federal Assembly was held in Bonn and not Berlin. This move indicated a change of style away from confrontation with the East as well as towards the permanent identity of the Federal Republic, a theme we will come across increasingly in the following years. Early in 1974, the free market liberal Scheel had become concerned with the rising power of the SPD’s left wing, which he did not want his party to be associated with, especially if it were to cause the government to fall. Like Heinemann, Scheel had a strong moral message, but it was one that contained neoconservative elements. Scheel emphasized the risks posed by the complexities of modern life, the limits on growth, and the need for a positive historical consciousness to support German identity. The last of these concerns was indicative of a coming shift in the legitimation profile. According to Wolfgang  Jäger (1986, 160; see also Glaser 1990, vol. 3, 93), the shift from Heinemann to Scheel in the office of federal president was crucial. Jäger writes:

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Heinemann could never hide the fact that he stood reservedly towards the first phase of the history of the Federal Republic. In his life history, he embodied the break with the Adenauer era, the conflict over the foreign policy orientation of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the controversy over the democratic development of the young state in the spirit of the Basic Law, which he saw less as a fulfilled mandate than as a promise and an offer.

By contrast, according to Jäger, “Heinemann’s successor Scheel symbolized with his biography as ‘Mister Federal Republic’ the ‘successful history’ [Er­ folgsgeschichte] of the state. . . . He placed the accent on the timely adaptation and evolution of the politics of the Federal Republic, and not on a ‘new zero hour’ ” (Jäger 1986, 160). Enough time had passed so that the no-­longer-­new state had acquired its own tradition and now had the self-­confidence not to harp on the radical transformation of its birth. In his inaugural address on May 15, 1974, Scheel introduced a number of themes that would come to be hallmarks of neoconservative thought, though his articulations were more moderate than those of  later proponents. He began by talking about the risks of modern life and the associated exhaustion of the welfare state: Technical-­economic development has led us to the limits of the possible and in many places has already overstepped the limits of the reasonable. . . . The world economic situation has enduringly changed in earthquake-­like shock waves . . . There are new tasks. People are seeking a new equilibrium. In the process, they look to the state. It is supposed to guarantee all that we today possess; it is supposed to ward off all that could be detrimental to our well-­being. The state that is capable of achieving this does not exist.

Scheel was, however, full of  praise for the Federal Republic: We may also today trust the spiritual and moral powers that led our people out of the chaos. . . . In the Federal Republic parliamentary democracy has stood the test for the first time in German history. . . . It was always the combination of civil diligence and creative achievement that distinguished our country. Today as well, the Federal Republic of Germany makes a proud contribution to the cultural development of Europe and the world.

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Scheel even reintroduced a concept of patriotism, though one careful to include respect for others, in implicit contrast to the nationalism of the nineteenth century. Within this formulation, it was perhaps implied that the Third Reich—­or at least virulent nationalism—­belonged more to the nineteenth than to the twentieth century: “The patriot of this century, in which millions became world citizens in the search for new fatherlands, is not the adversary to the world citizen. To the contrary, patriotism that grows out of tolerance and world citizenship do not exclude each other; they are mutually dependent.” Scheel added one other important element to his characterization of German collective identity: the importance of  historical consciousness, though he did not mean consciousness of Germany’s misdeeds. Quite to the contrary, he meant the prouder moments of longer German history, as well as of the Federal Republic’s recent history. While earlier references to the new generation were usually a way to assert their freedom from the past, Scheel felt the costs of this freedom: “A new generation has grown up. They have not peered into the depths of German history, and its high points say nothing to many.” Later he added, “We know what gives us strength: the lessons out of our history, the image of our future, and the unbroken creative power of our people.” When he spoke of the “lessons of history,” furthermore, the only ones he mentioned were those of the last “quarter century,” though he referred rather obscurely to “the errors and mistakes that we elders made, experienced, and suffered.”

A Q ua rt e r C e n t u ry o f P ro g r e s s The year 1974 was also the twenty-­fifth anniversary for institutions of  the Federal Republic, and as such it occasioned significant commemorative addresses, celebrating the successful establishment of new traditions. But to an even greater extent than earlier such speeches, the ones in 1974 spoke of the founding of the republic as relatively distant history. Or perhaps it was simply that after twenty-­five years, claims that the state’s founding was an historical rather than contemporary event seemed somewhat more plausible than they had in 1952. Part of this historicization, of course, was the repeated emphasis on the generational shift that had occurred. So, for instance, Helmut Schmidt said, “Now a third of our citizenry was first born in these last twenty-­five years since the birth of the Basic Law, and for them the Basic Law is a matter of course.” Or, in one of his last speeches as president, Heinemann remarked that “in the meantime an entire generation has grown up. It is the first generation that did

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not experience the bondage of the Third Reich.” None of  this was particularly new, though. What was new was that though there had always been some attempt to connect the ideas of  the Federal Republic to longer German democratic traditions, the trend was more dominant here, and was now linked to Social Democratic ideas about the welfare state. In an interesting lumping-­together of all the years between 1914 and 1945, for instance, Schmidt implied that perhaps poor management of social issues had been one cause of Germany’s difficulties: “This democratic order certainly remains strongly rooted, after the devastating [erschütternden] experience of the years 1914 to 1945, only if we, the governing and the governed, always take seriously the social mission of the Basic Law.” Heinemann made the connection between the democratic tradition and the welfare state more explicit: “The experiences from Weimar taught that we must bind both together: the rule of  law and welfare.” Both Heinemann and Bundestag President Annemarie Renger (SPD) waxed eloquent at this time about the tradition of democracy in Germany as something decisive for the historical founding of the Federal Republic. Renger first reminded her audience of the historical fact that the anniversary marked “the founding of a state in the free part of Germany after National Socialist despo­ tism, and after the first years of effort to overcome the physical, spiritual, and moral consequences of the catastrophic collapse.” Only after telling of these distant events did she conclude generally that “the Parliamentary Council linked up with traditions worthy of  being maintained, but at the same time drew lessons from the historical experiences.” Heinemann was more elaborate: “A hundred years after the first attempt of  a German constitution, the Parliamentary Council took over much in our contemporary Basic Law, especially in the fundamental rights, from the Frankfurt Reich Constitution, right down to the word choice. With that, a meaningful and binding period of  preservation and continuity stretches from the year 1849 to today.” In regard to overcoming “the encumbrance on democracy” which derived from the fact that “democracy was introduced after lost wars and under the influence of foreign models,” Heinemann argued that “the memory that democratic endeavors are in no way foreign to our history helped, and helps. . . . Our history is threaded with an abundance of attempts at a free order and at social justice that we are well-­advised to remember. Their pioneers risked their lives and their freedom—­ most recently even in the Third Reich.” In such a perspective, the Third Reich appeared as an interruption, rather than an expression, of German history. A third major theme in these twenty-­fifth anniversary speeches was one already begun on the twentieth anniversaries: the concern with radical threats

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to the constitutional order. Speakers in 1974 emphasized the right of the democratic state to defend itself, even at the paradoxical lengths of denying certain rights to particular factions. As always, the extension of authority required special justification. But, again, the urgency of such matters was increasingly clear in an age of radical terrorism, which had included not only numerous hijackings but the notorious murder of Israeli atheletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, certainly not an easy moment for Germany’s leaders.

M ay 8 i n t h e S o c i a l - L­ i b e r a l E r a In 1975, on the thirtieth anniversary of Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, Federal President Walter Scheel delivered a major address. While quite detailed and profound, it did not receive nearly as much notice (indeed not very much notice at all) in comparison to the one President Richard von Weizsäcker, a conservative, would give ten years later (as we will see below). This difference makes clear the importance of  timing and context in the reception of  particular ideas; but it also shows that ideas and arguments that at some point are successful or praised do not spring from thin air or merely respond to or take a position within a context; rather, they are also important instances in longer-­standing genres that provide a horizon of terms, positions, and general precedents. We have already seen the earlier history of  the official representation of  Ger­ many’s surrender in 1945, articulated first by Theodor Heuss as a paradox of simultaneous defeat and liberation, and then by Brandt and Heinemann as only a liberation. In his 1975 address, President Scheel provided a more thorough acknowledgment of Germany’s defeat, and spent at least as much time examining the past as the present and future. Scheel’s feelings about his nation’s surrender had to be ambivalent, no matter how rationally desirable it had been. He accepted that Germany’s former opponents celebrated the day: “The sacrifice that they made for the victory over injustice gives them the right.” Scheel noted, “We were freed from a terrible yoke, from war, murder, bondage, and barbarism. And we exhaled when the end came.” Nonetheless, in the first place, Germany had to be ashamed that the defeat of National Socialism had come only through foreign invasion, and not through domestic rejection: “We do not forget that this liberation came from outside, that we, the Germans, were not ourselves capable of shaking off this yoke that had to first destroy half the world before Adolf Hitler was forced from the stage of world history.” In the second place, according to Scheel, too much of importance for Germany was destroyed with the Third Reich for Germans to

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have wished too strongly for that defeat: “But on the eighth of  May not only did the Hitler dictatorship fall; the German Reich fell too. The German Reich was not a work of Hitler’s; it was the state of the Germans, the work of a great German statesman [Bismarck]. It was for generations of Germans the fatherland that we loved, as every person in the world loves his fatherland.” Scheel’s point was that German patriotism was not essentially different from patriotism elsewhere in the world, and that it was by implication possible to have wanted to protect that fatherland no matter who was at the helm: “Should we love it less because a dictator took it over, or because it now lay destroyed on the ground?” His conclusion was that “we Germans have no occasion to celebrate today.” All in all, he said, “the eighth of  May is a contradictory day in German history. . . . We do not pretend that the downfall of the German Reich, and the amputation and division of our land that resulted from it, does not concern us.” Pointedly new here, among other things, was the positive valuation of the German Reich (empire). Scheel moved on to call the day an occasion for self-­examination. It was important, he said, that Germany acknowledge its entire history. He began in 1933, the year in which, he said, “the German tragedy begins . . . , not in 1945.” He argued for a balanced view of German responsibility. Hitler’s victory in 1933, he said, “was no inescapable fate. He was elected.” This admission was a de­parture from most other speakers, who usually made a semantic point of the fact that Hitler had never gained a majority of the vote in free elections. Scheel also denied the argument that people had not been aware of the dangers in the years leading up to 1933: The years of the embittered fight against National Socialism before 1933 prove that one was fully aware of the danger; but then the terrible misery of the economic crisis sapped the power and the will to political resistance more and more. The shaky hope that an all-­promising seducer could perhaps help us out of the worst suffering got the better of perceptual ability, of critique, and also of fear.

Scheel thus seemed unwilling to attribute everything to an impossible circumstance, to a horrible ineluctability, though he also did not focus on arrogant or even evil motives of the general populace. In answer to the long-­standing question of  how it all could have happened, he blamed Hitler: “Hitler wanted the war; his life had no other goal than the war. He transformed our country into a huge war machine, and each of us was a cog in it. That was recognizable.

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But we closed our ears and eyes, hoping it would be otherwise.” Scheel thus acknowledged that the general populace had played roles in the horrible machinery of war and destruction, however passive and forced he characterized those roles to have been. There was some responsibility for having closed eyes and ears, if not for more insidious actions. As usual, Scheel rejected collective guilt, but not nearly as unequivocally as many others had done: “One was fully aware of the danger.” He formulated the issue this way: After the war there was an agitated discussion over whether there was a collective guilt. Today we have enough distance to recognize: Hitler became our fate because we—­in a time of greatest social misery—­did not respect the idea of law enough, did not give it the rank in our political reality that the constitution assigned to it . . . .

In the intervening section of the speech, Scheel said, “The evil spread itself out.” He listed the damage to freedoms, the destruction of  law, and the millions of murders that had occurred in the name of Germany. Finally: “The question of guilt? Whether he wants to feel guilty about it, or ashamed of it, every German who lived as a responsible person in this time may alone as an individual settle with himself.” This formulation is interesting because, while rejecting the idea of collective guilt, Scheel did not entirely free individuals from a contemplation of conscience (though of  course this applied only to the older generation). Nonetheless, he was clear that whatever individual contempla­ tion would produce, it was not a matter for politics. This passage also provides another good example of the memory of memory, the entry into the debate about German responsibility for earlier solutions to the question—­namely, the early guilt debate. In this address, Scheel thus addressed those who “want to hear nothing more about our dark past.” In response to the claim that such historical commemorations involved having people “run around in sackcloth and ashes because crimes were committed in which they had no part”—­more memory of memory, or at least a response to claims others were making about the importance and proper form of memory—­Scheel argued that such people missed the point. While it would not make sense, he said, to demand that young Germans atone for things that happened before they were born, “all words of national dignity, of  self-­respect, remain hollow if  we do not take on ourselves the entire, often enough pressing weight of our history.” In order to win back the national honor lost in 1933, the contravention of all that was “good and noble in the

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history of our people,” Scheel argued, “Germany must accept this dark history.” In putting it this way, of course, he made clear the distance of  this history from the present. There was, however, reason to be proud, Scheel said, when one examined what Germany had made out of the catastrophe and learned from it: the new traditions. Despite the omnipresent destruction after the war, including destruction of  moral values and traditional beliefs, “there nevertheless was hope.” West Germans had consistently rejected extremism, had renounced military violence, and had established a social welfare and constitutionally grounded state: “The Basic Law that we created was born out of the suffering and errors of German history.” And, “we have learned that the time of national power politics in Europe is over. For this reason, this country has subscribed to the unification of  Western Europe and will stick to it until the task is completed.” All of this proved, said Scheel, that West Germany had learned the lessons of the past. Nonetheless, unlike many earlier leaders—­with the exception of Brandt, who also accepted this—­Scheel acknowledged that there was still suspicion towards Germany in the world: We must be aware that one observes our country from abroad carefully, and that certain occurrences, which would find no attention were they to happen in other countries, register nervously. This too is a consequence of our past that we should understand and calmly accept without reacting oversensitively on our side. If we stick to freedom and law and nonviolence, then it [over-­careful attention to the German past from outside] will lessen and finally disappear entirely.

This was a significant contrast to the words of earlier speakers, who often expressed outrage at the ways in which the world misunderstood Germany and the putative self-­righteousness with which they treated it. In conclusion, Scheel stated that he believed Germany had gotten wiser (a touch of the moral superiority trope). He argued that the evidence that Germany had learned its lesson from the past provided “the deepest reasons why today this country is once again respected in the world.” All in all, then, Scheel’s commemoration of May 8 was a balanced one. He did not defensively seek to discount German responsibility, or even its guilt. He also did not wallow in self-­blame, but focused instead on what his country had learned. He maintained the importance of accepting that history. He was not strident about escaping from suspicion, and he honored the victims of German aggression without providing a German victim for every non-­German

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one. Nonetheless, he was proud of what his country had accomplished, and asked his people to remember the past while looking towards the future. It will be important to keep this speech in mind when we come to the one made by Richard von Weizsäcker ten years later. In 1975, Helmut Schmidt also gave a brief commemorative address. By this time, the subjects of such a speech were well established, even routinized. Schmidt began by characterizing the day as one of “liberation from National Socialist domination.” He was, however, more defensive than Scheel. While taking almost verbatim from Scheel the acknowledgment that Germany’s former opponents were justified in celebrating the day, he did not go on to say that Germany could not celebrate it. Rather, he characterized it as an occasion to inquire into what Germany had made out of the catastrophe. Schmidt’s assessment, not surprisingly, was overwhelmingly positive. But he used this judgment not entirely for positive reinforcement, but in a more defensive manner. For instance, he argued that this positive assessment demonstrated that it was “a mistaken judgment if some few still suspect us, or impute that we understand the day of unconditional capitulation as a day of mourning for the defeat of  Hitler.” Schmidt argued that Germany did indeed mourn on this day, but for the victims—­not for Hitler or even, as Scheel had, for the Reich. Nonetheless, Schmidt expressed the wish to move away from the downsides of this mourning, using the same phrase Scheel had used. “We Germans therefore do not need to go around in hair shirts in perpetuity,” he said, though Scheel denied that this was what was happening, while Schmidt was saying that it would be inappropriate if it were. Schmidt also placed perhaps greater emphasis here on a generational defense than other recent speakers had done—­though all recent speakers had included it, if more briefly on this occasion than on others. He said, “The great majority of the Germans liv­ ing today were born after 1933; they can in no way be burdened with guilt.” He also pointed out that no member of the present government had been old enough to vote in 1933. As proof of Germany’s accomplishments—­that it had learned and integrated the lessons of the past—­Schmidt referred to the rejection of extremism, the reconciliation with the West, recent progress with the East, the renunciation of violence, and West Germany’s faithful integration in the Western security alliance. He reassured his international listeners that “there is in our country no disagreement over the necessity of continuing this peace policy.” Like Scheel, Schmidt acknowledged that there were those who were still reserved towards Germany: “We know that there is still also in some places and with some victims of the Hitler aggression mistrust towards us Germans—­in

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the East, but also in the West.” Unlike Scheel, however, Schmidt did not say that this was understandable. Rather, he mentioned his discussions with world leaders about the necessity of having greater confidence in each other. In this reference, he appears to have blurred the lines between suspicions towards Germany because of its past, and general security suspicions between East and West. In conclusion, he claimed a communion with Germany’s former opponents: We want today—­in commemoration of May 8, 1945, and of the millions of fall­en and victims of the SS state in Germany and in many other countries of Europe—­to give prominence to that element that today binds us with the former war opponents of National Socialist Germany: the peace politics that arises from the knowledge that war as the continuation of politics by other means is a useless, inhumane instrument.

Here, then, was a clear residue of “the moral nation.” Schmidt’s emphasis, however, was on normalcy. In sum, Schmidt was a bit more strident than Scheel was in the same year. In comparison to Brandt five years earlier, Schmidt focused somewhat more defensively on the past. While Brandt had used the occasion as a resource in arguing for his Ostpolitik, Schmidt also appears to have understood the past as a significant constraint, at least insofar as it raised guilt feelings for Germans or expectations from others, as well as suspicions about Germany’s normal foreign policy role.

C o n s o l i dat i o n During his chancellorship, Schmidt projected an image of stability and solid leadership in a time of economic and geopolitical uncertainty. He became known as the Macher (the doer), which was meant by moralists on the left as a putdown, and by industry, military, and bureaucrats, both domestically and internationally, as a compliment. In his first years as chancellor, Schmidt sought to stabilize the economy—­which was reeling from the oil crisis, among other things—­and to finalize, solidify, and carry forward Brandt’s Ostpolitik initiatives, though with a sharp eye towards security interests. Scheduled elections in 1976 kept the SPD-­FDP coalition in power, though with a substantially smaller majority than before. Though the CDU/CSU, under the direction of  its new leader Helmut Kohl, made overtures to FDP Foreign Minister Hans-­Dietrich Genscher, the FDP remained in its coalition with

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the SPD. In his second Regierungserklärung, delivered on December 16, 1976, Schmidt announced the continuity of  his second cabinet with that of  his first, and placed highest priority on continued economic stabilization, which was nevertheless made increasingly difficult by such events as the Iranian revolution, the collapse of the US dollar, and the global recession. In this businesslike address the Nazi past was distant, rarely mentioned, and not presented as directly relevant. There were only a few minor references to it, most of which simply mentioned the now obvious distance from that past. Schmidt thus used an implicit contrast between history and the Federal Republic to praise the latter generally: Our country has in no way been involved in military conflicts for more than thirty years. The former opponents in the West long ago became our allies, and we are on the wide way to normal neighborly relations with our former opponents in the East. Domestically, we remain committed to the policy of gradual reform. Never before in history has there been a more free and more socially just order on German territory.

Moreover, Schmidt went on to praise the Bundeswehr (the military), implying that it could no longer be burdened by associations with its predecessor, the Wehrmacht (the Nazi forces): “One can say that in the fulfillment of its peacekeeping mission, the Bundeswehr has found good rudiments of its own tradition; it is no longer dependent on deriving models from past generations.” In a characteristic, even archetypal statement for this period, Schmidt brought up the issue of  protecting the individual from the forces of technology, which he nevertheless embraced. In contrast to radical conservative critics of earlier decades, Schmidt was confident in the ability of modernity to regulate itself properly: We want the state to acknowledge and protect the private sphere of the individual. Technical progress, the highly organized presence of the technical demands of the state and the economy, has grown strongly. That brings risks with it. In order to minimize them, the Bundestag has taken an important step with the Data Protection Law (Datenschutzgesetz); but others must follow.

The idea of protecting personal data was at least in part a reaction to the extensive record-­keeping—­and misuse of those records—­by the Nazi state, which enabled its dictatorship administratively.

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Finally, in an interesting indication of desired normalcy for the Federal Republic as a state, and in anticipation of later cultural policies under Kohl’s conservative government, Schmidt brought up the subject of the nation’s (or was it the state’s) capital: We are also looking in this context at the city of Bonn, which will be the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany for a long time. We are therefore obliged to shape the face of the city in light of this, its future. In the last few years, a committee of the city of Bonn and the state of North Rhine–­Westphalia has done much to shape this city in such a way that it can be viewed from abroad, as well, as the capital city of the Federal Republic.

The Federal Republic, he thus emphasized, was there to stay—­there in the West, that is.

Normal Traditions Beginning in 1974, addresses on the Federal Republic’s institutional anniversaries became more prominent. One indication of this was that they began receiving prominent place every year in the Bulletin of the Press and Information Agency, when previously usually only the speeches given on major anniversaries (e.g., intervals ending in zero or five) were noted at all. The most obvious explanation for this was the perceived threat to the constitutional order deriving from terrorism and radical protest; one of the government’s answers was to defend the Federal Republic’s constitutional order more vociferously than before, by emphasizing its accumulated tradition. Indeed, fearing the impact of missing symbolism, President Scheel joined the anniversary occasions together with the annual awarding of  Federal Service Medals, thereby creating a more regal state ceremony than before—­though, as always, any state pomp required some defense. Thus, in 1975, on the twenty-­ sixth anniversary of the Basic Law, Scheel said, “The Basic Law obliges us to resist those who want to disturb and eliminate its order. On the other side, this state deems it an honor to honor and single out those who have earned it.” Scheel recalled that in the Weimar period, democratic leaders had not wanted such traditions because of their associations with earlier feudal orders, and because they were seen as inappropriate to a democracy. But he cited Heuss, West Germany’s first president, for  justification: “For him, there was no reason why a free democracy that wins its strength, powers, and regard from the consent of the people should not honor and single out those who have in a special

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way made themselves valuable to the state and the collective good.” Two years later, in 1979, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Basic Law, Scheel continued on this theme: Many of our citizens have an ambivalent relation to forms and symbols of the state. Of course, that has its grounds. There was a time in which the state symbols were nearly ubiquitous. It was a time in which the saying applied: “You are nothing, your people is everything.” And the state symbols at that time entirely had the goal of always making clear to the individual that he was nothing. After the war, one could not see any more flags. . . . Many, consciously or unconsciously, carried over their justified disinclination toward the symbols of the National Socialist state to the symbols of the democracy. . . . I believe we are in danger of making formlessness our form.

Whatever taboos—­and in some cases, outright prohibitions—­on patriotic sym­ bolism might have been understandable in the early years, they had by this point outlived their purpose. Further restrictions were not only outdated, but might actually create troublesome deficits. In 1975, Bundestag President Annemarie Renger (SPD) made clear that the celebration of the Basic Law was indeed a response to the legitimation crisis implied by rampant terrorism and the government’s inability to do much about it: . . . how necessary it is that the citizens are prepared to identify with their state and to stand up for it. While precisely in the difficult hours of the Weimar Republic an ever-­ expanding segment gave up its loyalty to the existing state and opposed parliamentarianism, here in our time the state is completely, unquestionably treated with trust, and security is expected from it. It would be good if the annual birthday of our constitution could serve to facilitate for our citizens, and especially the young people, the consciousness of  belonging to a state with a constitutional order to which one can give his full consent, and to which one feels obliged out of conviction.

One is reminded, as a contrast, of Heuss’s ambivalence about September 7, Constitution Day, as a worthy occasion for celebration. Renger’s abandonment of the term “Basic Law” in favor of “Constitution” was also not insignificant. In 1978, Scheel added more emphasis to the importance of  historical consciousness as further  justification for loyalty:

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Behind the young constitution and our still young state stands a long German history. And both the Basic Law and our Federal Republic of Germany reveal their uniqueness and their quality, but also their vulnerability, only to him who knows this history. The older generation that experienced the war, National Socialist domination, the Weimar Republic, and, where still possible, the First World War and the empire hold personal and—­insofar as they refer to war and the unjust Nazi state—­painful memories of this history. They know what it means to live for thirty years in inner and outer peace.

A rebuke to the younger generation, seen as seduced by the forces of  disorder, was unmistakable. At the same time, it was understandable that they knew little of this history, since they had not experienced it.

Schmidt, Israel, and the Holocaust As we have already seen, Schmidt was much less inclined toward moralistic rhetoric than Brandt or Heinemann had been. Schmidt was a technocrat, and indeed often spoke about the general imperative towards strategy and man­ agement of risk above morally motivated policy. In this endeavor, he frequent­ly employed the sociologist Max Weber’s distinction, from his famous “Politics as a Vocation” (Weber 1946), between an ethic of responsibility (Verantwor­ tungsethik) and an ethic of conviction (Gesinnungsethik). Weber had called the latter ethic irresponsible, arguing that the politician who put principle above all else was not serving the interests of his people, and that the modern polity requires a tactician. Schmidt’s only address at a concentration camp was a brief one given at Auschwitz on November 23, 1977. (As already noted, Brandt did not speak at a concentration camp during his chancellorship.) Though brief and little noted, the speech displayed a remarkable and disturbing peculiarity. Not once did Schmidt, standing in Auschwitz, mention Jews. Indeed, he characterized the main crimes there as having been committed against the Poles, for a relationship with the latter group was his goal. “We have come to Auschwitz,” he said, “to remind ourselves and others that without knowledge of the past there is no way into the future, and also no way to a new and uninhibited relationship between Germans and Poles.” Schmidt emphasized the importance of remembering the past: “The crimes of Nazi fascism, the guilt of the German Reich under Hitler’s leadership, ground our responsibility.” His formula for this responsibility was as follows: “We Germans of today are as persons not guilty, but we have the legacy

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of the guilty to carry; herein lies our responsibility.” The goal, as always with Schmidt, was to shape the future: “Out of it [the responsibility] grows the mandate not to leave the future to chance, but rather to form it with courage and prudence.” Schmidt himself, of course, had been conscripted into the military during the war, and had served in various low-­level capacities. The degree to which this is a relevant consideration for evaluating his claim that he belonged to the generation that was “as persons not guilty” is open to debate, though it was not debated at the time. It would be, soon enough. At Auschwitz, Schmidt characterized the Poles as the Third Reich’s main victims. Of course this fit well with Polish self-­perceptions, which had often viewed the persecution of  Polish  Jews as simply one instance of the more gen­ eral persecution of Poland (though they did not mean to imply any unproblematic acceptance of and identity between Jews and Poles). Interestingly, Brandt’s kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial had not been well received by many Poles, in large part because they did not understand why he had chosen that spot rather than the other major war memorial in Warsaw, which honored fallen Poles. In contrast, Schmidt said: We know that we cannot make anything un-­happened, but we can draw the consequences for the future. We have been doing this for thirty-­two years; we do it in regard to all victims of Nazi fascism in all lands of Europe, and also in our own land. And I think our Polish partners, exactly because they had to suffer the most, will understand the best if  I also remind them that the first victims of  Hitler’s were Germans, and that Germans too became victims of  his dictator­ ship in increasing number until Hitler’s end.

Two points here are relevant. First, Schmidt noted the accumulated history of acknowledgment, implying that it had become a routine part of the West German political liturgy. But second, he seemed struck with an older reflex to remind his listeners of  German victimhood; this reminder was not only a thing of the past, but also a harbinger of a rhetorical turn to come. Beyond that, it was Poles who “had to suffer the most.” Schmidt’s relations with Jews generally were not particularly good, and at times were fairly disastrous.3 Trouble had begun as early as 1973, in the context of the international oil crisis and the Yom Kippur War. The problem in that 3. In fact, Schmidt revealed in 1980 (though it did not become widely known) that his father was Jewish. Before that, according to Schmidt, this had been a secret he held tightly within his intimate circle.

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instance was German neutrality. West Germany, much more than the United States, was vitally dependent on Arab oil. Any gesture at all towards Israel would have been taken as a violation of neutrality, and would thus have placed the West German economy in terrible jeopardy because the Arab nations would have retaliated by withholding oil supplies (which they were already doing to some degree). The first crisis came over American supplies for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The United States rushed emergency supplies to life-­threatened Israel, and used its air bases in West Germany as an intermediate staging ground. During the crucial period, West Germany did not react at all, and indeed sought to hide the fact that they were allowing the United States to conduct this operation in part from German soil. As soon as Israel was out of immediate danger, though, the West Germans protested to the US government that this use of air bases in West Germany violated West German neutrality. As the historian Michael Wolffsohn (1988, 39) put it, “Through its attitude, the Brandt/Scheel government killed many birds with one stone: Israel was helped and with it one’s own conscience; to the outside world, one could show how normal the federal German foreign and Near East politics had become.” This is but one example of the West German attempts to appease the Arab world at Israel’s expense during the 1970s and early 1980s. Wolffsohn (1988, 40) describes the change in the Federal Republic’s Israel policy between the governments of Brandt and Schmidt as a major one involving a significantly new style, a move to what he calls “Israel policy without atonement symbolism.” As we will see, this is an apt characterization. Though the relationship between West Germany and Israel deteriorated steadily through Schmidt’s chancellorship, it moved to a new low when Menachim Begin became Isarel’s prime minister in 1977. Begin was the first Israeli head of  government who had personally suffered in the Holocaust; all his prede­cessors had already been Zionist pioneers in Palestine many years before the Second World War. One might have expected that his attitude would be different towards Germany; indeed, he had long been a vocal opponent of relations with the Federal Republic. Schmidt, however, demonstrated no sensitivity—­indeed, substantial insensitivity—­to this fact. Early on in his chancellorship, Schmidt lost favor with Israel by advocating for the rights of  Palestinians at the United Nations. Additionally, as we have already seen in his 1977 speech in Auschwitz, he often excluded or downplayed Jewish victimhood in his references to the past. The major crisis, however, developed in late 1980 and early 1981. As part of  West Germany’s touted neutral and “normal” posture towards the Mideast, Schmidt and Foreign Minister

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Hans-­Dietrich Genscher (FDP) began dealings with Saudi Arabia for a Saudi purchase of  West German Leopard 2 tanks. West Germany’s immediate interest in such a sale was to secure the favor of—­and thus oil from—­the Arab oil suppliers. Wolffsohn (1988, 40), however, argues that the real goal lay elsewhere: “If one spins the thread of the year 1980/81 (Leopard export) back to 1974 (Germany, as first West European state, self-­determination for the Palestinians), doubts about the more short-­term considerations are appropriate, and the real goal becomes visible: a new politics of history.” As we will see directly, there is good reason to accept Wolffsohn’s assessment. When the Israelis found out about the West German–­Saudi discussion, their relations with West Germany came to a major crisis point. And the struggle played itself out largely in terms of Holocaust guilt and responsibility issues. When Begin with his hard-­line policies came to power in Israel in 1977, Schmidt made no secret of his antipathy to Israel’s new course and leader. Indeed, the West German government had attempted to head off the new Israeli hard line even before the new government came into power. In the fall of 1977, the federal government issued a statement saying that they wholeheartedly supported the European Community’s peace initiative, which called for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. This was, of course, unacceptable to the Israelis, who responded that they expected more support from, and closer consultation with, the Federal Republic than they had been afforded. Schmidt also traveled to Egypt at the end of 1977 to express his admiration and support for the Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat. In contrast, he had been avoiding an invitation to Israel for more than four years. A further West German provocation occurred when former Chancellor Brandt met with PLO leader Yassar Arafat in  July 1978. At about that time, the Jerusalem Post published an interview in which it quoted Schmidt as saying that Israel was following a dangerous path;4 and Schmidt also later let it be known within government circles that he viewed Begin as “a threat to world peace.”5 Begin’s response to the Jerusalem Post interview was quick and vituperative. He said, “Specifically the Germans should keep their advice to themselves. . . . Europe is soaked with  Jewish blood from the Atlantic Ocean to the Volga” (Deutschkron 1991, 408). 4. The interview was in the July 22, 1979, edition of the Jerusalem Post. The press spokesman of the Federal Republic later denied the accuracy of the quote. 5. This statement was attributed to Schmidt in the September 9, 1980, edition of the West German news magazine Der Spiegel.

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By the summer of 1980, relations had descended another level. In July of that year, Saudi King el-­Asis paid an official visit to Bonn and met there with Chancellor Schmidt to discuss Saudi Arabia’s interest in buying tanks from West Germany, ostensibly to defend against a Soviet invasion. This proposal unleashed a serious debate in the Bundestag, as well as vehement opposition from the Israelis. Schmidt was scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia in April 1981, and wanted to have a response for the Saudis by then, but because of significant parliamentary opposition he was not able to make a solid promise to deliver the weapons. Before his trip, however, he reacted to Israel’s concerns and vociferous objections by denying that his lack of solid commitment to the Saudis had anything at all to do with a sensitivity to Israel’s demands: “Among all industrial states, Bonn has imposed the greatest hesitancy in the export of weapons and other armaments. It should remain so in the future too. . . . We do not allow other states to prescribe to us what we do and allow” (quoted in Deutschkron 1991, 417). Before the issue was finally decided in May 1982, however, the memory-­ political dimension of the issue became startlingly clear. On his return trip from Saudi Arabia on April 30, 1981, Schmidt is credited with having said that West German foreign policy could no longer be held hostage to Auschwitz (Wolffsohn 1988, 42). This comment, though not absolutely confirmable, ranks among the most famous utterances on the past by any West German leader in the forty years of its history. However, what Schmidt said in a German television interview on April 30—­ that is, upon his return—­is certain.6 In that interview he offered some general remarks about the impact of the Nazi past on West German foreign relations, arguing rather peculiarly that relations with Saudi Arabia were somehow easier because Germany owed the Saudis nothing from the past: And we Germans also have, for once in the world, an historical advantage there [Saudi Arabia]. We are otherwise burdened, terribly, with guilt that a previous generation loaded upon itself, but on us too in the process. The entire moral, historical baggage [Gepäck] that I would like once to refer to with the keyword “Auschwitz,” burdens the present generation and burdens our foreign politics. We have burdens in regard to the Dutch, in regard to the Danes, in regard to the Norwegians, where we marched in under Hitler’s 6. This interview took place on a program called Television Discussion, on the major West German television network, ARD. Several journalists questioned Schmidt and engaged in discussion with him.

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leadership; in regard to the French, in regard to the Greeks, in regard to the Italians, to name only some.

In regard to the current context, he argued: “These Arab peoples are in this way seemingly the only ones in the world who have had no negative experiences with the Germans. One should not forget that. It plays a role in the open friendliness with which they have met us halfway.” Schmidt, of course, did not mention that the “historically friendly relations” between Germany and the Arab world—­which went back as far as the Ottoman Empire—­had especially flourished during the Nazi period, when Arab leaders cooperated enthusiastically with Nazi policies. Indeed, German anti-­Semitism was a very positive attraction for many in the Arab world during the Second World War. It seems as if Schmidt was expressing how wonderful it was to be able to deal, for once, from a position of normalcy rather than guilt. The most important feature of the statement quote above, however, was his careful listing of those to whom West Germany owed an historical burden: Israel or the Jews were remarkably absent, or at least consigned to a category of “and many others, too.” This served to diminish the obvious prominence of guilt to the Jews as a category apart. In addition, Schmidt argued that he considered West Germany to have a moral obligation to the Palestinians, considering Germany’s own experience with refugees and expellees. On top of that, the remarks came on the Israeli day of remembrance for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust (Deutschkron 1991, 419). Where political scientist Peter Reichel, in another context, characterized the multiple meanings of  November 9 as a “grace of the calendar,” this was more of a disgrace. The response from Begin was quite harsh and included a devastating ad hominem attack on Schmidt (Deutschkron 1991, 419–­21). Begin argued that it was unacceptable “to say to the German people that it has an obligation to the Palestinians, but not to say to the German people that it is obligated to the Israeli people in this and all coming generations!” He said it was “naked arrogance and freshness” to tell the Jews of his generation that Germany had a debt to the Arabs. Begin went on to attack Schmidt personally by insinuating that he had had connections to the purges following the Twentieth of July attempt on Hitler’s life. Begin’s reference was both obscure and without foundation: “Here it is a matter of the arrogance of a man who, in a particular room in Hitler’s presence, was a witness as generals who wanted to expurgate the devil in 1944 were hung on piano strings. I believe that I am not the only one who knows who was present there.” Here Begin was alluding to a rumor that Schmidt had been present at a screening of a film of the execution

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of generals involved in the Twentieth of  July conspiracy. Begin later recanted on the details, but not on the thrust, by saying the event in question was not a film screening but a trial (Deutschkron 1991, 421). In a subsequent session of the Israeli Knesset, Begin continued the attack by saying that Schmidt had remained true to his loyalty oath to Hitler, and had remained a faithful officer until the very end. This was Begin’s real point, and it was perhaps the most devastating accusation because it challenged a basic German claim about the innocence of the common soldier. Begin’s remarks were met with outrage in the Federal Republic. Leaders across the political spectrum denounced such personal accusations. Schmidt is also reported to have said that he would continue to refuse to visit Israel until he received a personal apology. No such apology was given. Indeed, Begin added a demand that Schmidt make a gesture similar to the one Brandt had made at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. Schmidt recognized very quickly, though, that his attempt to demonstrate the normalcy of West German Mideast policy had failed, and that the associated attempt to rework German historical responsibility—­however extreme Begin’s attack—­had done significant damage. According to Wolffsohn (1988, 42), in order to repair some of this damage to West Germany’s reputation in regard to historical burdens, Schmidt had copies of the speech he had given in 1978 on the fortieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, in which he avowed accep­ tance of special  Jewish claims on West Germany, rereleased to a wider public. Nonetheless, the damage was done. Begin’s attacks had succeeded in raising questions in the historical record about West German exculpatory strategies. How valid were claims that normal Wehrmacht soldiers bore no responsibili­ty for the “Final Solution?” I will turn to this issue later in this chapter, and to Schmidt’s Kristallnacht speech promptly. But while it is impossible to determine the concrete role Begin’s denunciations or the issue of responsibility to Israel generally played in the West German decision, by May 1982 the Bundes­ tag did finally and absolutely reject the Schmidt-­Genscher deal with Saudi Arabia. By then, of course, Schmidt’s government had other problems.

G u i lt a n d E x p i a t i o n : K r i s ta l l n a c h t P a s t a n d P r e s e n t As already discussed in the first pages of this book, on November 9, 1938, on the anniversary of a failed Nazi putsch, the Gestapo unleashed a vicious pogrom against  Jewish businesses, places of  worship, and homes. Synagogues were burned to the ground, stores looted, arrests made, and many people hurt

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or killed. This so-­called “Night of Broken Glass” or Kristallnacht was a most infamous date in a most infamous period. As such, it required acknowledgment from West Germany’s leaders—­though, as we will see, it received more attention later than earlier. In the early years of the Federal Republic, Kristallnacht was marked only occasionally, and never in significant detail at the federal level; the statements were few and far between. One of the first such statements was by the mayor of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter (SPD), in a short radio address he gave on November 9, 1951. Reuter described Kristallnacht as “a day with which a new chapter of  injustice in the name of Germany was begun, whose consequences peaked with horrible logic in war, murder, and destruction until the catastrophe came, the consequences of which we [the Germans, particularly in Berlin] are still suffering and will suffer for a long time.” Additionally, Reuter described Kristallnacht as standing for “an inexorable logic of criminal insanity. . . . This night was the beginning of  a will to destruction that increased from year to year until it set peoples and areas of the world in flames and finally let Germany and the German people sink in an almost hopeless abyss.” While he acknowledged the importance of remembering Kristallnacht for the purpose of avoiding a repetition, he also included standard defenses about German victims, as well as passive constructions about the crime having been done, and only by a small group. What is perhaps more interesting, though, is that Reuter characterized Kristallnacht as having been connected to the “German catastrophe” of  May 1945, as being an early indicator of  what was to come. While he did not mention Hitler’s rise in 1933 as the root of the problem, he nevertheless gave some acknowledgment that the real problem had come before the “catastrophe” of 1945 (though perhaps it was only 1938). Reuter, a former Communist, had himself  been imprisoned in a concentration camp, and had spent the war years in Turkish exile. The only official printed response to the twentieth anniversary of Kris­ tallnacht in 1958 was an extremely brief message from Adenauer to the Central Council of  Jews in Germany, as well as an interview he granted to the Jewish-­German newspaper Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutsch­ land (General Weekly Newspaper of  Jews in Germany). The only significant aspect of the brief message was that Adenauer mentioned the reparations agreement; he referred as well to a gradual (and, in truth, minimal) reawakening of  Jewish life in Germany as a sign of the success of his reparations policy. Adenauer discussed these same issues in the interview. His main point was to emphasize that the history of West Germany over the previous nine years had been a successful one that had included the overcoming of old attitudes. He

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pointed to the number of revived Jewish communities in Germany (seventy-­ three) and to the fact that of the 267 destroyed synagogues, 12 had been rebuilt. He mentioned as well that anti-­Semitism had been overcome, aside from occasional individual cases. Reminiscing about his interview with the same editor (again, the unfortunately-­named Karl Marx) nine years earlier, his first interivew as Chancellor, he repeated that he had viewed the respect for differing beliefs and backgrounds to be the essence of Christian belief, which had its “blackest day” on November 9, 1938. On the twenty-­fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1963, again the only mention was a small notice, this time from Chancellor Erhard, in the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung. As in his other speeches, Erhard included a bit more description than Adenauer: “At that time the open persecution of the German Jews, our fellow citizens, began with robbery, murder and violence. The synagogues went up in flames.” Erhard drew a general lesson: “The best that we can do is take to heart the warning. Contemplation on the ninth of November should strengthen our will to make sure we protect freedom and dignity of man as the highest good.” It was not until the fortieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, in 1978, that there were major addresses by national leaders. One of these was the speech at the synagogue in Cologne that Schmidt later used, in the midst of the above reported controversy with Begin and in face of doubts over his own attitudes towards the past, as evidence of  his unequivocal acceptance of Germany’s collective responsibility. Federal President Walter Scheel, as well as Bundestag President Karl Carstens (CDU), who would later succeeed Scheel as federal president, also presented interesting remarks. Scheel delivered his speech on television and radio (thus a much more public presentation than previous guilt occasions) on the eve of the anniversary—­ that is, November 8. In his speech, Scheel provided remarkable admissions of responsibility and even of guilt, in both substance and grammar (though of course such admissions fit the occasion, which is the quintessential guilt occasion). He began by listing some of the statistical results of the events, but then added, “Millions of Germans saw it, and they did nothing or could not do anything against it.” He said as well that only a few Germans had the courage after the ninth of November, 1938, to face up to the consequences of  the pogrom. But we of today view the whole context. We may not circumvent the truth, not even when it is painful and shaming. The injustice that we did to others came back terribly on ourselves. The outrage of 1938 ended in the defeat of 1945.

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Scheel thus drew a connection between the misdeeds of Kristallnacht—­the racist crimes of the Nazis—­and the total collapse of Germany in 1945. And, in speaking of people being unwilling or unable to prevent the misdeeds, as well as not having the insight to see the consequences, he left a larger door open for a general political guilt of adults of  the time. By the same token, Scheel said that the Germans had failed to stop it, rather than perpetrating or supporting it themselves. For his part, in a statement before the Bundestag, Karl Carstens rather strangely combined a number of different historical events. He began by talking about the founding of the Weimar Republic sixty years earlier, recounting the events in some detail. Only then did he turn to “a further occurrence from our recent history: forty years ago, on the ninth of  November, the first systematic and extensive persecution of the Jews began.” Carstens uncritically drew a loose cause-­and-­effect relationship—­as the Nazis had—­between Kristallnacht and the murder of a German consular official in Paris by a young German-­ Polish Jew, which the Nazis took as the proximate occasion for the revenge pogrom. He characterized the day as “only a beginning,” thus again identify­ ing Kristallnacht as the starting point of the horrors to follow. Chancellor Schmidt’s speech in the synagogue in Cologne combined traditional defense mechanisms, historical explanation, and acceptance of a generally conceived responsibility. He began by describing the events in the pogrom, and referred to it as “a station on the way to hell.” He then listed some results: the numbers of people dead, arrested, and so on. He finally mentioned the decision made three years later to carry out the “Final Solution.” Schmidt also said it was essential to accept the truths of the day, which he construed as follows: The truth is also that very many Germans disapproved of the crimes and offenses; and that in the same way, very many at that time learned nothing or almost nothing of  it. The truth is that at the same time that this occurred before the eyes of a great number of German citizens, and that a further proportion gained immediate knowledge of the occurrences. The truth is that most people remained fearfully silent, and that the churches too remained fearfully silent—­although synagogue and church serve the same God and are grounded in the spirit of the same testament.

Schmidt went on to evaluate these facts by adopting a position from the  Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Twenty-­five years earlier, Buber had given a speech

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in the Frankfurt Paulskirche in which he said that he could not hate people for not being willing to become martyrs. Schmidt concurred in this position, though he added that indeed there were many who had been willing to become martyrs. He quoted the opposition member General Henning von Tresckow, who, when arrested by the Nazis, said he hoped that as God had spared Sodom for ten good men, history would spare Germany for the attempts of the small opposition.7 Having established this defense, Schmidt went on to inquire into the causes of the events, which he openly characterized as a collective crime, though he did not explain what he meant by that term: “How could this terrible collective crime happen? What had gone before that such an outrageous collective crime could without impediment come to pass through many perpetrators? How could it come in the German Reich to that process preceding the crimes of the dissolution of the German-­Jewish connection?” Schmidt answered these questions in terms of the lack of support for democracy in the Weimar Republic: The generations of that time could in 1933, 1935, or 1938 no longer prevent an antihuman dictatorship because the democracy proclaimed in 1918 had al­ ready slipped out of their hands, even before they had consciously accepted and unfolded the democracy. . . . Many understood democracy only as technique, and not as a moral attitude by which the dignity of man is the highest basic principle.

Schmidt argued that the social and economic problems—­the overwhelming sense of deprivation and defeat—­resulting from the worldwide economic crisis, as well as the Treaty of  Versailles, had made people ripe for scapegoats: Many Germans of that period who in part saw themselves robbed of the protections favoring their old entrenched privileges, who in the other part saw themselves robbed of their shimmering idols, who in the third part were deeply disappointed over the outcome of the war, the meaninglessness of the sacrifice, and the shrinking of the Reich—­they all scorned and hated the democracy and the democrats because they sought guilty ones at whom they could direct their anger. 7. I examine speeches commemorating the July 20, 1944, opposition as a model case in the conclusion.

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We will need to recall this argument ten years later in the context of the Jenninger scandal, when Jenninger was attacked for making sense of historical German perceptions. Because the Jews were the embodiment of principles of emancipation and enlightenment associated with democracy, Schmidt said, the population was ready to accept them as scapegoats. The problem, though, was not simple anti-­ Semitism per se, which had existed for a long time, and by no means only in Germany; it was the lack of appreciation for democracy and humanity. It was Hitler and his associates who with unparalleled criminal energy led Germany and its Jews and our neighboring peoples into the catastrophe—­but the ground had already been prepared. The socialization to democracy, the socialization to one’s own judgment, the socialization to humanity, the socialization to dignity and freedom of person had already been insufficient for generations.

Notable here was the equal placement of Germany,  Jews, and neighboring peo­ple as the victims of  Hitler; all had had the catastrophe brought over them passively. In this, Schmidt sounded similar to Adenauer. He also added that “only the labor movement” had provided a foundation for solid democratic values. And in this he echoed Schumacher. With this explanation of origins, Schmidt sought to understand the legacy; he argued that the goal was to learn how to live together. Of course, he provided the almost universal preface about the change of generations: he said that the lessons were for the sake of “those who were children at that time, or who were born later—­that is, in Germany, more than two-­thirds of all citizens.” He warned against assigning any blame to those subsequent generations: The point cannot be to throw our people into the guilt dungeon of history. I repeat what I said in Auschwitz: the Germans living today are most often not guilty. But we have to carry the political inheritance of the guilty and to draw the consequences from it. Here lies our responsibility. It would be dishonest and otherwise dangerous to want to burden the younger generation with guilt. But it [the younger generation] carries our history with it, it [the guilt] is—­as we are ourselves—­part of our history. The involvement leads us into responsibility for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. But I add to that with great emphasis: young Germans too can still become guilty if they do not recognize their present and future responsibility that grows out of the events of that time.

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Schmidt thus provided, despite his defensive preface, a rather clear definition of the collective responsibility that the younger generation must accept. Part of this responsibility was to resist what he described as the fear, insanity, and hysteria out of which aggressiveness grew and could grow, and which, according to him, had characterized the events leading up to and following Kristallnacht. Schmidt added two further interesting points. First, he made a concession to Israel by asking for Jewish input into the upcoming final debate about the statute of  limitations.8 Second, he added a statement of support for the right of existence of all parties in the Middle East conflict, including the Palestinians.

The Growing Legitimacy of Commitment These were only some of the serious problems Schmidt faced in his second term. These were years of  important change in West German society as well as in the international order. Internationally, the delicate détente achieved in the late Sixties and the first half of the Seventies dissolved as US President  Jimmy Carter abandoned the policy of small steps and compromise in favor of absolute moral principles on human rights. Within West Germany, the Green Party emerged as a real national force, while the CDU and CSU regrouped and revived. Within the conservative bloc, there had been a long-­standing controversy between the CDU and the CSU which now devolved to the point of a threatened split. The problem involved an internal power struggle between the CDU leader, Helmut Kohl, and Franz-­ Josef  Strauß, the leader of the CSU and a perennial controversial figure. Strauß was an intolerable figure to anyone on the left (recalling the Spiegel affair), and to many within the CDU as well. On the other hand, Strauß continually lambasted Kohl as being unsuited to the chancellor candidacy. An agreement was reached whereby Strauß would be the candidate in 1980. Many commentators have speculated that this was the major reason why the CDU/CSU lost that election. Additionally, the possibility of  Strauß as chancellor may have been a prime factor in deterring the FDP from forming a coalition with the CDU/ CSU. After his loss, Strauß largely removed himself from the national stage, returning to Bavaria to be minister-­president.

8. Recall that in 1965 the limitation was extended four years, to account for the four years after the war and before the Federal Republic existed. In 1969 the Bundestag voted to add an additional ten years to the statute. Finally, in 1979, soon after this speech, the statute of  limitations on crimes against humanity was once and for all eliminated entirely.

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By 1979, victories in state elections had produced a CDU/CSU majority in the Federal Assembly. Thus, though Walter Scheel had been a relatively popular president and would have served a second term, the CDU/CSU used its advantage to nominate and elect one of its own, Karl Carstens, to succeed Scheel as president. Carstens was a well-­respected and prominent political figure throughout much of the history of the Federal Republic. He had been a professor of  law, and had served as a state secretary in various ministries and finally as president of the Bundestag. There were, however, at least two major problems. First, the idea of having a federal president from the ranks of the opposition was one met with skepticism and concern by many; Carstens was, however, largely able to reassure those concerns. Second, as a young man Carstens had joined the Nazi party. But such activities had not proved much of a stumbling block in very many cases in the past, and with the exception of some negative commentary, Carstens survived this liability relatively unscathed. Carstens began his inaugural address by pointing out that the assembled joint session of Bundestag and Bundesrat emphasized the federal character of the West German government. As was usual in such speeches, he warned against the tendency towards centralized power—­a tendency, he implied, of Social Democratic ideology. In a vivid demonstration of dialogical rhetoric, Carstens then went on to present a review and characterization of his predecessors in the office of president. He praised Theodor Heuss for his moral message after the horrors of the past: “To the Horrors of the death camps, to the relationship between Germans and Jews, about the role of the Bundeswehr, about the freedom of citizens, Heuss made fundamental statements that today are still effective.” Lübke he praised for being a “trustee of the nation” and for his humanitarian concern for the Third World; Heinemann he characterized as a reformer; and Scheel as raising basic issues of German society in “an always more technologized world.” This listing of matters handled by his predecessors had the effect of placing the issue of atonement for the past as a problem in the first years of the Republic, and thus as something distant and accomplished. While he said otherwise elsewhere, as we will see in the next chapter, in this general legitimacy claim he portrayed such matters as no lon­ ger pressing. The administrative tasks had been accomplished. Beyond this, the way in which Carstens reviewed the contributions of  his predecessors is a clear demonstration of the operation of genre memory; here Carstens was seeking not only to provide a memory of  memory, but to orient his own work within the tradition of his predecessors. This is something, of course, that his predecessors could not have done. This too was an implication of the review. In mentioning the thirtieth anniversary of the Federal Republic, Carstens

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argued that “the most important consequence that we should draw from the historical retrospect is our conviction and preparedness to maintain the free order on which this development depended.” The legitimacy claim here was thus based on a very general use of history as a source for values, though he did not spell them out here in their particulars. At the same time, Carstens advocated an increased emphasis on historical consciousness in the area of education: In my opinion, German culture and particularly German history should be dealt with more strongly than before in the schools, German history with its highs and lows, and with the goal to show how German history has begun in the last thirty years to become more and more a part of a collective European history.

He also advocated for a normalization of the history of the Federal Republic itself: I plead that our constitution, our Basic Law, be handled more thoroughly in the schools, and that the chances that exist for the self-­realization of young people in freedom be shown. At the same time, the free origins of our Basic Law—­the Weimar Constitution and the Frankfurt Constitution of 1849—­should be illustrated. The great names of the most important framers of these constitutions should be presented to our younger generation, just as the founding fathers of his country are made known to every young American.

As we have already started to see, this idea of Germany’s long-­standing liberal tradition was beginning to receive much more play, since Schmidt, than it ever had in earlier years. It was only after thirty years of successful democracy that it had seemed safe and compelling to look at the positive side of the Weimar Republic (thus no longer conceiving of that period as a total disaster with no redeeming qualities). Until then, moreover, Heuss had been the only one to put a great deal of emphasis on reference to 1848, as he did in his 1949 inaugural address. The reference here to “German history with its highs and lows” would also become an emblem of the coming epoch, “the normal nation.” But like subsequent speakers, Carstens certainly meant as much, or even more: a revival of interest in Germany’s longer history, and a reduced focus on the Nazi period. Another important theme for Carstens, and a sort of interpolation in tradition, was nature, in the form of the German landscape as an essential national

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treasure. Indeed, Carstens became famous for his walking tours through all parts of West Germany. In his plea for a renewed awareness of Germany’s beauty, there were perhaps echoes of a more Romantic national feeling. Indeed, he concluded his inaugural speech by answering Heinemann’s description of  Germany’s burdens in the idea of  a “difficult fatherland”: Carstens said he wanted to serve for “the benefit of our country, our—­despite the heavy burdens it carries—­loved fatherland.” On the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War—­ September 1, 1979 —­Carstens also gave a brief radio and television address, and Schmidt published articles in the French newspaper Le Figaro and in the German Bergsdorfer Zeitung ( just one place in which the same article appeared). Both Carstens and Schmidt adopted Heinemann’s high level of gener­ ality, and Schmidt advanced a theory of political stability based on Germany’s geographical and “moral” position in the center of Europe. Carstens commemorated the war which, he said, had “lasted five years and eight months” and had “destroyed the German reputation in the world and created the prerequisite for the division of Germany and Europe.” (For other commentators, of course, as well as on Kristallnacht, Germany’s reputation had already been in ruins before the war, and the relevant period under consideration was usually thirteen years, not five.) Carstens’s only foray into issues of responsibility and guilt here included the succinct but unspecified statement that “Germans at that time brought heavy guilt on themselves. We think in this regard about the abomination of the concentration and extermination camps [this was a first for such a distinction in political rhetoric], the million-­count murder of Jews and their comrades in suffering.” Carstens followed this directly with an acknowledgment of the opposition. He concluded these references by stating firmly and simply, “As far as this there is a broad consensus in our people.” Carstens also said, however, that he had to respond to a difference of opinion in the public which, in the context of the peace movement of the time, was the source of great concern. He sought to protect the reputation of the common soldier in the Second World War, perhaps (though he did not say this) to shore up the reputation of soldierly duty in general in the divisive climate of the present. Carstens thus complained: Many, above all in the younger generation, are not prepared to concede honorable thoughts and actions to those who fought and suffered on the fronts and who died by the millions. They are missing the experience of inner conflict in which the soldier of that time stood. Most believed they were fighting for their Heimat, and nevertheless knew or guessed that at the same time they were

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keeping a system of injustice alive whose disrespect for people had nothing in common with the Germany for which they were fighting. Those who lost their lives in the process deserve our honorable commemoration just as did the many Germans who found death as civilians in the Heimat.

Such an admission, that the ordinary German soldier had had a hint that he was serving injustice, was of course new. Nevertheless, arguments like this laid the groundwork for the Bitburg affair that would take place in 1985. In his September 1 article in Le Figaro, Schmidt expressed his hesitancy to address the occasion at all, especially to a French audience: “Couldn’t the mention injure someone or the other who still carries the sorrows inflicted on him?” He said he had finally chosen to make a statement because “we Ger­mans are accountable for our history. . . . There is no other political occurrence in the twentieth century that changed the social and political situation in Europe, in the world, and in Germany so radically and so enduringly.” Presumably, this included  January 30, 1933, the Nazi seizure of  power. Out of this historical fact, Germany had a collective responsibility, which Schmidt described thus: “I am not speaking of a collective guilt of all Germans. I am speaking of a common German responsibility: just as the individual cannot remain indifferent in regard to the injustice that a member of  his family does or has done, so little can he divide himself from what has happened in the living area and in the name of his people.” According to Schmidt, West Germany had behaved in accordance with this responsibility, pursuing reparations and peace treaties with France and the East. The memory of this memory was a resource. In both the French article and the one published in a German newspaper on the same day, Schmidt presented an argument about Germany’s geographical position in Europe, and about the consequences of the war for that position and for current policy. According to Schmidt, Germany’s role in the middle of  Europe was not simply to politically balance East and West, but was also to “give room for the different flows and streams of European culture and civilization; for meeting and mixing, for controversy and mutual respect.” Schmidt characterized the war (“Hitler’s war”) as being directed “against this historical task of Germany in Europe.” Regarding the policy implications of the war’s outcome, he argued, “With the defeat of Germany this possibility of the middle and of mediation is destroyed for an unlimited time.” Out of this result, Schmidt outlined three policy tasks: the securing of peace; good neighborliness; and political, economic and cultural cooperation in Europe. For Schmidt, the means to fulfill these

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goals were the “balance of defense powers,” and “membership in the Atlantic Alliance.” His more general conclusion, and perhaps the more relevant one in the context of debates about West Germany’s role in NATO, was: “We may not be undependable.” Here we see the enduring power of initial tropes, even in very changed geopolitical circumstances: reliability redux.

Chapter 14

The New Conservatism

The most important issue in West German politics at the turn of the 1980s was without a doubt the controversy over NATO’s two-­track decision, announced on December 14, 1979 (Herf 1991). This was the linchpin of the new post-­détente Western policy of strength that would characterize the following ten years, and some would say it played a role in bringing about the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. The two tracks were threatened armament and negotiation. NATO prepared to deploy intermediate-­range missiles in Europe (and, most importantly for German politics, on German soil) as a way of convincing the Soviets to remove their medium-­range weapons. The “double zero” option was that the Soviets would remove their weapons and the Americans would make no new deployments—­thus, zero on both sides, NATO remaining at zero, the Soviets returning to it. In lieu of the removal of Soviet weapons, there would be new deployments. The issue of  West Germany’s cooperation with its Western allies was highly contentious, and ultimately devastating for Schmidt’s position. The main problem for Schmidt was the peace movement that had grown out of Green and antinuclear circles, among others, and which had swept the country with massive protests. The left wing of the SPD was vehemently against cooperating with the deployments. In this regard, it is interesting that a nationalist rhetoric reminiscent of the 1950s was often used by the left in opposing the conservative support for the deployments. The argument was that Germany had a national interest in not being the battleground for a Third World War, and thus that the deployment of nuclear weapons on German soil was inimical to German national interests. Kurt Schumacher had also used nationalistic arguments in the

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1950s to argue against integration in the Western alliance. Schmidt’s position was an especially interesting turnaround, because part of the so-­called “change of tendency” (Tendenzwende) on the right, which we will examine shortly, was a revived sense of national identity, which the left opposed. It is quite plausible that this new acceptance of nationalist rhetorical forms contributed in an important way to the legitimacy of the conservative revival. Schmidt, though, argued vociferously for the importance of remaining true to Western solidar­ ity, and thus quickly lost the support of  wide segments of  his own party.

S c h m i d t ’ s L a s t S ta n d The 1980 election results were indicative of the diverse fractures in the West German parties, including the split in the CDU/CSU between Kohl and Strauß, and in the SPD between Schmidt and the party’s left wing. The FDP had its best showing in years, gaining 10.6 percent of the vote. The CDU/CSU did badly, receiving only 44.5 percent, and the SPD improved only marginally over 1976 with 42.9 percent. The FDP, however, remained committed to a coalition with the SPD, and indeed ran its campaign directed against Strauß. Nevertheless, differences over economic policy between the SPD and FDP, as well as gains for the left wing of the SPD, made for a shaky arrangement. Schmidt’s Regierungserklärung of November 24, 1980, thus began not surprisingly by emphasizing how crucial the juncture was: . . . the coming years will be difficult: in world politics, in the economy, and consequently in our own country. It [the future] depends on insight into the manifold complex relations of our world, on decisive communal action concentrated on the most important tasks. We are not objects of history. We are able to act—­and we are willing to act. Depending on how we decide politically, our country can look very different in ten or twenty years.

Schmidt’s claim here, of course, contradicted decades of argument about Germany in the Nazi era, in which the claim that Germany was in fact the object of history was a central exculpation. Given this contradiction, it is not surprising that in this address there was no direct reference to or image of the Nazi past, not even a vague mention of totalitarianism. There were frequent praises of the history of the Federal Republic, though, unlike in earlier speeches (especially those of Schmidt’s predecessors), there was not even a vague image of  what had come before it to make it an important achievement. Overall, Schmidt was most concerned to justify his support for the decisions of the Western Alliance.

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He did this by repeating the importance of solidarity; he argued that West Germany’s security and well-­being depended on it. He also went even further, to claim an historically rooted common value horizon with the West—­an idea often heard before, but never with quite this historical specificity: “This partnership rests also on common value conceptions, as they were first developed by the French, as they were formulated more than two hundred years ago by the American ‘Founding Fathers,’ and as they belong to German democracy at least since 1848.” The power of German traditions, unsullied by the past, was obvious. Schmidt also needed to be concerned with the conflicts within German society. Thus, in the peace debates he vehemently defended German soldiers, who were frequent objects of derision, and who were often associated by critics with dubious German militarism. He argued: The Bundeswehr has in twenty-­five years found its solid place in our community, as well as recognition. It is therefore for many soldiers incomprehensible and horrifying—­and I too am quite struck—­when they are burdened in the fulfillment of their duties through attacks and mockery of their vows. The Bundeswehr is shaped by a democratic tradition; not by a military tradition.1

Schmidt also gave a word of support for “inner security,” which remained a problem in these times of internal and external crisis. As already mentioned, there was a long-­standing connection between the issues of inner security and militant democracy. The concept of militant democracy was used to imply the right of a democracy to protect itself against its enemies, both domestically and internationally. The two-­track decision was thus often defended, as Western integration had been in the Fifties, as part of militant democracy. Militant democracy and inner security were thus two sides of the same coin ( Jaschke 1991; Herf 1991; Jesse 1980). All in all, though, Schmidt and the state he embodied appeared besieged and fractured, unable to meet the challenges of the day.

“Die Wende”; or, the “Turn” Despite its narrow success in the 1980 elections, the renewed social-­liberal coalition was not long-­lived. Support for Schmidt in his own party continued 1. For a detailed presentation of problems of military tradition, see Abenheim (1988), as well as sections of  Herf (1991).

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to erode, differences between the SPD and FDP over economic policy widened, and all the while the CDU—­under the leadership of Helmut Kohl, now that Strauß had retreated from the national stage—­was courting the FDP. Additionally, the United States was wary of  West Germany’s fragile loyalty and growing independence, and the domestic as well as international economies were doing badly. So by 1982, divisions within the SPD and between the SPD and FDP, as well as these other factors, were so significant that the coalition’s dissolution was perhaps inevitable. The details of the breakup are complicated, and are not that important for this presentation. Suffice it to say that the FDP—­due in part to clever maneuvering on Schmidt’s part—­came out looking like the villains. Thus, on October 1, 1982, Helmut Kohl of the CDU was elected chancel­ lor through a constructive vote of no confidence, though clearly some FDP members (from the left wing of that party, surrounding Theodor Heuss’s protégé Hildegard Hamm-­Brücher) voted with the SPD. Kohl was a conservative, provincial Catholic who had spent most of his professional life in politics. As we will see below, Kohl later pointed out in a controversial statement that he was “the first German chancellor to be graced by a late birth,” meaning that he had been a child during the war. Schmidt, by contrast, was just a few years older and, as already mentioned, had served in the Wehrmacht until the very end of the war. This fact, as we just saw, was a point of contention in his relations with Israel. During the war Kohl’s family had not been sympathetic to the Nazis, though they had also not been involved in any organized opposition. Kohl joined the CDU in his homeland Rhineland-­Palatinate region at the age of sixteen in 1946, was elected to the State Parliament in 1960, and became minister-­president of Rhineland-­Palatinate in 1969. Like Adenauer, he was a pragmatic Catholic committed to Western integration and a social market economy. He also had a doctorate in history.2 In 1978 the CDU/CSU had adopted a new program, one based on conser­ vative values of history, tradition, identity, and an increased independence for Germany within the Western Alliance. Indeed, it had been a long time coming. For most of the Sixties and the first half of the Seventies, the intellectual impetus had been from the left. Brandt had been supported by, and had referred to, some of West Germany’s most famous intellectuals, like Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, and Karl Jaspers. During these years there had been something of 2. The title of Kohl’s dissertation was “The Political Developments in the Palatinate and the Reconstruction of  Political Parties after 1945.” It described a process in which Kohl himself  had been very much involved.

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an intellectual vacuum on the right, and conservatives in politics were known more for their pragmatism. By the mid-­1970s, however, the deficit in economic legitimation combined with intellectual doubt about progressive ideology in the age of risk to form what was seen as a powerful need, as well as an opportunity, for new intellectual positions on the right (Müller 2000; Sontheimer 1983; Greiffenhagen and Greiffenhagen 1992; Lenk 1992; Dubiel 1985). This became known in intellectual and political circles as the Tendenzwende or “change of tendency.” Ideas associated with this movement were to be the basic principles for the next ten years of neoconservative government in West Germany (Baring 1989; Hermann 1983; Schnabel 1987). At its beginning in 1982, the political correlate was billed as die Wende, which translates roughly as “the change” or “the turn.” This is not to be confused with the Wende of 1989, which supplanted the earlier referent of the term, among other things. The differences were powerfully apparent in Kohl’s first Regierungserklärung, which he delivered after the constructive vote of no confidence, on October 13, 1982. Though Kohl began with an extensive discussion of the economic problems that were the proximate cause for the government crisis, he turned quickly to a discussion of what he called basic values. “This is not a traditional Regierungserklärung,” he said. “I will lay out what we will do immediately. But above all, I want to present the focal points and foundations on which we will commence a politics of renewal in the years in front of us.” He went on to present the central problems in West Germany as involving not only an economic but a spiritual crisis, and laid out a neoconservative litany of insecurities in the age of risk: “There exists a deep insecurity fed on fear and helplessness: fear of economic downfall, concern for employment, fear of environmental disturbance and of the arms race—­a fear of many young people for their future.” He saw these problems as a challenge for the moral basis of communal life: “Here we see a challenge to our duty as citizens, as parents, to our public spirit and to our persuasive power.” Kohl made clear, however, that he believed the Social Democrats were not up to these challenges and indeed had exacerbated them: “The ideologies of the Macher [“doer,” referring to Schmidt’s nickname and pragmatism] and the savior [referring to Brandt and Heinemann] have not sharpened the sense of reality in this country, have not increased the self-­sufficiency, and have misunderstood the spiritual challenges of the time.” In place of these approaches, Kohl argued for a return to the motivating values of the Adenauer era, saying that the same kind of new beginning supposedly undertaken in 1949 was once again necessary: “Once again the CDU/ CSU and the FDP are forming a coalition of the middle, in order to lay an

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historic new beginning. What occurred in 1949 under heavy spiritual wounds and material burdens is possible and necessary today as well.” According to Kohl, then, the key to this new beginning was a return to the older combination of values that he claimed characterized the ideas of the CDU/CSU in that early moment: “The connection of social, Christian, and liberal thought was the formative characteristic of an epoch that rightly counts as the most successful era of German postwar politics.” But this was not only material: “The wealth of the nation rests not only on economic growth rates, but on human values and virtues and ties . . . .” This was the ideology that “thirty years ago led the Germans back into the community of free peoples of the West, and built the foreign policy of the Federal Republic on it. It managed the reconciliation with France and with the people of the State of Israel. We became a respected partner in the federation of the West.” Despite this triumphal memory of memory, then, Kohl made clear that the errors of his more recent predecessors were not simply wrong policy choices, but matters that involved a misguided and heartlessly progressive ideology: “If  we thoughtlessly pursue the old path . . . we tumble the people into the new alienation of an anonymous, bureaucratic welfare state, just as we have barely freed him from the alienation of capitalism through the market economy.” This address also entailed a return to diverse past-­oriented references. Kohl thus reminded his audience that one of the achievements of the Adenauer era had been the support and integration of the ethnic expellees, which, he claimed, was essential for the growing “trust in the rule of law, democratic self-­confidence, and new political culture.” He also used the past as a defense of Germany’s desire for peace in light of new missile deployments: “After the historical experiences of our people in this century, above all in two world wars, with all the privation and suffering that came over the land, we say to all citizens of our country and we call out to all the peoples of the world: We, the Germans, want neither a nuclear war nor a conventional war. We want freedom in peace.” This quote is full of interesting rhetorical elements. First, Kohl spoke of the difficulties of the entire century, and grouped together the two world wars, eliding the differences between them and the role of responsibility for them. Though there was, as we saw, an important discussion in the 1960s known as the Fischer controversy, in which the historian Fritz Fischer argued that the First World War had been the result of the belligerence of the Prussian leadership and thus Germany’s responsibility as well, this is not what Kohl seems to have had in mind. He was not implying an equal responsibility for both wars and for the horrors of the twentieth century, but rather a passivity in regard to both. This passivity was clear in the second rhetorical element, reminiscent

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of speeches from the Fifties (though it also existed in speeches from the Sixties and Seventies, only less so because the topic as a whole was less centrally featured at that time): the difficulties that “came over the land.” A third rhetorical element, also repeated from the Fifties, was the formulation “freedom in peace,” which implied West Germany’s commitment to reunification, though only through peaceful means, and had frequently been used in the 1950s to emphasize the new Germany’s peaceful, cooperative reliability. Other references to the past in this speech included thanking the Catholic Church for its contribution to understanding between Germany and Poland by canonizing Father Maximillian Kolbe, a Catholic martyr who had died in Auschwitz, and a vague reference to the division of Germany as “the burden of our history,” though Kohl did not specify what he meant by this. The issue of Catholic martyrdom at Auschwitz obviously served the old trope of German victimization. The question of Catholics at Auschwitz, however, became a significant point of controversy when Catholic nuns converted a warehouse that had been used to store Zyklon-­B gas into a convent and erected a large cross at the gates of Auschwitz, thus offending those who viewed the tragedy at Auschwitz as largely Jewish in character (Zybrzycki 2006). A further main feature of the new ideology Kohl presented in this address was one that he developed at much greater length in subsequent speeches: the emphasis on the value, even necessity, of historical consciousness. “The contemplation of German history,” he said, is part of the renewal. The national state of the Germans is shattered. The German nation was left, and it will persist . . . The year 1983 reminds us in a special way of the highs and lows of our history: Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther was born. Fifty years ago, the German dictatorship began, and with it the way into catastrophe. Thirty years ago, the workers in East Berlin rose up against the communist tyranny. These events exhort us to our own history. Our Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, came into being in the shadow of catastrophe. In the meantime, it has its own history.

This reference to the highs and lows of German history was, as already noted, one of the hallmark phrases of the Kohl years. It implied that German history

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should not be viewed solely as a dark abyss of Nazi horrors, but as composed of good and bad, things that could be used and honored as well as those that caused shame, required atonement, and would preferably be forgotten. It was thus a resource for German legitimation. At the same time, where in the Fifties such continuities—­Luther, Bismarck, Hitler—­were adamantly resisted, here they seemed not only harmless, but a resource. Interestingly, no significant official statements about Hitler’s 1933 seizure of power were made by federal leaders between 1963 and 1983—­that is, during the grand coalition and the social-­liberal years. Indeed, only one major official speech on that subject was made before 1983 (examined above in chapter 9). By contrast, Kohl made two official statements on the fiftieth anniversary in 1983—­one described simply as a statement, and the other given during a ceremony in the Reichstag building. In both of these, Kohl investigated the origins of the Third Reich in the Weimar Republic and the aftermath of the Second World War, though he was clear to praise the Weimar Republic as “a courageous free answer to the defeat in the First World War. Only when it was lost did many recognize what they had lost.” Both statements, though, fit clearly into the German suffering genre. In both statements, Kohl identified January 30, 1933, as the real origin of the “German catastrophe.” After President Paul von Hindenburg had appointed Hitler’s coalition cabinet, according to Kohl, “it took only weeks until the free rule of law lay in ruins, and only months until power was unlimited and organized in a totalitarian manner.” Nonetheless, this was not an ex­ clusively German “turn,” but one “which German and European history” had taken. According to Kohl, the source of Hitler’s rise lay in the untenable situation of the Weimar Republic and the civil-­war-­like conditions that prevailed: “The state founding of 1919 stood under burdens that were difficult to master: the incomprehensible defeat, the half revolution, the bitter peace, the impoverishment of  wide strata through war and postwar.” Though there had been a desire for, and a tradition of, democratic forms in Germany, “the peace treaty of Versailles counteracted this hope with decisive sharpness.” The answer to the question of  why this all led specifically in Germany to a catastrophe, according to Kohl, was that “destruction appeared to many as salvation, and that democracy cannot stand against the majority of its citizens.” But the problem was even more than this—­and again not specifically German: “If the Germans placed too many false hopes on it [dictatorship], they did not stand alone in the world in this regard. Dictatorship was also the creation of a sick world condition.”

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Kohl went on to say, “A war guilt question, like in 1914, does not exist in regard to the Second World War. The conquest of Europe was planned and desired.” Clear enough. But he followed immediately by saying, Nevertheless, also this lesson applies: without the complicity of Stalin there would not have been the war against Poland and the division of that unlucky land—­and the destruction of millions. Decisive deterrence, that much we know, would have blocked the way for the dictator. Mass murder of the Jews in occupied Europe, of Gypsies, Poles, and Russians, followed the military advances.

Kohl thus spread the responsibility around. The catastrophe was essentially the product of an untenable situation: a crisis of values, and the weakness and opportunism of the world. One clearly heard the ghost of the Fifties. Nevertheless, one heard a bit of the Sixties as well. Kohl lamented the horrors and losses, but argued that the Federal Republic had gained a special character from this historical background: “Out of this bitter experience grows for us Germans a high responsibility for the law and peace at home and in the world.” By the same token, an additional casualty must, according to Kohl, be avoided in the remembrance of the past: German traditions. In the first place, Kohl referred to the common German soldier as a victim: “Mourning must apply also to the soldiers who suffered in the conflict between fighting for the fatherland and dying, and at the same time serving the dictator.” In the second place, long-­standing German traditions were at stake: “Mourning must also finally apply to the old virtues that were at that time defiled: the belief in the law, the love of fatherland, service to the state, and willingness to sacrifice and duty to one’s neighbor.” Kohl concluded by saying, “We do not want to, and cannot, release ourselves from the responsibility for the past. But it is also necessary to save German history, which the dictatorship gave such a disastrous turn, from it. It [dictatorship] was not its [German history’s] goal. It is not its last word. It is not true that it [dictatorship] spoiled it [German history] for all past and for all future.”3

3. The German here is filled with gendered pronouns which unfortunately all translate as “it” in English, though the distinctions are clearer in German: “Aber es gilt auch, die deutsche Geschichte, der der Diktator eine so verhängnisvolle Wendung gab, gegen ihn zu retten. Er war nicht ihr Ziel. Er ist nicht ihr letztes Wort. Es ist nicht wahr, daß er sie in alle Vergangenheit und für alle Zukunft verdarb.”

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Genre differences are starkly apparent when one looks at Kristallnacht speeches in contrast to these political and military anniversaries. For instance, in the next speech on an anniversary of this event, following Schmidt’s in 1978—­the one given by Justice Minister Hans Engelhard (FDP) in 1983—­we can see some of the new themes that became prominent with the change of government to a conservative-­liberal coalition in 1982, though there were many continuities as well. In his address, for instance, Engelhard made statements about generational change that had been familiar at least since Erhard, but he drew a further implication than even Schmidt had made, or at least couched it in different terms. Engelhard said: “I myself belong to a generation that did not yet experience this night consciously. At the point in time of the so-­called Reichskristallnacht, I was four years old.” He thus characterized the relation to those events as necessarily an historical one—­that is, as something to which the natural relation of memory was no longer adequate: “. . . many people in our country who are only a bit younger did not have such experiences, and can know this all only from books and reports.” The problem was one of making the historical relevant. Engelhard described this as a general problem of history in many cases: “That is a question that has always posed itself in all historical epochs in regard to similar, but also much smaller, occasions.” He made it clear that this past was solidly historicized, that it was no longer presented in the way it had been just a few years earlier: “I believe it is also necessary to keep this short segment of our history alive in our consciousness for the sake of hygiene, for the sake of spiritual hygiene.” (The word “hygiene,” unremarked in the press coverage, seems infelicitous at best.) “A people will not be able to go straight along its way into the future that does not know what good and bad happened in its history.” He thus characterized the Nazi past as a segment of history—­perhaps a particularly bad one, but one that could be listed among other segments of a history, which included good and bad. Englehard mentioned the argument that one should draw a final line (Schlußstrich) under the “mastered past.” The quotation marks were Engelhard’s, indicating that this notion of “mastered past” had become a term in the discourse (Jesse 1990; Reichel 1995). And though he said he opposed that attitude, he had already manifested it in his treatment of the date as a closed historical epoch. The remainder, indeed the majority, of this address was devoted to a discussion of the opposition to Hitler, and of the differences between the Nazi state and the Federal Republic. Englehard’s main goal, however, was apparently to make contemporary attempts to use “right to opposition” arguments—­then

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being used by antinuclear peace protesters in the context of the NATO two-­ track decision—­invalid. Indeed, Kristallnacht itself was not mentioned at all after the first 20 percent of this speech supposedly commemorating it.

R e co n f i r m at i o n Election to the chancellorship through a constructive vote of no confidence had not made for a solid mandate. Chancellor Kohl thus forced early elections—­to be held on March 6, 1983—­through the same mechanism of a failed confidence vote that Brandt had used in 1972. The campaign was a bitter and emotional one on both sides. The role of West Germany in the Western Alliance, the ideological outlook of the Republic as a whole, and the validity of the West German political process were all at stake. The CDU/CSU did very well, receiving 48.8 percent of the vote. The FDP lost ground, falling to 6.9 percent, most likely because of a tarnished image of unreliability and wishy-­washiness it had gained through its coalition defection. The SPD fell to 38.2 percent. And for the first time, the Greens broke the 5-­percent barrier with 5.6 percent, and gained seats on the national stage. The CDU/CSU was thus secured in its mandate, and the SPD entered a long period of turmoil and weakness, dominated by its left wing. Kohl’s second Regierungserklärung, which he delivered on May 4, 1983, delved even more extensively into the program of renewal based on neoconservative outlooks and values than his previous one. He began by praising the turnaround that he claimed had already begun. This depended, however, on a return to the basic outlook from the Adenauer era: “. . . much of what was obvious at the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany we must today elaborate. What for the founding generation of the Republic was the fruit of often bitter experience, the children and grandchildren acquire anew.” Kohl reiterated the praise for certain basic institutions that one had often heard in the Republic’s early years. He spoke at length about the benefits and necessity of feder­ alism, and thanked the churches for providing essential social values: “Our free society derives its life force from shared basic values,” he said. “My acknowledgment and my thanks apply to the great achievements of the churches and religious communities, who help shape our value consciousness. Without Christian ethics and charity, our people would be poorer.” He added an un­ usual inclusion of  Jewish groups: “I also thank the members of  Jewish religious communities in Germany, who have continuously made essential contributions to the buildup of our free state.”

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Consistent with his emphasis on values from the Federal Republic’s early years, Kohl included references to a number of issues that had been concerns in those years as well. For instance, he delineated a special responsibility to Germans who had suffered because of the war, and who had not been mentioned for a long time (though one should recall Schmidt’s description of these administrative matters as requiring conclusion). He thus exempted these victims of the war from proposed limits on public assistance: “. . . we have a special responsibility for the victims of the war. The work of the associations of  war victims earns our special recognition. The primary rank of provisions for war victims (Kriegsopferversorgung) in social security remains untouched. The victims of war remain excepted from special savings measures.” Also, the ethnic German expellees from the East reemerged as a notable top­ic, and as the object of special and extensive praise, here as well as elsewhere: Many citizens of our country lost their home [Heimat] through expulsion, flight, and evacuation. They made an important contribution to the buildup of the Federal Republic of Germany, and they have indefatigably supported the right to self-­determination of the Germans and the unification of Europe. It is not least their great achievement, the achievement of the expellees, that revanch­ism found no support in Germany.

Kohl went on to cite the 1950 Stuttgart Charter of the Association of Expellees, which stated that they “renounce revenge and retribution.” Of course, the very idea of such a public renunciation raised serious questions. First, what alternatives did they have? Second, was it widely supported by the expellees, or was it simply a necessary statement for legitimacy within the political climate? And third, did not the very fact of renunciation imply that another possibility was contemplated? As part of this latter point, Ralph Giordano (1987)—­who articulated the notion of the “second guilt” in Germany—­has argued that this statement, portraying the renunciation of revenge, culpably failed to make any connection between the events of the Second World War and the expulsions. While the expulsions were often cruel and perhaps unfair, they could not be seen in a vacuum, for the history of Nazi activities in these areas provided a morally significant background for them. The statement of renunciation was thus arrogant, according to this interpretation, and possibly even inherently revanchist, insofar as it failed to acknowledge the historical context. As we will see in the next chapter, it often seems as if repetition of this charter was a way for West German leaders to both pay token homage to this lobby and remind

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them of this basic principle, so that they would not advocate politically difficult revanchist positions (see also the essays in Benz 1985). Statements like these about the expellees and other victims of the war were again in marked contrast to statements made since the grand coalition, which had continuously grown through Schmidt’s chancellorship, that it was time to finish the business of war costs. For Kohl, however, these groups and the victimhood they represented were to be a major rhetorical resource. In the area of foreign policy as well, Kohl articulated a number of new basic principles (as well as occasionally citing principles that harked back to the Adenauer years, and which thus were new in the context of the 1980s). He included a statement of support for Israel’s right to exist, though he outlined this within a context of “respect for the rightful interests of all . . . in the region.” He did not, however, use any explicit historical argument for this position regarding Israel. While emphasizing West Germany’s integration in the Western alliance, Kohl spoke about Germany’s geographical and political position at the dividing line between East and West. He also stated that he supported the freedom of individual members in the power blocs, thus indicating a perhaps greater independence for, or at least greater power for, West Germany on the geopolitical stage. Indeed, he used a vague historical reference to justify this position between East and West, which he described as a responsibility: “On the basis of our situation and our history, we Germans are obliged to entertain good relations with both East and West. For us Germans, their are numerous historical ties with the East.” Arguments about Germany’s uniquely difficult position in the center of Europe had not only been part of sympathetic accounts of Germany’s history, but were associated with justifying greater German independence from the East-­West antithesis. In comments about growing European unity, Kohl spoke about it as “an historical task” and quoted Adenauer, who had said that “Europe is like a tree that grows but cannot be built.” And in relation to West Germany’s ties to the United States, Kohl also provided an historical justification: he spoke about the ties with America going back three hundred years in the form of emigration. In both of these examples, then, he employed a more intuitive—­if not naturalistic, then at least long-­term historical—­reasoning rather than a more purely rationalistic argument, such as the SPD had often used in the Seventies. In regard to relations with East Germany, Kohl argued for a policy of realpolitik rather than “resignation,” perhaps implying that his predecessors had given up more to the status quo than the CDU/CSU would have done. A tone of greater moral discomfort pervaded all of Kohl’s remarks about the continued division of Germany and about relations with the East German state. The

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most direct example of this was that he brought up the East German rebellion of  June 17, 1953 by mentioning its thirtieth anniversary.4 The social-­liberal government had downplayed this event out of a desire not to irritate leaders in the East. Picking up on a theme from the social-­liberal era, Kohl also spoke about how important consciousness of German national identity was. Yet, he went on to provide a less democratic, more historical or naturalistic argument: “We Germans have learned from our history,” Kohl said in one of his major for­ mulas. “We want to live together in peace and in freedom. We want to come to­ gether because we belong to each other.” Indeed, since—­as Peter Katzenstein (1987) argues—­the neoconservative agenda ended up affecting few momentous changes in concrete policy areas, this matter of legitimation style and its associated cultural politics may properly be seen as having been the core of the Wende or “turn” when Kohl came to power.5 And it is specifically to such an agenda that Kohl devoted the last portion of his address, outlining concrete cultural policies in an unprecedented depth and detail. The core of this agenda was the desire to encourage greater historical consciousness, with special emphasis on the positive, legitimating features of the German past. In contrast to Adenauer, then, tradition took some precedence over administration. First, Kohl brought up the 750th anniversary of Berlin, to occur in 1987—­ which the government developed as a significant, though ultimately failed, symbolic moment (Trumpener 1988). Second, he announced plans for two historical museums: a German Historical Museum, to be opened in Berlin during the celebration year, and a collection on the history of Germany since 1945, to be opened in Bonn—­aimed in part to help Bonn achieve the status of a real capital city (Rose 1987). The point for Kohl was as follows:

4. On June 17, 1953, a strike by construction workers in East Berlin spread into a general uprising against the East German regime (Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had died in March). The rebellion was swiftly put down by the government with the help of Soviet forces, though it had spread fairly widely and continued with protests in other locations. In its account of the event, the East German government blamed Western agitators, as well as the influence of Western youth culture. In the West,  June 17 became the “Day of  National Unity,” celebrated until unification in 1990, when that holiday was moved to October 3 to commemorate reunification. 5. As already mentioned, the term Wende, originally used to refer to the neoconservative revival that had put Kohl in office, would later be used instead to refer to the change in the East German regime that would lead to its collapse in the late 1980s.

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We, the Germans, must pose our history to ourselves, with its greatness and its wretchedness, take away nothing, add nothing. We have to take our history as it was and is: an essential part of European existence in the middle of the continent. German history in its European contexts and conditions must once again become the spiritual homeland of the young generation.

Insofar as German history was part of  European history, therefore, its burdens and low points were less specifically German and more generally epochal. We note here, moreover, the use of the Central European geopolitical trope, not heard much since the Adenauer era’s efforts to delegitimate territorial losses. Kohl went on to emphasize common European elements as well as particular proud moments in German history. He thus described the Federal Republic as the heir to “Christianity and European enlightenment.” Consistent with his revival of German history, Kohl quoted Bismarck—­a not unproblematic figure, and one not usually cited, because of his association with nationalism—­as saying, “Man cannot create the stream of time; he can only drive and steer it” (itself not a bad description of  how collective memory/mnemohistory works). And he described what he saw as other features of the positive history of which Germany could be proud: We have every basis for confidence: a great cultural inheritance has been handed down to us: philosophy, poetry, literature, music, and fine arts. But we have always been and still are a people of discoverers and entrepreneurs, of social reformers and of scientists; the people of Albert Einstein and Max Planck, the people of Siemens and Daimler, of Zeiss and Röntgen, the people of a Ketteler and of a Bodelschwingh.

Again, “we have every basis for confidence”: German identity was not to be limited by the Holocaust. What Schmidt had sought but could not achieve in the realm of foreign policy, Kohl now asserted for identity. According to Kohl, it was this German cultural inheritance that had been responsible for Germany’s recovery from the devastation after the Nazi period (the implication seems to have been that the German cultural inheritance had not been involved in the Nazi catastrophe): “We have the power and the model to connect ethics and economics, freedom and justice. Both together enabled the rise of the Germans out of the moral catastrophe and out of the suffering more than thirty years ago.” This long history and cultural inheritance was thus, according to Kohl, a prime resource for German politics and society. The Nazi period, though, was not mentioned, except in the vague formulation that

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Germans had “learned from our history.” Kohl did not explore more fully what sort of resource that history might be. Rather, he sought to emphasize what in Germany history was unproblematic.

Kohl and the Jews When Helmut Kohl brought the CDU/CSU back to power in 1982, he sought to follow through on the weapons exports to Saudi Arabia that Schmidt had not been able to get past the parliament. In that context, though, he planned his first trip as head of state to be one to Israel. Indeed, he anticipated extra benefit from the timing: it was not just the pride of timing he gave the trip—­in contrast to his predecessor, who had precluded such a visit in the face of his conflict with Begin, among other things—­but the fact that it would take place while other Western leaders were shunning Israel in reaction to its invasion of Lebanon (Deutschkron 1991, 425). However, Menachim Begin’s sudden resignation derailed Kohl’s carefully planned timing and agenda. It was thus not until January 1984—­after a trip to Arab countries—­that Kohl finally went to Israel. It is difficult to assess whether the trip was successful. On the one hand, Kohl angered many people both at home and in Israel with his apparent insensitivity to the delicacy of the historical issues involved. On the other hand, he was not working without precedent in this regard, given Schmidt’s poor record; and even if criticized, he was able to establish by insistence the tone and attitude his government would be taking over the next several years. The issue, as in the mid-­to late 1970s, was that of normalization; and its proximate occasion, once again, involved weapons exports to Saudi Arabia. In Israel, Kohl sought again and again to demonstrate that, although he accepted that Germany bore responsibility for its past, this past could no longer be an encumbrance on the Federal Republic’s diplomatic freedom. Kohl did this by continually assuming normalcy in word, act, and posture. Unlike Brandt eleven years before, Kohl explicitly did not assign pride of place to past-­oriented symbolism and gestures right from the very beginning of the visit. In his greeting statement on  January 24, 1984 at Lod Airport, he spoke generally about his excitement at being in the Holy Land—­the common source of three major world religions—­and about his diplomatic interest in discussing Mideast tensions. Missing, though, was a statement of collective responsibility or a reference to any necessary “specialness” in the relation between the Federal Republic and Israel. He called Israel’s invitation to him a “symbol of the bridge-­building between our two countries and peoples across

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the abyss of the past.” According to Kohl’s formulation, then, the past had already been successfully bridged. Throughout his many addresses (and not only the ones in Israel), Kohl emphasized the importance of generational distinctions to an even greater degree than his predecessors had done. In his greeting statement, for instance, he said, “I come as the representative of a new Germany, as the first federal chancellor from the postwar generation, for whom the respect for the dignity of man, justice, peace, and freedom are the highest commandment.” In a speech at a dinner the same night, he added: “A young German generation understands history not as a burden, but rather as an assignment for the future. It is ready to carry responsibility. But it refuses to hold itself collectively guilty for the acts of the fathers. We should welcome this development.” Of course, as Deutschkron (1991, 428) and many others have pointed out, no one was trying to assign a collective guilt to the younger German generations. The explicit denial thus appears to have been overly defensive, and perhaps out of place. The persistence of the desire to deny the charge—­so prevalent in the early years—­was remarkable so many years later, to say nothing of the unchanged language. It was, however, in his speech to the Knesset on January 25 that Kohl made his most significant remarks about the relation of new generations to the past. He began by saying, “Whoever comes here as a German, to say nothing of as German federal chancellor, and who goes already on the first day—­and I find that is good—­with some of  you to Yad Vashem [Israel’s main Holocaust memorial center], knows that history is present here, particularly to a German, with all the horror, the outrageousness, that happened.” But he went on to again bring up the importance of the generational distinction: Certainly a new generation has grown here, since at home more than 60 per­ cent of the Germans living today in the Federal Republic were born and grew up after Hitler. But it is like in one’s own family: whether one agrees or not with all that those who came before did, one cannot renounce oneself; one carries the blood of the family, the inherited disposition. All of it flows into a later ge­n­ eration. And it is therefore clear that one here poses history to oneself. But I want to say one thing clearly beforehand, particularly because I am the first federal chancellor from the generation after Hitler. I still experienced the war as a child; I experienced the Nazi time very consciously in the home of parents who stood against the Nazis. Whatever you read or hear about the Federal Republic of Germany—­in this Federal Republic there is no danger of a new right-­wing radicalism. There are, as in all countries, elements of this kind.

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This last sentence indicated that, in Kohl’s view, Germany’s problems were not special. That being said, it is clear that generational distancing was an overwhelming concern for Kohl, though in this he was no different from his predecessors. Regardless of the morality of that argument, it is worth noting his reference to the flow of blood and inherited disposition, a not particularly comforting choice, given Nazi racial language. Additionally, a hereditary guilt was exactly the kind of charge so many German leaders had been seeking to deny for so long. Kohl’s most controversial statement on this trip, however, came at the end of this speech to the Knesset. It was there that he said he spoke “as one who could not have fallen into guilt in the Nazi time” because he had “the grace of late birth and the luck of the home of special parents.” Though the statement about the “grace of late birth” was not original—­it had been coined in a different context by the Federal Republic’s first permanent representative to East Germany, Günter Gaus—­and though it seems on the surface to have implied nothing untoward, it was taken in this context to imply, all explicit avowals to the contrary, that Kohl and his generation of Germans did not really have the same historical problems as the previous generation, and therefore should not be constrained in the same way. The statement was taken by many critics, both in Israel and in the Federal Republic, as a claim to be somehow free from responsibility, and thus as a provocation (this at the same time that the reference to blood and inheritance received little comment). Of course it was not only this statement by Kohl that caused problems on the trip and gave the impression of his making a de facto assumption of normalcy. There were other more casual impressions given off by Kohl and his retinue that also did not go over well with the Israelis. Wolffsohn (1988, 43), for instance, reported that Kohl’s press spokesman repeated out loud and before a wide public what Schmidt had only tried out in closed circles earlier: that West German foreign policy could no longer be decided in the context of Auschwitz. Additionally, Deutschkron (1991, 427) reports that on his visit to the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, Kohl acted uninterested and distracted. When asked if he would like to examine any particular materials more closely, he is said to have responded that he was familiar with German history. Supposedly, the only question he could muster during the visit was whether certain materials were arranged alphabetically. The Israelis, however, made no formal objections in the way that Begin had done in response to Schmidt. Criticisms of Kohl were greatest during a Bundestag debate on February 9, following his return, when the SPD and Greens lambasted his policies as well as his posture

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(and it is not too much of a stretch to see this as a foreshadowing of the Jenninger controversy). Nevertheless, other elements in Kohl’s speeches also troubled his hosts. He gave, for instance, a philo-­Semitic account of  Jewish life in his home region, portraying an existence of mutual cooperation, cultural enrichment, and even love. And then he followed with the standard array of formulations de­picting the Nazi period as something arranged by a small group of criminals that simply washed over the German and Jewish peoples, against all political will. While such phrases as “in the German name” had been standard formulations throughout West German history, their grammatical repressions appeared especially clearly in this setting. All in all, then, while Kohl’s goal had been to demonstrate the normalcy of West German-­Israeli relations, his continued insistence proved beyond a doubt that those relations were not normal at all. It was as with a teenager who continually insists on his maturity: the surest sign that one is not mature is that one goes around telling everyone how mature one is. Everywhere Kohl went, he characterized the relations between the Federal Republic and Israel as being as normal as possible. In his speech at dinner on the twenty-­fourth, for instance, he spoke of a desire to cultivate with care and engagement and, wherever possible, to deepen German-­ Israeli relations. Our two countries are today connected with each other in many ways. Israel is a decisive power in the Near East. The Federal Republic of Germany is strongly anchored in the Western Alliance and in the European Community, which in the frame of European political cooperation is coming ever closer in foreign policy too.

In his Knesset speech, Kohl paraphrased the remarks Adenauer had made in his first Regierungserklärung about the rapprochement task facing the newly formed Federal Republic. But Kohl misrepresented Adenauer by seemingly equating the problems in relation to France, Poland, and Israel, something Adenauer never did. “We, the Germans of the Federal Republic, strive to become, as fast as possible, good neighbors and friends with the former war opponents,” Kohl said. “And that applies because of the burden of history and the deeds that were committed in the German name, especially for our relation to the French people, to the Polish people, and, if possible, to the Israeli people.” Kohl thereby grouped together the difficulties of the past in relation to Israel with those in relation to European neighbors. (By the same token, a similar

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elision was claimed when Brandt visited Warsaw and supposedly conflated the debt to Poland and the guilt toward the Jews.) Indeed, in a press conference on January 29 in Israel, Kohl went so far as to characterize the closeness of the relation between Israel and West Germany as surprising. Relations between the two states since Ben-­Gurion and Adenauer first met, he said, constitute in the meantime a thick mesh of connections, ties, and contacts on many levels. No state in Europe—­I find that this is too little known—­has so many partnership connections with Israel as the Federal Republic of Germany. I will, corresponding to my conviction, very personally encourage that this particularly close relation remain and be expanded.

Kohl went on to say specifically that the “special” relationship had evolved to a normal one: “From our special relationship, specified through the past, has come more and more, through the change of generation, a normal relation that nevertheless—­and I want to underline that—­rests on a special moral foundation. Out of this responsibility we plead with special emphasis for secured and recognized borders of Israel.” He added, however, an equal claim for the Palestinians. In his speech to the Bundestag on February 9, Kohl reported how he had dealt with the Israelis on this issue of the character of relations: I of course acknowledged in Israel, as I do here, our history and also our responsibility. But I also said in Israel, as I say it here too, that we may not exclusively direct our glance at the terrible years 1933 to 1945. To German-­Jewish history belong also many years of togetherness in one fatherland, whose spiritual and cultural existence would have been unthinkable without the Jewish contribution.

Here and elsewhere, Kohl made clear that he saw the Nazi years as only one period in German history, and that the overwhelming attention paid to it was, in his opinion, unwarranted. In a speech on January 26 at Tel Aviv University, for instance, he had referred to “a long and difficult history of German-­Jewish synthesis, with its achievements as well as its terrible burden, with the grief that it awakes, and the hope that it allows, despite everything.” At a dinner that same day he said, “But German history and the history of the Jews in Germany do not know just those twelve apocalyptic years. There was, and there is also

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since then, a better chapter of our common history.” And during his speech to the Bundestag, he described the “horrifying suffering” with which he had been confronted at Yad Vashem as “a part of our German history.” It is interesting to note, however, the difference between his statements at Tel Aviv University and in the Bundestag. To his Israeli listeners he recognized a history that transcended great trouble; in the Bundestag he seemed to characterize a history in which trouble had been only a short moment.

Chapter 15

The Politics of History

The year 1984 was an election year for the federal president. The president since 1979, Karl Carstens, declined to run for reelection, even though, with CDU/CSU control of the Bundestag and Bundesrat, his election would have been secure. In his place, Richard von Weizsäcker was elected West Germany’s sixth federal president on May 23, 1984. Von Weizsäcker was one of the most prominent members of the CDU’s left wing, regarded especially highly for his statements on moral and symbolic matters. He had been considered for the presidency several times before, but this was the first politically viable moment for his candidacy. After many years in the Bundestag, he had served as mayor of  West Berlin during some of that city’s toughest years, and had done a  job widely acknowledged as outstanding in managing the many competing factions and difficult problems during his tenure there. For all of that, and for all his subsequent renown for probity concerning the past, von Weizsäcker was not without past-­oriented difficulties. Although he came from one of the Federal Republic’s most prominent Protestant families, this had its positive as well as negative features. On the positive side, his brother, the physicist Carl Friedrick von Weizsäcker, was one of the most famous figures in the peace movement, and had himself   been considered by the Social Democrats as a potential presidential candidate. On the negative side, his father, Ernst von Weizsäcker, had been the state secretary (the highest ranking civil servant) in Hitler’s Foreign Ministry under Ribbentrop. The elder von Weizsäcker had been tried at Nuremberg, with Richard, then a law student, serving as an aide to the defense counsel. The defense had centered on the

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argument that the father had served only in order to do what he could from the inside to prevent the war. As Heinrich Senfft (1990), among others, has pointed out, however, the elder von Weizsäcker did not resign when the war broke out, but served loyally until the end. This made the son Richard’s claims that he had defended his father out of a sense of  moral righteousness somewhat problematic. Nonetheless, Richard von Weizsäcker came to be known during his presidency for his openness and eloquence about the past, as well as for dignified moral leadership, as we will see. In his inaugural address, von Weizsäcker was a thoughtful and intelligent spokesman for neoconservative ideas about identity and history, where Kohl was frequently more clumsy.   Just as Kohl had done, however, von Weizsäcker included as part of his presentation an explicit renunciation of Social Democratic ideology. He said that Germany needed “a new moral measure. For years a new, a more eager social and cultural belief in progress prevailed. The confidence that we could do good things shaped the discussion. Utopias followed the disillusionment and disappointment. Today the moods are shaped by a zeitgeist that fluctuates between fear of the future and optimism.” The new ideology von Weizsäcker went on to describe was, thus, a reaction to the uncertainties and failures of the social-­liberal solutions in a time of increasing dissatisfaction with, and challenges to, the progressive state. The main failure, according to neoconservative outlooks, was again that in light of all the challenges facing the state, it had not built up a solid enough foundation for legitimacy—­one that would be grounded firmly in a collective identity—­to help it get over its growing incapacity to fulfill the ever-­increasing expectations placed upon it by an ever more complex environment. The problem was that German identity was problematic. It thus required special de­ fense if it was to be revived, if it was to step in and provide the solid foundation for the state for which neoconservatives looked to it. While von Weizsäcker’s approach was perhaps gentler than Kohl’s, both men understood and believed that this would require a reconceptualization of Germany history (Dirks 1987). As von Weizsäcker put it, Certainly, we have special difficulties with our national feeling. Our own history, with its light and its shadow, and our geographical position in the center of  Europe, has contributed to it. But we are not the only ones in the world who have a difficult fatherland. We should not forget that. Nowhere are two nations the same. Every national feeling has its own special roots, its incommensurable problems and its own heat. . . .

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This formulation implied that all countries have problematic aspects of their histories. This much is certainly true. “Our situation, which is distinguished from that of most other nations, is no occasion to deny us a national feeling,” von Weizsäcker continued. “That would be unhealthy for ourselves, and would be bad for our neighbors.” Here, then, was a central argument of the neoconservatism prevalent during this period: the lack of a national identity was somehow unhealthy because it denied the state the naturalized legitimacy necessary for bridging the hard times during which the state could not produce what was demanded of it in terms of administrative efficiency and protection. And it was common to add an almost threatening reference: this lack of German identity could prove to be a danger for Germany’s neighbors. That is, no one should try to interfere with these attempts to revive a strong German identity, whatever fears there were about German identity in the world, because that resistance would simply play into the hands of more extreme identitarian forms, like nationalism. One is reminded of   warnings in the late 1940s that accusations of collective guilt could produce dangerous reactions (Olick 2005). Nevertheless, exactly where the line was to be drawn between healthy identity and nationalism, while often ad­ dressed, remained rather obscure. Von Weizsäcker went on: “We must and we may in the Federal Republic of Germany acknowledge our national feeling, our history, the open German question, the fact that we can be faithful alliance and community partners and nonetheless live with our hearts on the other side of the wall.” He denied, however, that these ideas were Romantic, otherwise unmodern, or dangerous: “We are not a people of confused feelings or Romantic broodings. We are not wanderers between the worlds.” The problem was thus to delineate a right to greater independence—­one based on a common German national interest—­ without raising doubts about West Germany’s reliability as a block partner, to say nothing of errant German nationalism. By the same token, von Weizsäcker also sought to convince nationalists that there was nothing wrong with membership in the Atlantic Alliance and in the European Community: “Partnership [forms] no contradiction to our German identity.” Another conservative value that reemerged in this speech was that of religion. In the following interesting formulation, von Weizsäcker argued that in light of the past, this conservative value had to be added to the liberal tradition, which had usually neglected it. He thus implied that culling insights from the errors of the past was not the sole province of  liberalism, nor was pure liberalism alone an adequate answer to those lessons: “There was no solid tradition

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of calling upon God in German constitutional history. The Parliamentary Council found the courage to use these words in light of the calamity of National Socialism and the delusion that a people or a person be all-­powerful [selbstmächtig], self-­worshipping [selbstherrlich], a master race [Herrenvolk, a superman [Herrenmensch].” Von Weizsäcker also described various cultural elements that he offered as bases of German national identity. In the first place, he talked about a “community of responsibility” that existed among leaders of   both states, and he based this idea on an historical perspective: “The leaderships on both sides declare their loyalty to the idea that war will never again emanate from German soil. All too often in history, peoples have fallen into wars against each other, mostly against their will, often through blunders and misunderstandings. But the effect of today’s weapons has changed the character of  war.” He thus claimed a deeper insight into the need for peace, based on Germany’s position in spanning the Eastern and Western Blocs. This he shared with his predecessors in the moral nation. At the same time, his reference to falling into wars through blunders was clearly not addressed to the situation of the Second World War. Von Weizsäcker spoke as well of the rebuilding of the Semper Opera House in Dresden, East Germany, as part of the German national culture, and expressed a sense of identification with that cultural event in the other German state. Berlin was also portrayed as a key element of the German national cultural inheritance, though as a more problematic one, because of its role in the Third Reich. Von Weizsäcker thus detailed the problems, but argued against them: The history of this city was always shaped by world-­openness, tolerance, and liberalism. Berlin became the center of the Third Reich. It was not the birthplace but the center point of  National Socialist domination. Berlin also became the point of origin for world war, and finally for the Holocaust. We all are responsible for the unspeakable suffering that happened in the German name.

Though von Weizsäcker use the standard “in the German name” formulation, this was a relatively straightforward acceptance of responsibility, certainly for the general context of a presidential inaugural. Nevertheless, he also followed with a standard exculpatory “but”: “Not only horrors and crimes spread from Berlin, but always also, again and finally, brave and selfless deeds of  humanitarian help and resistance. We will recall it on the twentieth of  July in Berlin.” Von Weizsäcker was obviously referring here to the annual celebration in Berlin of the Twentieth of   July opposition movement, which had been headquartered

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there. I will investigate this annual occurrence in greater detail later. The argument here, however, concerning “the other Germany,” served once again to deny any collective guilt or, since that issue was no longer quite so pressing, to rescue German history from any associations with guilt. These are, nevertheless, only two examples of the substantially greater attention von Weizsäcker was devoting to issues of the Nazi past than any of his predecessors or any chancellors had done in such a general address—­though, as we have seen above, he was still including and indeed reviving many of the standard exculpatory formulations. Continuing with his unusual content, von Weizsäcker went on to speak about the rebirth of the Jewish community in Berlin: In Berlin, a Jewish community has come together again, in full consciousness of the terrible past, in order to make a new beginning with us. Not to repress, but to remember further, helps. They stuck to that. In the meantime, trust has grown again in  Jewry beyond Berlin. A new human bridge has come about. It is still delicate and tenuous. But it carries on, and must never fall again.

He thus also revived an official philo-­Semitism that characterized the 1950s as well (Jesse 1990).

Roads to Bitburg Events surrounding the fortieth anniversary of Germany’s May 8, 1945, surrender were quite complex, and were indeed embroiled both domestically and internationally (Olick 1999; Kirsch 2002). The main issue here was the well known so-­called Bitburg affair, though the matter spread out importantly into much of the surrounding debate about commemoration and ceremony in the Federal Republic. A brief review of this significant moment in West Germany’s confrontation with the past will be necessary for us to understand the important images of the past presented in this context, though the matter deserves, and has received, its own book-­length treatments (see, for example, Hartmann 1986 and Levkov 1987, as well as the lengthy treatments in Deutschkron 1991 and Maier 1988, among many others). The beginnings of the controversy can be traced back at least to June of 1984, when the Western Allies from the Second World War celebrated the fortieth anniversary of D-­Day in Normandy. Chancellor Kohl was not invited to participate. From the perspective of  West Germany’s neoconservative leadership, this symbolic exclusion of West Germany in the context of an historical

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commemoration provided an undesirable image, one perhaps indicating continued limitations of Germany’s equal status in more concrete areas. After forty years of  Western democratic stability, it seemed to many West German leaders that history was serving in this symbolic way as an unjustified shackle on West Germany’s apparent political equality. They thus sought some form of symbolic gesture to indicate West Germany’s upgraded stature, its freedom from the constraints of a burdened past. The first such symbolic demonstration came in September 1984, when French President François Mitterand and West German Chancellor Kohl conducted a ceremony at the First World War French-­German military cemetery in Verdun. Mitterand and Kohl held hands to show that their countries had overcome the antipathy that had been so horribly expressed in the First World War. That antipathy was a thing of the past, and all parties had been forgiven. During a trip to Washington in November 1984, Kohl had suggested to US President Ronald Reagan that, as part of a trip to an economic summit in Europe in the spring of 1985, Reagan should visit a German military cemetery, and perhaps also a concentration camp, as a gesture showing that the alliance between the United States and West Germany was one of equals, not encumbered by residues of past conflicts. As we have seen, this was after a time in which Kohl had fought hard, against substantial internal opposition, to allow the deployment of intermediate-­range missiles on West German soil as part of NATO’s two-­track decision (Herf 1991). Reagan said that he did not want to go to a concentration camp. “I don’t think we ought to focus on the past,” he said. “I want to focus on the future. I want to put that history behind me” (Hartmann 1986, xii). But when he said he did not want to focus on the past, he actually seemed to mean exactly the opposite. Reagan did not want a German guilt occasion; he wanted an occasion that would explicitly rework the need for that kind of an occasion. At the end of January, 1985, the White House announced that Reagan would commemorate the fortieth anniversary of    V-­E (Victory in Europe) Day together with Kohl during his May trip to Europe. The White House canceled those plans a few weeks later, but West German pressure apparently led to their reinstatement. German and American officials then settled on the military cemetery at Bitburg, which was close to a US air base. A bit later, Reagan announced that he would not be visiting a concentration camp as part of the reconciliation with Germany, arguing that young Germans who had not lived through the Nazi period were saddled with an unnecessary sense of guilt. His comments in this announcement were quite offensive to many, however, and at the very least impolitic.

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In the United States,  Jewish and veterans’ groups objected strenuously to Reagan’s plans, which were immediately placed under White House review. In response, Kohl cabled Washington to point out that the original discussion between himself and Reagan had included plans for a visit to Dachau. But the problem became immediately more difficult. It was now revealed that in addition to “normal” Wehrmacht soldiers, members of the Waffen-­SS were also buried at Bitburg (the number was later revealed to be forty-­nine). Reagan’s response to the high level of criticism was to agree to lay a wreath at a concentration camp as part of his visit. At about the same time, fifty-­three US senators petitioned him not to go to Bitburg. In a press conference, Reagan responded in harsh terms: “Those young men are victims of   Nazism also. . . . They were victims,  just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” Despite all the years of denial, defense, and construction of   Germans as victims in the German discourse, this was still a strikingly bald elision of distinctions, a step beyond what might have been dared by a West German leader, whatever the sentiments (though, as we have seen, Lübke came close, to say nothing of Eisenhower’s negotiated innocence declaration and Adenauer’s subsequent statement about the Waffen-­SS). In the meantime, not surprisingly, the controversy was heating up in the Federal Republic. On April 20, 1985, the leader of the CDU fraction in the Bundestag, Alfred Dregger, addressed a letter to US Senator Howard Metzenbaum, who had led the petition drive to prevent Reagan from visiting Bitburg (Levkov 1987, 95). Dregger, a leading neoconservative ideologue and Second World War veteran, wrote that the senators’ petition letter to Reagan “filled me with dismay,” and he sought to explain why. Dregger told of his brother, “a decent young man, as were the overwhelming majority of my comrades,” who had died on the Eastern front in 1944. Dregger argued that if Reagan refused to go to Bitburg, in part because of the Senate’s pressure, Dregger would “consider this to be an insult to my brother and my comrades who were killed in action.” (We recall here that, despite his negotiated statement about the Wehrmacht, Eisenhower had refused to shake hands with General  Jodl at the surrender in May 1945.) Dregger went on to imply that such an attitude would not be “compatible with our shared ideas of decency, human dignity, and respect for the dead.” Indeed, Dregger went so far as to imply that he would see such a position as a terrible disturbance to good relations: “I ask you whether you regard the German people, who were subjected to a fascist dictatorship for twelve years and who have been on the side of the West for forty years, as an ally?” In sum, Dregger argued that German soldiers in the Second World War had been essentially the same as other soldiers, and deserved the same

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posthumous respect. Anything less would have been an unjust insult to West Germany’s honor, and a rebuke to its claimed political equality. Dregger would also pursue these themes in an important Memorial Day speech later that year. Interestingly, in the midst of the significant international criticism and pressure relating to his history politics, both in general and in the context of Bitburg, Kohl sought to mollify his critics by giving a speech at Bergen-­Belsen—­a site of important earlier addresses by West German presidents—­that made clear his acceptance of German responsibility for history. He said, “The warning of this place may never be lost, may never be forgotten. It demands consequences for the spiritual foundations of our politics.” He added, “Reconciliation with the bereaved and the descendants of  the victims is only possible if  we accept our history as it truly was: our shame, our responsibility before history.” Like all his predecessors, Kohl posed the question of how so many people remained indifferent, did not listen, did not want to believe anything, as the future rulers, first in back rooms and than in the streets, advertised for their inhumane program. . . . We ask ourselves today why it was not possible to demand a stop as the signs of the National Socialist tyranny could no longer be overlooked. As one burned books we had counted as the great cultural goods of our century. As one set fire to synagogues. As one demolished  Jewish businesses. As one prohibited  Jewish fellow citizens from taking seats on park benches.

Kohl also clearly acknowledged the   Jewish specificity of the Holocaust, something that seemed to have been lost in the previous two decades: “From the very beginning, the terror of the totalitarian regime was directed very specifically against the Jews. Jealousy and primitive prejudice—­grown over centuries—­in­ creased itself to an ideology of race insanity [Rassenwahn]. Where that led, we can see in the mass graves in front of our eyes.” In both of these concerns—­ posing the question of   how it could have happened that people stood by, and citing the specificity of crimes against the Jews—­Kohl appeared to be directly answering the critics who were saying that he was seeking to cover up the past. Indeed, in these and other ways, he went beyond practically all of his predecessors in detail, even seeming to imply some sort of  thoroughgoing shame, if not guilt. He spoke, for instance, about “never expiring shame” and of “knowledge of the guilty complicity, the unscrupulousness, also of the cowardice and the failure.” Unlike earlier conservatives, and unlike his colleague Dregger, who was railing against the emphasis, Kohl stated clearly that the May 8, 1945, had been a day of   liberation.

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At the same time, while the speech was certainly clear on these points—­ and there are some important rhetorical formulations that Kohl employed to rework the image of the past—­the gesture seems to have been unusual in the context of his other policies. Or perhaps it was perversely fitting. The historian Charles Maier (1988), for instance, sees Kohl’s politics of history as a postmodern grab bag, providing something for everyone with a shameless lack of interest in consistency. Another way to look at the juxtaposition of such different approaches in different speeches is in terms of the power of genre: different tropes are, if not segregated, then at least unevenly distributed to different occasions. And the rhetorical segregation of occasions—­the constraints of genre—­do appear to have become stronger over time. Kohl thus offered the standard defenses we have already seen so many times, though the generational argument was conspicuously absent (perhaps a fall from the grace of a late birth after the Israel debacle). Nevertheless, Kohl mentioned “courageous people who in everyday life gave refuge to those hunted by dictatorship and often enough risked their own lives in the process.” He referred to universal victimhood, but gave German victimhood as a prime example: “The National Socialists’ disrespect for people demonstrated itself not only in the concentration camps. It was as omnipresent as the dictatorship as a whole. Violence dominated everywhere, and everywhere people were watched, followed, and arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered.” As usual, the grammar was rife with passives. In the second place, Kohl described the Nazi past as just one period in German history, and portrayed the tragedy of the Holocaust as universal. In one of   his characteristic formulations, he referred to the Nazi period as a “chapter in German history,” implying that it was only one among many: “For twelve years in Germany, and for a part of those years in Europe, the light of humanity was covered by ubiquitous violence. The National Socialistic Germany set the world into fear and horror. This time of murder, that is to say genocide, is the darkest, the most painful chapter in German history.” Kohl nevertheless also identified the Holocaust as being at the core of this horrible history. The mnemonic trajectory had thus come full circle from the immediate postwar period, in which the war was the obvious referent spreading out over all others, including the extermination of  the Jews, to the exact opposite. This was also a rare and perhaps even unprecedented use of the term “genocide,” which nevertheless had been part of intellectual discourse since the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin first coined it in 1946. In line with his standard approach, however, Kohl again emphasized that this period was one moment in a longer totality. As such, it was important to remember, but within this longer

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context: “We acknowledge this historical responsibility, forty years after the fact. Exactly for this reason, because we Germans may not repress this dark chapter of our history, I am speaking here in front of   you and to all my fellow citizens in Germany as federal chancellor of the Federal Republic of  Germany.” Additionally, Kohl characterized the crimes of the Nazi period as raising the broadest possible human issues—­issues which far transcended specifically German issues: “We commemorate above all the persecution and murder of the Jews, that merciless war that man basically declared upon himself.” He characterized the horror of Auschwitz and Treblinka as a demonstration of “what man in hate and delusion can do to his fellow man.” Humanity itself was the Holocaust’s victim, Kohl implied, somewhat as Brandt had done, though with more Jewish specificity. Like Brandt, however, for Kohl, this destruction of humanity in general was also demonstrated by the diversity of suffering, and he listed many different groups, adding “the people on whom the injustice of the Nazis was repaid with new injustice, who as Germans were driven out of their homelands [Heimat] and found death in flight.” He concluded, however, that “we would have learned nothing from history if we wanted to add up atrocities against each other.” Yet it seems as though that is exactly what Kohl was doing, all denials to the contrary. It almost sounded like a complete list of the diverse repertoire of tropes that earlier speakers had long deployed. Kohl thus accepted responsibility more clearly and demonstratively than before, in order to answer his critics in the context of Bitburg. Yet a subtle historicization and universalization was undoubtedly there as well: everyone was a victim, as the depths of general human depravity were revealed. It was important to remember the now distant horrors of the Nazi period because of the humanitarian lessons they taught. But German history included much more. So the speech played to both sides: to those who insisted on enduring memory, and to those who argued for historicization. Indeed, during the early Eighties there was an important argument among intellectuals advancing the idea that German history focused too exclusively on the Nazi period as something outside of the historical continuum. Treating the Holocaust as unique and incomparable precluded calm analysis, they argued. On the other side, it was argued that the issues raised by the Holocaust made analytical distance impossible, and that such distance hid a political interest in decentering attention away from difficult history, and thus trivializing it (see the essays by Friedländer and Broszat, reprinted in English in Baldwin 1990; see also the collections on “normalization” by Diner 1987 and Backes, Jesse and Zitelmann 1990). The question of “historicization” was thus widely discussed and highly politicized.

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Justifying the Visit On April 25, Kohl received a letter from 257 members of the US Congress urging him to release Reagan from the accepted invitation to Bitburg. At the same time, the West German opposition Green Party moved in the Bundestag to cancel the ceremony, though that motion was overwhelmingly defeated. On April 25, Kohl addressed the Bundestag, arguing for the visit’s importance and defending his actions. In this address, Kohl told the story from his perspective of how the matter had come about. He began with the Allied celebration of D-­Day, saying that he understood why he was not invited, and had had no interest in taking part. Nevertheless, Kohl said, in discussing the matter with his French colleagues, he had inquired about the possibility of acknowledging through some symbolic gesture—­some form of reconciliation over the graves—­that the antipathies of past generations had been overcome through great achievements in European partnership in recent history. This, said Kohl, had been the origin of the September 1984 Verdun ceremony, and the Bitburg ceremony was not to be understood as some implied answer to having been excluded from the Normandy celebration. The idea of a similar ceremony with the United States, according to Kohl, came about because he and President Reagan had agreed during Kohl’s visit that it would be a good idea if the President of the United States, forty years after the fact, would speak to young Germans about the future, about the world of tomorrow, and if during this visit he would also honor—­this was always my suggestion—­the victims of National Socialism in regard to what happened in those bad days in Germany at an appropriate place, and if—­this too was my suggestion—­there would be a possibility to honor the fallen of all peoples at a military cemetery—­not only the fallen of our people, not only the fallen young Americans, but rather all victims of the Second World War.

This kind of grouping together of all the dead soldiers of all countries, no matter what sort of a regime they had served, was one of the main points for criticism. It was argued that Kohl thereby sought to elide important distinctions, and thus to universalize the German past as simply terrible world history, at the hands of which all were victims equally. Kohl argued that it was especially important for Reagan to address young people, first because it would signal a true reconciliation to talk to the grandchildren of former opponents together,

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and secondly because young German soldiers needed to feel a bond with their military allies. So, Kohl claimed, the visit to the military ceremony was simply one part of a larger program. He also suggested that Reagan deliver an address at Hambach, an important historical locus of the German democracy movement, which Reagan did, thus acknowledging a German democratic tradition. With respect to the problem of the Waffen-­SS soldiers buried at Bitburg, Kohl argued first that such soldiers were buried at virtually every German military cemetery, and second that it was necessary to avoid generalizing  judgments, even in regard to the SS: Whoever speaks about the question of SS soldiers in military cemeteries, meaning SS people of the fighting troops, must also forty years after the fact fulfill the duty of differentiated thinking and judgment. Many of these very young soldiers had—­as everyone who experienced this period knows—­absolutely no chance to avoid the draft order of the Waffen-­SS.

Kohl’s point was that most members of the Waffen-­SS fighting units were draftees, and extremely young ones at that (this was not entirely true). Thus, according to Kohl, they bore no special responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. He thus argued vociferously against “undifferentiated judgment . . . [and] unbearable collective accusations” much in the way that critics of the occupation had done in the late 1940s. Moreover, as we have already seen, this issue of the Waffen-­SS was not a new one in 1985, but had a long history. Kohl’s statements were thus not separable from their position within a longer polemic, however fair they may have seemed (historical inaccuracies notwithstanding). Kohl was criticized for abandoning all distinctions rather than accepting that one extra, long-­dead soldier group be included in the guilty category. He seemed to do away with all but the narrowest such category; after all, if the Waffen-­SS soldiers were not to be held accountable, it was a very narrow group of individuals who could be. Kohl defended his view by characterizing the Nazi system as one which, because of its ubiquity, inevitably implicated all individuals no matter what their will: Whoever could not escape from the omnipresent power of National Socialism was in one or the other way entangled: as young person in the HJ [Hitler Youth], as a soldier, often as civil servant, and many in completely different contexts.

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The extent—­let me say that to our foreign friends and many young fellow citizens—­of such entanglements was often enough dependent only on coincidence of age, of personal living conditions, or on the arbitrary decision of some authority or another.

His conclusion was that it is really not possible to pass judgment on individuals who experienced such circumstances: “Is it really up to us to pass judgment on people who lost their life caught up in the occurrence of injustice, while we honor others who were perhaps not less entangled, but who were able to survive, and who since then have truly grasped their chance, and have served in all democratic parties in our Republic all these years?” It thus appears as if, in arguing for differentiated judgment, Kohl was really calling for undifferentiated acceptance. While he did not say as baldly as Reagan had that the Waffen­SS soldiers buried in Bitburg were victims, he nevertheless drew the same image. One might argue that since the issues here were general ones of historical symbolism, it might be more important to differentiate between members of criminal organizations and common soldiers—­to maintain some distinction among good (or simply innocent) and bad—­than to protect the memory of long-­dead nineteen-­year-­old draftees caught up in the system. But Kohl headed off such arguments by characterizing the issue as one with personal implications for individual families: I think I may articulate what millions who have lost kin in the war feel. My friend Theo Waigel [Franz-­Josef Strauß’s successor as head of the CSU, and federal minister of finance] spoke of it a few days ago. Alfred Dregger wrote of it in a letter. And if you will look around yourselves in this room, you will find in all benches colleagues who lost fathers or brothers—­among the older colleagues, perhaps even sons—­in this war, and who in this noble gesture of a friend [Reagan’s visit] find their way to them again after forty years.

Kohl thus defined the character of this highly public international ceremony in terms of what it meant to individuals with personal losses, despite its obvious national-­symbolic motivation. In conclusion, Kohl returned to a very broad message, one that no longer saw the importance of treating the dead of perpetrator nations differently from those of  defender or victim nations: “Reconciliation between former war adversaries has been reached when we are capable of mourning for people

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independently of which nation the murdered, fallen, and dead once belonged to. We demonstrated this at Verdun. We want to demonstrate it at Bitburg.” On April 26, Kohl followed up his Bundestag statement with a Time magazine interview. There he repeated the personal suffering argument and emphasized the visit’s importance for young German soldiers. In the first place, Kohl argued, any change of plans would “deeply injure” the German people: “With the Germans not only reason counts. They also have heart and soul. Many of our citizens have been deeply affected in these days. I, too, have asked myself whether the fact that we have been allies for thirty years has any consequences. This has nothing to do with a glorification of the Nazi regime.” He went on to give his personal perspective. He said he was thankful that he was, “thank God, in no way guilty,” because he had been only fifteen years old in 1945, raised by parents who did not support the Nazis. Kohl said that this biographical condition allowed him to speak about these issues: “There are no political complexes that I must overcome. Thus I can speak openly.” This formulation reinforced his argument that guilt was more a matter of circumstance than of individual responsibility; otherwise, he would thank himself and not God. This is, of course, a rather unusual understanding of the meaning of guilt and responsibility. He then told of   his eighteen-­year-­old brother who had died in the war. He argued that it was necessary to show today’s German army—­service in which was mandatory—­that the world did not dishonor drafted soldiers forty years after their deaths: “Can you tell me how I should answer our soldiers when they ask why they should make this personal sacrifice? Forty years after the fact, one is disputing whether it is right to honor the memory of eighteen-­year-­ old war dead.” He added that one of the reasons for having obligatory military service in West Germany was to defend American freedom as well as West German freedom. This, then, was Kohl’s answer to American critics. He reassured them, however, that “we are far away from denying the terrible deeds that were committed by the Nazis.”

The Ceremony On May 5, 1985, Reagan’s visit to Bitburg went off as originally planned, with the addition of a brief wreath-­laying ceremony at Bergen-­Belsen. The important addresses included remarks by both Reagan and Kohl at Bergen-­Belsen, a statement by Kohl at the Bitburg cemetery, and one by Reagan at the American air base. All were met with significant protests.

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Bergen-­Belsen was the first stop, and Kohl’s very brief remarks came first. He addressed Reagan, and said very generally that Reagan had “come to pay homage to the victims of    National Socialist tyranny,” without specifying further who those victims were. Kohl then referred back to his speech of two weeks earlier at Bergen-­Belsen, in which he “professed our historical responsibility.” He did not repeat or elaborate on that record. Kohl concluded his remarks by stating, “The supreme goal of our political efforts is to render impossible the repetition of that systematic destruction of human life and dignity.” He said that this goal united West Germany and the United States “together as allies in the community of shared values and in the defense alliance in order to safeguard man’s absolute and inviolable dignity in conditions of freedom and peace.” In his remarks at Bergen-­Belsen, Reagan for his part said that “no one of the rest of us can fully understand the enormity of the feelings carried by the victims of these camps.” Most of those victims, of course, were dead. Though Reagan did not say so explicitly, he perhaps was offering this as an explanation for the vituperative criticisms his plans for this trip had received, especially from Jewish groups. Reagan also praised Kohl and the other German leaders for their probity and resolution in the face of the horrors of their national past: “Chancellor Kohl, you and your countrymen have made real the renewal that had to happen. Your nation and the German people have been strong and resolute in your willingness to confront and condemn the acts of a hated regime of the past. This reflects the courage of  your people and their devotion to freedom and   justice since the war.” Reagan thus contradicted those critics who had said that Kohl’s desire for this ceremony was an underhanded attempt to lay the past to rest, to end its continued role in West German policy. Both Kohl and Reagan spoke again that day, at the air base in Bitburg after their ceremony at the cemetery. Once again, Kohl characterized the homage as being paid to “all victims of  war and tyranny, to the dead and persecuted of all nations.” He also provided a more general interpretation of the ceremony, arguing that “the visit to the graves in Bitburg is also a reaffirmation, and a widely visible and widely felt gesture of reconciliation between our peoples . . . reconciliation which does not dismiss the past, but enables us to overcome it by acting together.” He went on to thank Reagan and the American people, reminding them that “the security of  the Federal Republic of  Germany is closely linked to the partnership and friendship of the United States of America.” In his speech at Bitburg, Reagan responded more directly to the critics. To American war veterans who had objected to the visit, he noted that

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our gesture of reconciliation with the German people today in no way minimizes our love and honor for those who fought and died for our country. They gave their lives to rescue freedom in its darkest hour. The alliance of democratic nations that guard the freedom of millions in Europe and America today stands as living testimony that their noble sacrifice was not in vain.

To Holocaust survivors, Reagan said that reconciliation did not mean forgetting, and he promised that the world would never forget. As proof of this he mentioned his visit that morning to Bergen-­Belsen, though he did not say that he had not wanted to go there in the first place. Reagan went on to defend mourning for German war dead: “The war against one man’s totalitarian dictatorship was not like other wars. The evil war of Nazism turned all values upside down. Nevertheless we can mourn the German war dead today as human beings, crushed by a vicious ideology.” Reagan thus clearly characterized all Germans, as well as the dead German soldiers, as victims—­and specifically of   just one man, Adolf   Hitler. There was, of course, a certain incoherence in referring to “one man’s totalitarian dictatorship.” He thus defended the soldiers buried in Bitburg as hapless victims: How many were fanatical followers of a dictator and willfully carried out his cruel orders? And how many were conscripts, forced into service during the throes of the Nazi war machine? We do not know. Many, however, we know from the dates on their tombstones, were only teenagers at the time. There were thousands of such soldiers to whom Nazism meant no more than a brutal end to a short life. We do not believe in collective guilt. Only God can look into the human heart and all these men have now met their Supreme Judge and they have been  judged by Him as we shall all be judged.

The differences between Kohl’s more restrained rhetoric and Reagan’s more indiscriminate historical view is interesting, and probably not entirely accidental. Reagan did his   job with flying colors, saying what Kohl might have wanted to say but did not dare. Reagan’s words fit well with Kohl’s presentation of the past, which was manifest in Kohl’s desire for this ceremony. Kohl seemed to have gotten what he wanted. But the controversies before the ceremony, the protests on site, and the memory of   it as a debacle afterwards combined to demonstrate exactly the opposite of what Kohl was trying to establish. It apparently was not time enough that difficult history could be laid unproblematically to rest.

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Von Weizsäcker’s Solution Three days after the Bitburg event, Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker delivered a major address in the Bundestag during a ceremony commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the war’s end (Hartmann 1986, 262–­73). This address—­coming at a time when public attention was focused on programmatic disputes over the German past, and being especially eloquent—­is perhaps the most noted of all speeches made on the past in the forty years of   West German history. More than 1.5 million copies were eventually distributed, and the public response, both domestically and internationally, was enormous. Von Weizsäcker’s speech was vastly comprehensive, touching on most of the major interpretive issues in debates about the Nazi past. He argued for truthfulness and responsibility about the past because he believed the future depended on it. Nonetheless, von Weizsäcker’s statement, like Walter Scheel’s speech ten years earlier, was not without precedent; like all speeches, it embodied and recombined persistent genre elements. Von Weizsäcker began with the basic question of Germany’s attitude toward the unconditional surrender and all that went along with it. He argued that different nations necessarily bore different relations to this date. “For us,” he said, “the eighth of May is above all a date to remember what people had to suffer. It is also a date to reflect on the course taken by our history. The greater honesty we show in commemorating this day, the freer we are to face the consequences with due responsibility. For us Germans, May 8 is not a day of celebration.” Despite this it was, in his opinion, still unequivocally a day of liberation. He argued explicitly against judging the day on the basis of how much Germans suffered: “Nobody will, because of that liberation, forget the grave suffering that only started for many people on May 8. But we must not regard the end of the war as the cause of flight, expulsion, and deprivation of freedom. The cause goes way back to the start of the tyranny that brought about the war. We must not separate May 8, 1945, from  January 30, 1933.” Von Weizsäcker thus refuted those who acted as though there was no inherent relation between Germany’s deeds in the Second World War and the subsequent division of Germany and expulsion of Germans from the Eastern provinces. He argued that Germany’s division could not be uncontextually blamed on the malevolence or indifference of the victors towards German national interests: The division of Europe into two different political systems took its course. True, it was the postwar developments that cemented that division, but without

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the war started by Hitler it would not have happened at all. That is what first comes to the minds of the nations concerned when they recall the war unleashed by the German leaders. And we think of that too, when we ponder the division of our own country and the loss of  huge sections of German territory.

This was an important rebuke to those who excessively lamented the injustice of  Germany’s situation. Nevertheless, von Weizsäcker did refer to the Nazi period as an “aberration in German history,” rather than describing it as a more essential manifestation, as theorists of fascism, for instance, were wont to do. If May 8 was not a day of celebration, von Weizsäcker argued, it was a day for remembering the vast suffering associated with the war. “Today we mourn for all the dead of the war and tyranny,” he said. He listed the Jews, all the nations that fought (including the Soviet Union), the German soldiers and citizens, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the mentally ill, those who were politically persecuted, and resistance fighters in occupied lands, as well as the many different kinds of German resistance. He thus adopted Kohl’s procedure of grouping all the victims together under one umbrella and mourning them all together without discrimination, though he did add a few who had to that point received little acknowledgment (i.e., homosexuals). Von Weizsäcker also examined the issue of responsibility for what had happened. He noted, “Hardly any country has in its history always remained free from blame for war or violence. The genocide of the   Jews is, however, unparalleled in history.” The issue of blame, therefore, was rather complicated. Von Weizsäcker struck a balance between attributing blame to a small clique and to the population at large. On the one hand, he said, “At the root of the tyranny was Hitler’s immeasurable hatred against our Jewish compatriots.” He also said, “The perpetration of this crime was in the hands of a few people. It was concealed from the eyes of the public. . . .” Nevertheless, in some contradiction to this statement, von Weizsäcker implied that he was not willing to stop here, as so many other speakers over the years had done. Nor was what he added an exculpation; quite the contrary. He began by saying, “Hitler had never concealed this hatred from the public, but made the entire nation a tool of   it.” He then went on to offer a fair indictment of all those who claimed that they had not known: . . . every German was able to experience what his  Jewish compatriots had to suffer, ranging from plain apathy and hidden intolerance to outright hatred. Who could remain unsuspecting after the burning of the synagogues, the plundering, the ceaseless violation of human dignity? Whoever opened his eyes

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and ears and sought information could not fail to notice that Jews were being deported. The scope and nature of the destruction may have exceeded human imagination, but in reality there was, apart from the crime itself, the attempt by too many people, including those of my generation, who were young and were not involved in planning the events and carrying them out, not to take note of what was happening. There were many ways of not burdening one’s conscience—­of shunning responsibility, looking away, keeping mum. When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed that they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything.

Von Weizsäcker was thus not willing to accept the easy road of distancing that so many of his generation had pursued. These were harsh words for many a repressed memory. But what was the implication of such an acknowledgment, one that surely hit its target of a basic national memory myth? According to von Weizsäcker, it was still not meant to embrace notions of collective guilt. Even after forty years, denying collective guilt remained a central organizing challenge. Von Weizsäcker asserted that guilt was an individual matter, though he also suggested that a fair number of people had to think about this: “There is no such thing as the guilt or innocence of an entire nation. Guilt, like innocence, is not collective but personal. There is discovered or concealed individual guilt. There is guilt that people acknowledge or deny. Everyone who directly experienced that era should today quietly ask himself about his involvement then.” Indeed, we have heard exactly this formulation before: the idea that guilt is a matter for individual contemplation rather than public discussion. It was there already during the occupation period and throughout the Adeanuer years. Of course, the younger generation was not subject to this call for self-­examination: “No discerning person can expect them to wear a penitential robe simply because they are Germans.” This too was by then the established trope. We heard it already in Schmidt: the perpetual hair shirt. In what way self-­examination could be a penitential robe or who is asserting this, however, was obscure, as it had been when Schmidt said it. Nevertheless, according to von Weizsäcker, this did not mean that the past was no longer relevant to the younger generations. Quite the contrary: “. . . 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 the memories alive.” There

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could thus be no final adjudication, no so-­called Schlußstrich (final line): “It was not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or made not to have happened. However, anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection.” It is interesting to note that calls for a final line were strongest in the earlier years; here was the reminder that no such line could be drawn. Part of the reason, of course, was that the meaning of continued acknowledgment was no longer so consequential. Von Weizsäcker went on to fend off arguments that remembrance was either something exclusively Jewish or something demanded of Germans by Jews. He said that, on the contrary, remembrance was the prerequisite for reconciliation because that experience was so defining for  Jews; it had become part of their identity, and any rapprochement thus depended on accepting that omnipresent memory. This formulation can be contrasted to the normalization efforts that began with Helmut Schmidt, who argued that memory of the Holocaust could not continue to pervade relations between West Germany and Israel. Here, von Weizsäcker appeared to be arguing that memory could not help but pervade such a relation. After making these points, von Weizsäcker turned to a more general analysis of the role of the Nazi period in German and European history—­again, by now a well-­established requirement—­and to how post-­war Germany had confronted the legacy and gone on with life—­the memory of memory. In the first place, he argued, “The eighth of May marks a deep cut not only in German history but in the history of Europe as a whole.” Adopting a much older formulation, he said, “The European civil war had come to an end, the old world of Europe lay in ruins.” He thus characterized the Second World War once again, as in the earliest formulations, as an “episode” of “extreme nationalistic aspirations.” As part of this, von Weizsäcker provided a standard list of contextual factors, including bad peace treaties, financial distress, weak democracy, and mass hysteria. And of course there was the Hitler-­Stalin pact. He concluded, however: That does not mitigate Germany’s responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War. The Soviet Union was prepared to allow other nations to fight one another so that it could have a share of the spoils. The initiative for the war, however, came from Germany, not from the Soviet Union. It was Hitler who resorted to the use of force. The outbreak of the Second World War remains linked with the name of Germany.

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Despite von Weizsäcker’s very different tone, of course, we note here as well that “it” was still Hitler and not Germany. And it seems as though being “linked with the name of Germany” was something not quite fair, and the linkage was again only with “the name” of Germany. And while von Weizsäcker denied that Stalin was responsible, he nevertheless brought Stalin’s responsibility into the discussion. Thus, he did not depart all that much from standard formulations. The differences in his argument were rather more subtle ones of emphasis.

The Return of the Expellees Around the time of the Bitburg affair and this fortieth anniversary address—­ from late 1984 to mid-­1985—­the issue of ethnic expellees had also returned to the fore in West German politics. Various associations had become rather vocal of late, and unlike his predecessors all the way back to Erhard, Kohl accepted invitations to address them on several occasions. The combination of these groups’ lobbying activities and Kohl’s apparent pandering to them had led to significant criticism, especially from the Eastern press, that there were signs of nationalistic revanchism in the Federal Republic. In the context of commemorating the end of  the war, von Weizsäcker thus felt the need to respond directly both to the expellees and to those making accusations of revanchism. In the first place, von Weizsäcker acknowledged the suffering of the expellees—­as the history of the topic clearly required, and as was inscribed in the date as a German suffering occasion—­pointing out that the burdens were not distributed justly on the basis of guilt: The arbitrariness of destruction continued to be felt in the arbitrary distribution of burdens. There were innocent people who were persecuted, and guilty ones who got away. Some were lucky to be able to begin life anew at home in familiar surroundings. Others were expelled from the lands of their fathers. . . . In our country, the biggest sacrifice was demanded of those who had been driven out of their homeland. They were to experience suffering and injustice long after the eighth of May.

Von Weizsäcker thus acknowledged the expellees as having borne special burdens. Nonetheless, he also pointed out that the passage of time had changed the composition of these groups and the relation of their members to those former German territories:

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Many millions of refugees and expellees were taken in who over the years were able to strike new roots. Their children and grandchildren have in many different ways formed a loving attachment to the culture and the homeland of their ancestors. . . . But they themselves have found a new home where they are growing up and integrating with the local people of the same age, sharing their dialect and their customs. . . . Their grandparents were once driven out. They, themselves, however, are now at home.

The implied criticism went to the fact that many of the active and often most vociferous members of these groups were young people. Von Weizsäcker was apparently signaling that the often overtly political tenor of the young members of these groups did not make sense because they were not the injured parties. Of course, he did not put it so bluntly. A further difficulty von Weizsäcker pointed out about the political side of these groups was that the lands they had left were not unoccupied by this point in time. He made clear that other people had been living there for forty years, that new generations had grown up for whom those lands were now genuine homelands, and, furthermore, that the settlers of those lands were equally victims of arbitrary decisions. They often had not wanted to be relocated any more than the German inhabitants had: “These are all people who were not asked, people who suffered injustice, people who became defenseless objects of political events, and to whom no compensation for those injustices and no offsetting of claims can make up for what has been done to them.” One could well imagine—­though it is clear why it did not happen—­exactly this kind of a statement about the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict. In this context, von Weizsäcker reminded the expellees’ lobby of their long-­ standing commitment to nonaggression: Renouncing force today means giving them lasting security, unchallenged on political grounds for their future in the place where fate drove them after the eighth of May, and where they have been living for decades since. It means placing the dictate of understanding above conflicting legal claims. That is the true, the human contribution to a peaceful order in Europe which we can provide.

These last two sentences seem to imply that finally giving up all claims on former territories was Germany’s contribution to peace in a torn world they had helped to create. It was, in other words, their sacrifice for peace. Of course, von Weizsäcker also defended his country against the accusations of revanchist tendencies; he did this by characterizing these groups’

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activities as natural, normal, and even admirable: “The peoples of  Europe love their homelands. The Germans are no different. Who could trust in a people’s love of  peace if  it were capable of forgetting its homeland. . . . An expellee’s love for his homeland is in no way revanchism.” Following these discussions, von Weizsäcker turned to an evaluation of what West Germany had built out of its historical legacy. He talked about the stronger-­than-­ever desire for peace and European cooperation. Against those pundits who had hypothesized a “zero hour” for Germany after 1945, he argued, “There was no ‘zero hour,’ but we had the opportunity to make a fresh start. We have used this opportunity as well as we could.” The structural changes he pointed to included the emphasis on the inalienability of human rights, economic responsibility, and freedom of the individual. In a nod to German traditions and the neoconservative interest in them, he added that it had been possible to develop a certain basic pride once again: “We certainly have no reason to be arrogant and self-­righteous. But we may look back with gratitude on our development over these forty years, if we use the memory of our own history as a guideline for our future behavior.” Von Weizsäcker listed support for the handicapped, prevention of racism, freedom of speech, support for Israel’s right to exist, and accommodation with the East as concrete implications of those guidelines. Finally, von Weizsäcker addressed the question of  why it was on the fortieth anniversary that these issues had come to such a head. His answer had to do with the importance of   forty years as a period in   Judeo-­Christian culture, rather than with anything more political, such as an attempt at normalization for the purpose of increasing Germany’s weight in the world. He said that while this temporal distance usually placed a limit on responsibility and memory, it was nonetheless important to keep these memories alive: “We must help younger people to understand why it is vital to keep memories alive. We want to help them to accept historical truth soberly, not onesidedly; without taking refuge in utopian doctrines, but also without moral arrogance.” The implicit message, of  course, was that none of these things—­that it was important to keep memory alive, that young people needed guidance on these matters—­was still obvious, and that they still required an argument. These statements also contradicted the fact that it had most often been the older generation that militated against too much memory from the immediate postwar “catastrophe.” In conclusion, von Weizsäcker merely called upon the German people to do its best, without setting a specific standard: “On this eighth of   May, let us face up as well as we can to the truth.” Von Weizsäcker’s address thus had an eloquent moral tone, and it was

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highly praised around the world as a fresh wind in a West German discourse that had been attracting so much criticism for its apparent attempts to minimize the past. Centrist political commentators in West Germany and elsewhere hailed the speech as particularly honest, balanced, and even courageous. However, some argued that there was nothing special in it. Historian Alfred Grosser, for instance, wrote, “It is said every time that there is finally true consciousness in the Federal Republic, whereby it is forgotten every time that this consciousness has already existed before—­and at particular points in time, especially intensively.” Grosser argued that Scheel’s speech ten years earlier had been “even clearer, even more forceful.” Public commentary has a short memory, while speakers seem well attuned to the generic resources and constraints of commemoration. The speech was well received by the moderate left as well, who hypothesized that it indicated a split between von Weizsäcker and Kohl. That is, von Weizsäcker’s argument for the importance of continued painful memory was seen as a rebuke to Kohl’s “grace of a late birth” comment. To maintain this reading, Kohl’s Bergen-­Belsen speech, which resembled von Weizsäcker’s in many respects, was dismissed as a strategic move in the context of  Bitburg—­or, again, as Charles Maier (1988) put it, as evidence of Kohl’s willingness to use history for immediate purposes no matter what the contradictions, thus forming a malleable postmodern hodgepodge rather than a consistent theory of  history. But von Weizsäcker’s theory appears to have been the true hodgepodge; where Kohl had replaced one set of  blinders for another when expedient, von Weizsäcker attempted to hold all arguments simultaneously in view. For many, von Weizsäcker’s speech settled the disturbances of the previous months by providing a formula by which an older, more mature Federal Republic could get on with things. The new commemorative regime was now past the struggle: “responsibility before history” was a palatable trope, and it could be deployed without the fuss of old struggles. It demanded nothing other than ritual acknowledgment. Indeed, as we will see, this was what happened through German unification in general, and on the fiftieth anniversary of   May 8 in particular. But this smoother ritualism was possible only after the difficult moment of 1985 had passed. In that moment, von Weizsäcker settled the internal contradictions and external costs of the genre by providing a new synthesis in which no one felt left out. On this basis, commemoration could occur without opening up so many partisan wounds. For others, of course, the speech was still unacceptable. In some Social Democratic circles, von Weizsäcker’s unwillingness to embrace collective

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guilt was problematic. And far out on the left, his denial of revanchism and his praise of the Federal Republic’s accomplishments proved his speech as a mere symptom of the problem. For the moderate to far right, von Weizsäcker had given away too much. There were always those who did not care what the arguments were, who considered any mention of responsibility for the National Socialist past an attack on Germany. And there were certainly radicals in the expellees’ groups who harbored hopes of regaining the territories, even at any cost. But the overwhelming majority—­in West Germany, in the United States, in Israel, and elsewhere—­hailed the speech as a major success, a real point of reference in difficult symbolic times. There is one further moment of interest that can be grouped in the context of Bitburg and the fortieth anniversary. This is the matter of legislation that came to be known as the Auschwitz Lie Law. This measure was originally introduced to protect against fringes that claimed that the genocide of the Jews had never happened—­that Auschwitz was a lie. It made punishable any such public statement, and prohibited the printing of such claims. The idea behind this law, which from an American perspective seemingly violated freedom of speech, fit well with West German notions of   “militant democracy.” It was not, however, on libertarian grounds that the legislation was opposed. Rather, debate centered around the issue of singling out this German crime to the exclusion of German suffering. Conservative factions thus pressed for equivalent legislation to prohibit the denial or downplaying of the ethnic expulsions after the war. Of course, no one had been doing that, but the sentiment was for a “balanced” view of Germany’s past. The original intentions of the Auschwitz Lie Law—­to defend against denial of the Holocaust, and to demonstrate that such behavior was held by the German people to be beyond the pale—­were thus vitiated in the final version, which also included the prohibition sought by the conservatives.

Von Weizsäcker and the Historians Despite his eloquent speech on May 8, 1985, von Weizsäcker had yet another occasion to address the matter of Germany’s proper attitude towards the past in the context of the Historians’ Dispute, which followed quickly after the Bitburg affair. The Historians’ Dispute was an exchange of articles in West Germany’s major newspapers by a number of prominent historians and sociologists concerning the status of the Nazi past in German history and its

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implications for contemporary German politics and identity.1 On one side, the conservative historian Ernst Nolte published an essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in June 1986 called “The Past That Will Not Pass Away” (Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will), in which he argued that Auschwitz had involved no greater evil than had occurred in many other places, from Turkish Armenia to Stalin’s gulags. Nolte also referred to the 1939 declaration by Chaim Weizmann (leader of the European Zionists) that in the case of war Jews would sympathize with the British, as well as to Nazi fears that the Soviets would commit “Asiatic deeds” against Germany; both references were meant to imply that the Nazis had defensive motivations. Nolte’s arguments thus challenged those who believed that the Holocaust was an event different from all others in history, implying special burdens for Germany. Indeed, Nolte claimed, as he put it in the article’s subtitle, that his essay was originally a speech that could not be delivered because it violated a politically correct taboo of West Germany political culture (though the article’s publication in one of West Germany’s most significant newspapers seems like a prima facie contradiction of that claim). Nolte was not alone. At around the same time, the historian Andreas Hillgruber (1986) published a small book called Two Kinds of Destruction: The Shattering of the German Reich and the End of the European Jews. The book comprised two parts: a substantial and passionate account of the German army on the Eastern front in the winter of 1944–­45, and a much shorter, dryer report on the “end” of the Jews in the same period. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the book, critics charged, was Hillgruber’s argument that the difference in his treatments of the German soldiers and of the Jewish Holocaust victims derived from the fact that the German historian inevitably had to identify with the terrible plight of Hitler’s soldiers rather than with the Jews. Nolte’s and Hillgruber’s positions were also echoed by numerous others, most prominently   Joachim Fest, editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine, and the historian Michael Stürmer, an adviser to Chancellor Kohl who published an article calling for history in a country in which history was supposedly taboo. On the other side, the philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, among others, argued that these arguments were illegitimate forms of revi1. The literature of and on the Historians’ Dispute is enormous. Original documents can be found in Knowlton and Cates (1993); other interesting materials are in Baldwin (1990); excellent intellectual-­historical accounts in English include Evans (1982) and Maier (1988). See also Augstein (1986).

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sionism. Nolte’s attempt to establish equivalences among the horrors of the twentieth century, he argued, not only was factually misleading, but ended up obliterating moral differences. In crediting claims of defensive motivations for the “Final Solution,” Habermas charged, Nolte went even further than making the Holocaust seem a “normal” part of political life, and appeared to be justifying the logic that had brought it about. Habermas saw such arguments as an attempt to avoid collective responsibility through a misguided comparative historiography. Indeed, Habermas characterized the arguments as a sort of conspiracy (he used the term to provoke), and associated them with the overall tenor of the foreign and cultural policies Kohl had pursued since taking office in 1982. They were, he argued, an effort to rework the foundations of   West German political culture. For Habermas, the centrality of Nazi crimes in German historical and political narrative was not only not a barrier to a healthy German national identity; it was its sine qua non. And this is what neoconservative history politics was threatening to disrupt, at great risk to the moral core of the state’s identity. It was President von Weizsäcker who provided the symbolic end to this debate (though it continued in fits and spurts for years) in an address to the annual convention of  historians in 1988. There he reiterated main themes from his May 8 speech, but went on to address a central issue from the Historians’ Dispute (and from its earlier beginnings in the Friedländer-­Broszat debate, mentioned above): the purported and challenged uniqueness of Auschwitz, and the result of that status for the collective life of the Federal Republic. Von Weizsäcker attempted to lay the matter to rest by coming down firmly in favor of the left in the debate, thereby lending further credence to presumptions of a rift between Kohl and von Weizsäcker on symbolic historical issues. (Of course, such a difference of presentation was not necessarily a real problem for Kohl. Indeed, the attention von Weizsäcker’s remarks received internationally may have deflected attention from Kohl’s cultural plans, including the two museums mentioned above, his politics of normalization, and subsequent plans for a war memorial in Bonn.) Von Weizsäcker thus argued that the crimes of the Nazi period could not be relativized through historical comparison (Glaser 1990, vol. 3, 347): Auschwitz remains singular. It happened in the German name, through Germans. This truth is indisputable. And it will not go away. Auschwitz remains familiar to us, so Siegfried Lenz [a prominent novelist, dramatist, and commentator] said a few days ago; it belongs to us, just as the rest of our own history belongs to us. Historical responsibility means accepting history as one’s own.

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The passage of time does not change this at all. What happened in Auschwitz has, if anything, increased in its weight in the awareness of humanity in the decades since the end of the war.

To that weight von Weizsäcker counterposed the achievements of German democracy, a system that had survived for forty years, and one that, he said, was in no small measure a response to history: “That we could achieve this and continually learn entitles us to self-­confidence [Selbstbewußtsein] in the true sense of   the word. That is liberation.”

Chapter 16

Beyond Bitburg

By the time of the next scheduled federal elections, in 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in the Soviet Union, and this had repercussions for West German politics. The FDP, under the leadership of Foreign Minister Hans-­Dietrich Genscher, believed Gorbachev posed a real opportunity for change. Genscher thus pushed for cooperating with Gorbachev and for supporting him in whatever way possible. By contrast, the CDU/CSU was extremely wary. Indeed, in 1988 after a visit with the Soviet leader, Kohl went so far as to call Gorbachev “another Goebbels”—­a rabble-­rousing propagandist. The point was that Kohl and other conservative leaders did not think the rhetoric of change in the Soviet Union would result in significant changes for the East-­West antithesis, or for the status quo of divided Germany. From this perspective, Gorbachev’s reduction of fears in the German public was in fact dangerous, because it also reduced the public’s willingness to support a strong defense, still believed necessary by conservative leaders. In the federal elections of 1987, the CDU/CSU lost 4.5 percent from its 1983 results, while the FDP (in part because of its support for Gorbachev) went up substantially to 9.1 percent, and the SPD became the strongest single party in the Bundestag, though falling 1.2 percent to 37 percent. The Greens also increased their share, moving up to 8.3 percent. The conservative-­liberal coalition thus survived. In his third Regierungserklärung, delivered on March 18, 1987, Kohl repeated the general program of  value renewal through cultural policy and histor­ ical orientation that he had laid out in his previous two Regierungserklärungen,

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emphasizing certain of these themes to an even greater degree than before, while adding others that, while featured in general public discourse, had not previously made it into a Regierungserklärung. Indeed, in the years between 1983 and 1987, Kohl’s cultural policies had become a significant focus of attention and controversy in public discourse. Many important events, like the Historians’ Dispute, Bitburg, and the many fortieth anniversaries all contributed to a greater awareness of and sensitivity to the complexities of historical and cultural issues in politics. Kohl began this address by claiming that the immediate crisis that had led to the Wende of 1982 had been overcome, but that the fundamental problems of life in a complex, risk-­laden society were perpetual, and could only be met with the continuous reinforcement of  basic values. The problem was that the profound changes of our time affect citizens in their everyday life. Many people see themselves caught in the conflict of opposing feelings. We know all about the fascinating possibilities of the modern sciences, but we also know that not everything that is technically possible and economically advantageous is desirable from a human standpoint. In our secularized world, the search for meaning in life has become more difficult, and existential fears are becoming greater. And, as in all times of great change, the tension between continuity and progress, tradition and modernity are today also strongly felt.

The solution, according to Kohl, was a return to basic values: We want to sharpen value consciousness, especially the sense of the connection of freedom and responsibility. The value system that is valid for us, essentially formed through Christianity and the Enlightenment, is based on the uniqueness of every person, on the respect for life, for the value of man, and for personal freedom. . . . In our time the necessity of ethical principles is always more strongly felt, as they are also the foundation of our Basic Law.

Note the return of the term “Basic Law” over “constitution.” As in his earlier addresses, Kohl proposed that the way to solve the value crisis, and thus to resist the anxieties and overburdening of modern society and the state, was the revival of traditional identity through a broad cultural program. In this 1987 address, though, he added an important element to those mentioned in his earlier Regierungserklärungen: that of regional identities,

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symbolized by the term Heimat. The notion of Heimat had experienced a broad cultural revival in the 1980s (Applegate 1990; Confino 1997). It had many expressions, ranging from President Karl Carstens’s hikes through all the regions of Germany to a much-­touted television series called Heimat, by the filmmaker Edgar Reitz (Kaes 1989; Santner 1990), which traced the life of one family from the Weimar Republic through the war and afterward. In this latter form, the notion of Heimat was associated with the practice of “history of everyday life,” which, many argued, downplayed the centrality of Nazism to the German experience by demonstrating the essential continuities of everyday life through momentous historical occurrences (Nolan 1990). Part of this concept was a somewhat Romantic-­sounding appeal to love of the German soil, which the Nazis had co-­opted in their expression Blut und Boden (blood and soil). The concrete part was the revival of attention to ethnic expellee lobbies, whom Kohl thanked, and whom he reminded of their charter renouncing revenge. Kohl was the first chancellor since Erhard to address such a group, and those addresses earned him significant criticism for encouraging revanchism. In his address, Kohl called for renewed attention to and support of the sense of Heimat: “In modern mass society—­we are experiencing it in the Federal Republic of Germany as well—­the danger is great that the individual is be­ coming cut off from society.” The thought was redolent of Adenauer’s Cold War warnings against “massification.” Kohl went on to say, “In the reawakening of Heimat [regional] cultures, the need for clarity [Überschaubarkeit] and intimacy expresses itself. For many, the word Heimat has happily become a synonym for this need. The fostering of culture and love of Heimat essentially contribute to our country preserving its human face within all the technical progress.” Following his earlier addresses, Kohl repeated and expanded his interest in supporting broad cultural policies for the purpose of underwriting a strong German identity. And as before, history was a, if not the, crucial element. Kohl’s not always implicit argument was directed against any mono­ tonic presentation of German history and identity, one that inevitably focused on the Third Reich: “Our foreign cultural policy should impart an inclusive picture mirroring the democratic variety of opinion of the Federal Republic of Germany. It should correspond to the economic, social, and cultural reality and encompass the entire German history in all its highs and lows.” Kohl connected this cultural policy to a concern for the foundations of national unity: “The unity of the nation should and must first be realized in the freedom of  its people. This unity is founded not last in the common history. We acknowledge the entire German history with its highs and its lows. For every people, history

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is the source of self-­assurance. The nurturing of culture and history is therefore also a national task of the future.” In addition to offering this justification, Kohl referred to building up Bonn as a capital, called for increased interest in maintaining monuments, mentioned the importance of celebrating Berlin’s upcoming 750th anniversary, and again mentioned the plans for two historical museums. In regard to the last, he included a defense against criticism: “German history should be represented so that citizens recognize themselves in it—­open for controversial interpretations and discussions, open for the multiplicity of possibilities of dispositions toward history. In a free society, there is in our conviction no closed and certainly no officially decreed image of history.” Many people had argued that plans developed by the government-­appointed museum commission involved a whitewashed version of history, one de-­centering attention away from the Nazi period for the purposes of legitimating conservative notions of identity. In this address, Kohl also included a number of formulaic “lessons of the past”: “From our history we have learned: German foreign policy may not be value-­free.” And: “The bitter experience of war and domination may not recur—­that is the lesson of the history of our century.” He argued, further, against the disruptions and challenges caused by the peace movement’s demonstrations: “The sorrowful experience of our people in this century [note again the entire century, not the Nazi years] teaches how important this peaceful order is to us.” Here Kohl did not firmly distinguish between the different challenges to peaceful order, which came both from terrorism and from ordinary demonstrations. While Kohl of course included standard reassurances of Germany’s understanding of its obligations (including a brief statement of support for everyone’s interests in the Middle East), he placed it all in its explicit instrumental context: “We need a stronger consciousness in our citizens of the increased role and responsibility of the Federal Republic of Germany in international politics.”

Jenninger This book began with a description of a speech on November 10, 1988, that Bundestag President Philipp Jenninger delivered to a special session of the Bundestag marking the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht. During the speech, many members of the SPD and Greens took offense to the tone and content of the remarks, and dozens walked out in protest. The event quickly became a scandal, with criticisms and countercriticisms flying in all directions. As a result, Jenninger was pressured into resigning his position, one of the most

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important in West German politics. On the basis of the foregoing history of German memory, we are now in a better position to appreciate the complexities of that significant moment. The incident, of course, cannot be understood in isolation from the context. Indeed, the entire field of public and political discourse throughout the mid-­1980s, as we have seen, was clearly one powerfully shaped by the politics of   history and sensitive to it. Occasions for that discourse included Kohl’s 1984 “grace of late birth” trip to Israel, Bitburg, the Historians’ Dispute, and many war-­related fortieth anniversaries. They also included cultural events, such as a production of, and protest over, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play City, Trash, and Death1—­which included a tremendously negative depiction of a Jewish character—­as well as the showing of the American television miniseries Holocaust in the Federal Republic (it was among the most watched TV shows in West German history, and engendered significant attention and discussion, as well as criticism).2 The Eighties were thus especially volatile and sensitive years for the politics of history in West Germany. As Kohl pursued his neoconservative cultural agenda, these many events—­more and less related to and involved in political contexts—­kept the debates percolating. It is a challenge, therefore, to understand what made Jenninger’s speech particularly problematic—­how much it was simply a convenient focus for already existing positions and leveraging, and how much it departed from its context, both generic and epochal. I will offer some thoughts on these matters in the conclusion, as a way of testing my interpretive categories. My task here is to unpack what it was that Jenninger said, and how it was or was not significantly different from other statements. In this regard, it is especially helpful that Jenninger had also given a commemorative address on Kristallnacht three years earlier, in 1985—­though on that occasion to the Society for Christian-­Jewish Cooperation in Stuttgart, rather than to the Bundestag. How do the two speeches—­as well as another 1988 Kristallnacht address, by Kohl—­compare? Jenninger’s 1985 speech was among the most sensitive and unassailable in the discourse. He began it by discussing the importance of the year 1985 for 1. On the Fassbinder contorversy, see especially Markovits, Benhabib, and Postone (1986). The play, originally to be performed in Frankfurt in 1975, was withdrawn over charges that it was anti-­Semitic. When the play was staged in 1985, a group of Jews formed a chain in front of the actors to prevent it from being seen. 2. On the reception of Holocaust by West German television audiences, see especially Kansteiner (2006).

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German-­Jewish relations in general; it had been forty years, he said, since the end of the war, and the debates surrounding Bitburg and other events had made it a difficult year for German-­Jewish dialogue. But he acknowledged the special meaning this year had for Jews in particular: “The year 1985, with its commemoration days, has let painful memories become alive in every single one of us; but especially in Jews all over the world. For connected with the end of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship is the memory of the million-­count murder.” He said that this year “was and is for us Germans, and for our living together—­for Germans and Jews in Germany, but also for relations between Germany and Israel—­a year of testing that has led us to a deepened contemplation of the past and of the future.” On the one hand,  Jenninger was very clear about the importance of  memory. He referred specifically to Kohl’s speech that year in Bergen-­Belsen, where, he said, it was announced with all clarity that we Germans are aware of our responsibility before history and stand under the commandment not to repress [the memory of ] the crime against our Jewish fellow citizens in the National Socialist time, not to forget the wickedness of the National Socialist dictatorship. This is the prerequisite for living together in the spirit of an understanding based in truthfulness and mutual trust.

On the other hand,  Jenninger’s defenses were comparatively minimal. He said that the appeal to remember “does not mean just keeping guilt feelings alive, to accuse ourselves or the generation of our parents, but rather to make conscious the responsibility laid on us out of our history.” While Jenninger focused extensively on organized as well as individual opposition, he both attacked the churches for their moral failures (while appreciating their late acknowledgments of responsibility—­the Protestants right after the war, the Catholics not until 1975)—and gave a regretful accounting of the complicity (if mostly passive) of the German public in the events of Kristallnacht. Of course, he did argue that most people reacted with concern, distanced themselves from the acts and from subsequent boycotts, and even expressed sympathy and outrage: “The large majority of Germans refused to participate in the organized disgraces.” But he added: “Nevertheless, we read the reports about the occurrences at that time with shame. For all of that happened without noteworthy opposition, without rejection—­even, in great measure, without interested sympathy, comradely solidarity, support, or help showing themselves.”

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T h r e e Y e a r s L at e r In his 1988 address, Jenninger posed the same question so many others had asked in regard to the Nazi past: “How did it come to that; how could it have come to that?” He made clear that he rejected the conservative thesis advanced with renewed vigor during the Historians’ Dispute and elsewhere over the previous several years. He thus noted that “the occupation with National Socialist crimes is not declining despite the growing chronological distance from the occurrences. . . . The self-­emancipation in the confrontation with the horrors is less tortuous than its repression.” Indeed, Jenninger offered in this speech perhaps the most extensive and probing answer to the question of how the crimes of the Third Reich could have come about. At the beginning, he argued that “not the victims, but rather we, in whose midst the crimes occurred, must remember and give an accounting. . . .” In fact, he inquired quite deeply—­and quite discomfitingly—­into the attitudes and complicity of the German citizenry under the Nazis. While he repeated his remark from the earlier speech that many people had opposed the actions of Kristallnacht by meeting them with passivity or silent disapproval, he now added that “sympathy and practical solidarity and aid were completely isolated there. All saw what happened, but most looked away and remained silent. The churches remained silent too.” Jenninger also went a step beyond the earlier address; while he acknowledged those who said that the term “Reichskristallnacht” is not appropriate—­presumably because it implies that it was the property of the entire Reich—­he asserted that the pogrom had been an accurate reflection of widespread attitudes, and that it had fallen on fertile ground. He furthermore argued that anti-­Semitism was a central feature of Nazi ideology, not a by-­product or a late add-­on, and that it was there already in 1933 (in boycotts of  Jewish businesses) and 1935 (in the Nuremberg racial laws), as well as in 1938 (Kristallnacht) and after (Auschwitz). However,  Jenninger also characterized the period between 1933 and 1938 as a revolution, by the end of which “Germany had taken leave of all humanitarian ideas that constituted the spiritual identity of Europe.” He stated as well that this “descent into barbarism was intentional and planned.” Jenninger then devoted a major part of his speech to examining this revolution, and to demonstrating how it exercised its ideological power over such wide segments of the population. Jenninger argued, “For the fate of the Germans and European Jews, even more fateful than the outrages and crimes of Hitler were perhaps his successes.” Jenninger referred to these successes as a “source of fascination” for the people at that time, and sought to explain them further.

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This is where Jenninger got into trouble; for, in recounting how things looked to people at that time, in trying to grasp the frame in which Hitler and the Nazis might have been appealing to the masses, it seemed to some as if he were saying that those people had been right, or that they had had good reason to act as they did. That is, it seemed to some that in listing Hitler’s apparent successes, Jenninger was saying that these successes were both real and sufficient as a justification for decent people to have supported Hitler. Indeed, that is not what Jenninger was saying, though his use of rhetorical questions might have seemed to imply a defense of the claims, rather than their obvious indefensibility. Additionally, Jenninger characterized the German ideology from the Nazi period that he analyzed as “fascinating,” and perhaps he was in fact a bit too fascinated, taking it for granted that people would understand that he was not negating horror, though he was not as clear as he intended. Fascination is indeed an inappropriate sentiment in such a context—­a memorial speech marking an atrocity—­which demands horror and repugnance. Jenninger listed such apparent achievements of Nazi politics as the return of the Saarland, rearmament, the conclusion of a British-­German naval treaty, the end of the Rhineland occupation, and the Anschluß of Austria, all of which contributed to overcoming the Treaty of Versailles, which had been an apparent national humiliation: For the Germans, who had felt the Weimar Republic to have been the consequence of diplomatic humiliations, all of this must have seemed a miracle. And that was not all: out of mass unemployment was full employment, out of mass suffering came something like prosperity for the broadest categories. Instead of despair and hopelessness, optimism and self-­confidence prevailed. Didn’t Hitler make true what Wilhelm II had only promised, namely to bring the Germans good times? Was he not truly chosen according to a divine plan, a leader who was given to a people only once in a thousand years?

Refuting a classic defense—­one we have already seen repeatedly—­which made a point of the fact that Hitler had never received a majority of votes in a free election, Jenninger added, “Who would want to doubt that in 1938 a great majority of Germans stood behind him, identified with him and his politics?” Jenninger went on to argue that Hitler’s success seemed to discredit not only the treaty of Versailles and its product, the Weimar Republic, but democracy per se: “That is to say Hitler’s successes, in the last analsyis,retrospectively discredited the parliamentary-­constituted free system, the democracy of Weimar itself. The question of which system was preferable never even occurred

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to most Germans.” But what about the virulent anti-­Semitism? According to Jenninger, there were indeed many people at the time who were ready to see even this as justified: “And concerning the Jews? Hadn’t they assumed a role—­so it was said at that time—­that they did not deserve? Didn’t they have to accept some limits? Hadn’t they perhaps even earned that they be put in their place?” Jenninger went on to offer an historical look at anti-­Semitism in Germany, demonstrating that this history made the ground more amenable to more radical agitation. This was in contrast to so many of the other speakers whose words we have examined, who often characterized German anti-­ Semitism as a mystery, and as a sudden one at that. Additionally, Jenninger argued, there was an apparent association between the Nazis’ ideological distrust of the modern and the position of Jews in relation to modernity—­they were largely urban, liberal, and professional: suspect categories for the Nazis. The apparent problem in the Bundestag, according to many commentators, was that Jenninger did not add enough prefatory remarks or interjections to make clear that he found this entire line of reasoning utterly insidious. It seemed to many that Jenninger was portraying this way of   looking at the world in the 1930s as commonsensical and thus defensible and exculpatory. Indeed, Jenninger did not anywhere say that those who thought this way were ideologically deluded, or anything of that direct sort. He seemed to rely, instead, on the obviousness of that conclusion to his listeners. This became more apparent as he went on. Following his description of how things may have seemed to the average German in 1933 or 1938, he reviewed some of the major social-­scientific theories, including those arguing that it was Germany’s late modernization and absent middle-­class revolution that had made industrialization and liberalism so much more painful and despised in Germany. In the process, he portrayed much more honestly than virtually anyone official before him how much the German people had really believed in Nazism, including anti-­Semitism. The counterimage heard so often was that most people had certainly opposed Hitler but had not been in a position to stop him, and that most people had been disgusted by anti-­Semitism. The crimes, in this image, had been perpetrated by an evil clique without the support of the German people. Jenninger was the first to portray another image so clearly. He also unpacked some of the major themes in Nazi ideology: the role of the Jews in Hitler’s worldview, and the connection of the Holocaust to the war in the East. Indeed, he raised a sensitive point with the conservatives, for whom, as we have seen, it had always been important to defend the reputation of the common soldier fighting on the Eastern Front: “To the most enraging truths of the Holocaust came the

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knowledge, perhaps today still not fully internalized, that the planning of the war in the East and the destruction of the Jews were inextricably connected to each other; that without the one, the other would not have been possible.” When Jenninger turned to postwar attitudes, it became perfectly clear—­if there had been any doubt, which there unfortunately was—­that this recounting was in no way an attempt at exculpation; indeed, it was more the opposite of an attempt at exculpation than practically any other address we have seen. After the war, according to Jenninger, people had been so disillusioned that they rejected Nazism radically and suddenly. Importantly, however, this had not made them amenable to contemplation of the sort critics had called for: “In this, certainly not only the complete disillusionment in regard to the methods and goals of  National Socialism manifested itself, but also the aversion to mourning and guilt, the antipathy to an unsparing confrontation with the past.” Jenninger argued that the instantaneous identification with the Allies was thus the result of a dishonest process of repression, while he recognized that in the midst of so much destruction and horror, perhaps little else really would have been pos­ sible in those years: “The rash identification with the Western victors promoted the conviction that in the last analysis—­just like other peoples—­the Germans had been misused, ‘occupied’ by, and finally freed from the National Socialist rulers.” Indeed, he argued that this conviction added to the quick economic recovery. In these comments, he was challenging the memory of memory, which had been so invested in understanding Germany as a victim not only of the Nazis, but also of the occupation. Jenninger also stated clearly that he believed enough people knew enough about the horrors to make claims of collective unawareness indefensible: It is true that the National Socialists took great pains to keep the truth of the mass murder secret. But it is also true that everyone knew about the Nuremberg laws, that all could see what happened fifty years ago today in Germany, and that the deportations took place in full public view. And it is also true that the million-­count crimes came from many individual hands, that the acts of the Einsatzkommandos were the object of hushed conversations not just in the Wehrmacht, but at home too. . . . The essential was known.

This statement certainly debunked many of the well-­entrenched strategies that had been built up so carefully over such a long period of time in the Federal Republic. Indeed,  Jenninger added long excerpts from an eyewitness account of concentration camp horrors—­thus giving a more graphic view of the crimes than most speech audiences had previously received—­as well as a quote from

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Himmler to SS commanders, in which Himmler called those weak who recognized the validity of the “Final Solution” and yet wanted exemptions for particular Jews. Jenninger took issue with defensiveness of any sort in the Federal Republic. He insisted on the fact that Germans had been involved with, had been seduced by, the National Socialists, and his entire speech stood to rail against those who would, and indeed consistently had, tried to deny this: “What we must resist is the placing into question of historical truth, the miscounting of  victims, the misrepresentation of facts. Whoever wants to compare guilt, whoever claims it wasn’t all so—­or not completely so—­bad, is attempting to defend where there is nothing to defend.” Who would want to be seen as having sympathy with those who had committed or even generally supported a criminal regime? Apparently, many thought Jenninger would. This speech thus clearly departed from most of the standard styles of presentation, both in the genre of guilt speeches and in general. Jenninger’s awkward rhetorical questions lacked clear signposts indicating that he was recounting these arguments as examples of horrible logic, rather than recounting them to make having supported National Socialism seem an intelligent choice in its context. But whatever the reaction of his listeners at the time, Jenninger provided one of the least defensive and most honest appraisals of what could have led to “what happened.” In my opinion, it was—­on the face of it—­one of the most telling ironies of German commemoration that this speech was so misunderstood. That it was misunderstood is, I think, clear. But because of the complex environment in which it was delivered, the knives were already drawn for Jenninger. As detailed in the first pages of this book, other players had other expectations of what should have taken place on this occasion, namely a stan­ dard ritual in which all stations of the liturgy were visited, but in which settled clichés were not challenged too much.

Kohl’s Version Chancellor Kohl’s Kristallnacht speech that same year made even clearer both what the orthodoxy was and how Jenninger’s speech had departed from it. Like Jenninger, Kohl identified November 9, 1938, as the point after which no one could deny awareness of the regime’s evilness: “By that point, everyone truly must have become aware that anti-­Semitism belonged to the core of National Socialist ideology, and thus that it was not simply one instrument of domination among many—­and already certainly not a more accidental side effect of the dictatorship.” And like Jenninger, Kohl asked why so few had

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resisted. He also argued that the persecution of Jews had been clear from the very beginning, from January 30, 1933. But while Jenninger had drawn a detailed account of the broad support Nazism and anti-­Semitism had received, Kohl employed more standard defensive formulations. He said, From today’s perspective it is difficult to grasp, and it remains a cause of deep shame, that on the ninth and tenth of  November, 1938, the majority of the popu­ lation remained silent. Much was involved here: Deficient civil courage or even paralyzing fear by some, and indifference by others. There were those who were aghast—­and those who eased their consciences with many arguments, perhaps with the widespread prejudice of “Jewish influence” that had to be pushed back and eliminated. Some felt themselves personally affected by the suffering of their Jewish fellow citizens; others were of the opinion that it had nothing to do with them.

Kohl was thus less willing than Jenninger to accept the overwhelming support that Nazism in general and anti-­Semitism in particular had received from the population at large. He placed great emphasis on those few who had felt sympathy and outrage, and who might have resisted except that they were unwilling to become martyrs. And he also emphasized those who had actively opposed the regime. “But also those may not be forgotten who expressed their disapproval or sought to help within the limits of the possible,” he said. “We remember today with high respect and with gratitude the courageous men and women who, fifty years ago and in the time after that, stood by their Jewish fellow human beings in many ways under the danger of the own lives. . . .” To demonstrate that the new Germany had absolutely no connection to the Nazi period, Kohl extensively praised Jews in contemporary Germany, and mentioned accomplishments of German Jews of the past in German culture. He wanted to be sure that this longer history of beneficial relations was remembered, for it was, in his portrayal, the true quality of German history. Nazism was not. As individual people, Germans were guilty—­but the injustice that was committed under the National Socialist tyranny is a part of our collective history. This history is in its totality entrusted and assigned to us. Insofar as we pose it to ourselves in freedom, a chance can come out of the burden: the chance that we find ourselves, and open paths into a better future.

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It would be untruthful to seek only the agreeable parts out of German history. For this history is indivisible—­it is ours in good and bad.

As we have seen many times over, with this formula of history with its good and bad parts, Kohl apparently wanted to take a longer view—­one in which the Holocaust could no longer be seen as the most central moment in German history. In pointing to those who had resisted (often to a greater degree than to those who had complied), he drew the image of a complicated reality. In contrast to his predecessor Brandt, he argued against those who in hindsight would claim a superior moral standpoint. The lesson was that no one was better than anyone else, and that the best one could do was secure the dignity of man in democratic constitutional forms and get on with life. At the same time, Kohl also argued strongly for the worth of tradition and history as a foundation for those democratic and cultural values. The paradox of his argument was that one had to accept all of  history because it constitutes who we are, but that one must pick and choose carefully among the apparent elements to find the true features of that identity. Too much guilt would, in Kohl’s view, overwhelm and disrupt the sobriety with which that process must be carried out.

S e p t e m b e r 1 , 1939 , a H a l f C e n t u ry L at e r Both Federal President von Weizsäcker and Chancellor Kohl issued statements in the following year to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the start of  war. Von Weizsäcker sent an official message to Polish President Jaruselzski, and Kohl delivered a major address to the Bundestag. At this time, both von Weizsäcker and Kohl emphasized the longer history of good relations between Germany and Poland, and said that it was time, despite the wounds on both sides, to move on from twentieth-­century antipathies. In his letter, von Weizsäcker began by saying that the Second World War “became fateful especially for Poles and Germans. . . . It is the painful memories that separate us.” He stated clearly that Poland had been the first victim of a war picked by the National Socialist leadership: In their responsibility [presumably, that of the National Socialist leadership, rather than that of the German people as a whole] for beginning the war, they were unburdened neither by the German-­Polish tensions existing at that time, nor by the cynical Hitler-­Stalin pact. They alone opened this war of aggression, full of disrespect for humanity, international law, and the obligation to negotiate.

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Von Weizsäcker referred to the crimes against Jews from Poland and elsewhere, but said, “The consequences of war and war crimes that the entire Polish people must bear are without equal.” Whether and in what way the Poles counted the murder of the Jews as an atrocity against Poland was a more complex matter than this formulation implied. Nonetheless, Germany too had suffered, and in a perhaps especially perverse manner: “But we Germans too were also heavily marked [ gezeichnet] by the war. We had to experience that injustice and suffering rebounded onto the very people in whose name they had happened.” He went on to list particular ways in which Germany had suffered, ways that implied misdeeds on many sides: “The heavy injuries among the people, the destruction of Dresden and of many other cities, was followed by the forcible expulsion of millions of Germans from their ancestral homelands and, with the division of Europe, the division of our own nation and capital city. . . . Terrible wounds were struck reciprocally, and the scars do not stop hurting.” Quite a difference, then, from his May 8 speech. This was one of the clearest cases of adding up damages on both sides—­perhaps not specifically for the purpose of comparatively alleviating German guilt by justifying actions, but simply by showing that history was filled with horrors of all sorts that, as history, had to be laid aside. The problem, to paraphrase Helmut Schmidt, was that German politics was being held hostage to history. Von Weizsäcker thus argued in his letter to the Polish leader: Each of us has his own way of reading history. But he should not use it to make life for the other more difficult in the future by reference to the past. What counts for you and us is human fate. Historically grounded political retrenchment does these fates no good. Only open hearts and perception of personally experienced suffering help further.

In his address to the Bundestag, Kohl employed a similar rhetorical frame, one that acknowledged everyone’s historical suffering and argued for putting it all behind as history. Kohl began by circumscribing the circle of German perpetration: “Special responsibility for us grows out of the fact that the Second World War was unleashed through that criminal regime which at that time possessed the state and governmental power in Germany.” Kohl also hypothesized a community of victims, one that included Germany: “We feel sorrow over the suffering that was done to people and to peoples in the German name and by German hands. We mourn for the many innocent victims from among our own people.” He listed the victims as follows: victims of the “Shoah, of the

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unparalleled genocide of the European Jews”; the Poles; the Sinti and Roma (Gypsies); and the “many other victims of the National Socialist tyranny.” He made special mention of “the victims of the deprivation of rights that Hitler’s dictatorship first brought over Germany and then over the world,” of the “innocent victims of the war front and of the Homeland [Heimat],” and of the “victims of the expulsions.” He also included “the millions of soldiers from so many nations who died in prisoner-­of-­war camps, or who returned home as casualties.” All these different groups were apparently equal as victims, though in contrast to the immediate postwar period, the Jews are both mentioned and mentioned first. This strategy appeared more explicitly later, when Kohl directly juxtaposed Polish suffering with German suffering. He first gave a clear and honest acknowledgment of the Polish tragedy, insisting on absolute openness about the past, seemingly for its own sake: “In the German name and by German hands, terrible suffering was done to the Polish people. Who still knows in these parts that the concentration camps were also specifically on Polish land in order to eliminate the elite of this people? Rapprochement is only possible if the entire truth is stated.” Kohl immediately followed this, however, with the other side of the coin: German victimhood. It seemed as if his pure acceptance of honesty about Polish suffering was part and parcel of a larger equation, one including a benefit for the German side as well: It is also the truth that more than two million Germans—­innocent people—­lost their lives in flight and expulsion. The loss of the Heimat struck deep wounds with many of our countrymen. This bitter experience cannot be repressed. But we want to learn from it. For what meaning should it have if Germans and Poles add up accounts against each other, as some here and there unfortunately still do?

Once again, however, the explicit statement and the implication seem at odds: one shouldn’t keep a balance sheet, says the accountant who has just pre­­sented one. It also appeared as if Kohl was pushing toward equal responsibility in history with Poland, a responsibility of the same sort that speakers in the Adenauer era had formulated in regard to France and the “European civil war.” Indeed, Kohl drew the comparison himself when he said, “The example of German-­French rapprochement and friendship proves that trenches that have stood for decades or even centuries can be overcome.” He thus implicitly

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downplayed any distinctions between Germany’s relations to France and to Poland, despite the occasion. Kohl admitted that “too many people in Germany—­also some abroad—­ allowed themselves to be blinded and misled by tyranny.” But he was quick to add, “Judgment about the National Socialist dictatorship, however, depends alone on its misdeeds, its campaign of destruction and genocide.” He blamed the dictatorship for many horrors, some of which he recalled from his childhood. He included people being dragged off to concentration camps (against his claims that people had not known), the killing fields where many soldiers died, and the “seemingly endless columns of exhausted children, women, and old men in flight and during the expulsion,” as well as the refugee trains. And who was responsible, according to Kohl? “Hitler wanted, planned, and unleashed the war.” In the process, according to Kohl, European values were discarded, thus making clear that Hitler had violated the German spirit, on whose basis—­in traditional values—­the Federal Republic was established. Kohl inquired into the context that gave Hitler his chance, mentioning the social and political problems the Weimar Republic had inherited in part from the Treaty of   Versailles, as well as the Hitler-­Stalin Pact. Like early speakers, he argued that mentioning these historical facts did not lessen the guilt. Nevertheless, he spoke of the “guilt of the National Socialist authorities” rather than the guilt of the German nation as a whole. For him, the latter was inconceivable, and no longer needed to be refuted, though refute it he did. In the context of discussing the Hitler-­Stalin pact, Kohl drew a direct connection between this contract of dictators and the postwar division of Germany. In this way, division was to be seen not as the result of Germany’s historical belligerence, or as somehow a justified solution to it, but as a continuation of Hitler’s injustice, from which the Soviet Union did not differ in essence: “The division of Germany and Europe may in part be explained by the Second World War, but in no way justified.” Indeed, Kohl’s blurring of boundaries became even more explicit when he sought an historical distance. He said, for instance, that, under totalitarianism “the borders between good and bad blurred more and more. The integrity of the individual was less of a guarantee for correct behavior.” Kohl used this characterization to argue that “a just picture of the generation of our parents and grandparents does not let itself be drawn with the black and white of a woodcut.” He went on to argue that aspects of behavior—­even those aspects that had contributed to the destruction—­could still be seen as positive values; these included patriotism and the loyalty of soldiers.

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The true perfidy of Hitler’s totalitarian system, according to Kohl, was that people had been caught between “guilt and self-­endangerment.” On the one side, there were the soldiers: “Most of them were honestly and uprightly convinced that they were serving their fatherland. There were many examples of bravery and human greatness that are worthy of high praise. Such attitudes do not earn being denigrated or derided.” The general conclusion was that judging from historical distance is not possible: “We must be wary of making hasty judgments from today’s perspective. Who among us . . . can with good conscience claim that he would have had the strength for martyrdom in the face of such evil? And who among us can really measure what it meant at that time, in awareness of the danger to one’s own person, to put the well-­being of one’s own family at risk?” Kohl appeared to be arguing for a suspension of historical judgment. It was very difficult to place blame, except in the most obvious cases: “The people of today are not better and are not worse than were the people at that time.” This argument clearly differed from the impulse among the student movement of the Sixties and Seventies, which had rejected the entire older generation. While there is of course much to be criticized in such oversimplifications, it almost seems as though Kohl was rejecting not   just categorical judgment, but historical judgment per se. In conclusion, Kohl said that the younger generation must accept responsibility for the past, which, at the same time, should not exclude an acceptance of conservative values. The younger generation, he said, carried “in no way guilt for dictatorship and world war—­not collectively, because in principle this does not exist, and not individually, because their age prevents it. Nevertheless, they too carry responsibility, because the past remains present. No one of us can escape it.” At the same time, Kohl argued that awareness of the past was consistent with an appreciation of such traditions as patriotism, which he grouped together with the love of freedom: We must also resist the attempt to scorn the values of love of the Heimat and patriotism that were brought into disrepute in the National Socialisttime because they were misused at that time. To underestimate patriotism would unconsciously be in the spirit of Hitler [im Sinne Hitlers]. . . . Indeed, the love of fatherland and the love of freedom, patriotism, and European ways of thinking may never again go in separate ways.

In this address commemorating the start of  war, Kohl thus elided the differences among victims, rejected black-­and-­white historical judgment, and called

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for a revival of traditional values which, he said, were misused rather than implicated in the Third Reich. History is one long trauma, yet also provides the foundations for contemporary orientation. The point, said Kohl, was to look past the bad in history to find the true: “Continuity is only defensible [verantwortbar] as a conscious connection to the good that remained undestroyed above the fray.”

Chapter 17

The Normal Nation

To summarize, successes for the Social Democrats’ Ostpolitik in the first half of the 1970s were at the same time the cause of difficulties for West German conservatives. After the defeat of Franz-­Josef Strauß’s challenge to the new Ostpolitik in the Constitutional Court, the CDU/CSU had apparently lost its place on the political center stage, where it had never claimed much of the intellectual spotlight. The Sixties and the first half of the Seventies were West Germany’s progressive era. But the unbridled optimism of the Social Democratic program—­seemingly vindicated in the foreign policy that won Brandt the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973—­was relatively short-­lived. By the time Helmut Schmidt became chancellor, the prospects of the domestic economy under the increased burden of the welfare state had diminished. The program of  broad reforms did not seem to have met its promise, and was expensive at that. By the late Seventies and early Eighties, the international climate had deteriorated as well. Throughout the late Seventies and early Eighties, the political and now intellectual prospects of the right thus appeared to be in ascendancy. Many felt that the progressive program had chipped away too many of the traditional bases of  loyalty—­namely, a sense of national identity and traditional values. Indeed, even many prominent progressive intellectuals had become disillusioned with the growing problems and apparent fragmentation of  West German society in the face of relentless generational conflict, growing domestic terrorism, and ever-­increasing social dislocation; they and their counterparts elsewhere were the core of what became known internationally as neoconservatism.

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Neoconservatives (comprising disillusioned progressives as well as longtime conservatives and even reactionaries) argued that no contemporary state could hope to bridge the gaps its legitimacy suffered periodically due to inevitable and growing costs and cyclical economic crises. In such times, it was argued, the state needed to fall back on tradition as a source of  legitimacy. But West Germany, it was argued, faced special limitations in this regard because of its past, and increasingly so because of the relentless leftist attack on traditional values and national identity. Of course, Helmut Schmidt was a Social Democrat and a pragmatist, not a neoconservative. Nonetheless, his style was markedly different from Brandt’s, and in interesting ways may have laid the foundation for the CDU/CSU’s return to power. Schmidt was not the ideologue Brandt had been, and furthermore, he had inherited a difficult domestic economic situation and attitude—­one partly brought about by Brandt’s policies. Not only was Schmidt by nature a technocrat (emphasizing, as we have seen, the sociologist Max Weber’s “ethic of responsibility” over an “ethic of conviction”), but he had to work in an environment in which the state faced increasing demands on its capabilities to manage social problems. In this situation, Schmidt emphasized that after almost thirty years of stability, the Federal Republic was facing the same sorts of problems that other states were facing at the time, given the increased role of its welfare state and the economic difficulties caused by such things as the oil price shocks of the mid-­1970s.1 In this way, he maintained that the Federal Republic was a “normal” state, facing the same problems in the same ways as other states. It seemed important for its economic health that the Federal Republic be on good terms with the Arab world, but the traditional “specialness” of the relationship with Israel borne of the Holocaust was in the way. The solution—­ consistent with responsibility over conviction—­was to escape from the limitations on West German maneuverability imposed by German history. This was the beginning of a new attitude towards the Nazi past, though, with Schmidt, it apparently grew out of pragmatic exigency rather than ideological principle (Schmidt’s principle seemed to be that such ideological principles in general were inappropriate). Schmidt also paved the way for Helmut Kohl’s conservative government in the context of the so-­called Euromissile debates. In the first place, Schmidt’s 1. These economic problems were perhaps felt more strongly in the Federal Republic than in other countries, which had alternative supply options. The Federal Republic was overwhelmingly dependent on Arab oil. One emergency solution to the crisis was the institution of so-­ called auto-­free Sundays, when driving was essentially prohibited.

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support for the Western Alliance’s decision to deploy new midrange missiles in Germany led to a split in the SPD, one that ultimately brought him down. In this way, he made the ideological left appear especially radical, while the left made him seem more conservative (thus diminishing the apparent difference between Schmidt and the CDU). In the second place, the struggle in the SPD over the missile deployment perhaps made it seem as though allegiance to the Alliance (a widely accepted principle of  West German policy since at least the Bad Godesberg Program of 1959) was a sacrifice. This appearance made it more plausible for Kohl later to ask for a quid pro quo, which the Bitburg affair was widely interpreted as being. Schmidt’s tenure—­and with it the election of the conservative Karl Carstens to the presidency—­thus arguably constituted a first stage of the “normal nation,” despite the fact that Schmidt belonged to the same party as his predecessor Brandt. The second, more ideological stage began when the CDU/CSU under Helmut Kohl succeeded in regaining governmental power on the basis of a platform of spiritual and ideological renewal. The new legitimation frame, following what was known as die Wende (a neoconservative turn), also involved a reworking of the past, but now out of apparently more ideological than pragmatic grounds. From the neoconservative perspective, the chief obstacle to the urgently needed renewal of purportedly traditional bases of identity was an image of the past that, supposedly unjustly, held such values in Germany in disrepute. A main goal of the new legitimation profile was therefore to explicitly alter that image. Germany could no longer, Schmidt (not Kohl!) asserted, wear “a hair shirt in perpetuity.” Kohl’s government undertook a broad program of symbolic reform in an attempt to provide the West German state with the trappings of deep-­rooted (that is, not merely consensual) legitimacy and identity. This included such explicit image work as proposals for two historical museums, a German war memorial in Bonn, and a spectacular 750th birthday celebration for Berlin, among other things. In their general rhetoric on a wide variety of public occasions, Kohl and other speakers thus emphasized the importance of tradition and the sense of German history, which, it was argued, included much more than the mere twelve years of the Third Reich. While the speakers met every obligation to acknowledge the memory of that period, they also sought to broaden the vision of German national history to include so much more, so that the epoch of the Third Reich would seem only one element among many others—­others that could provide points of orientation and a positive identity for a German citizenry awash in the confusions of the modern world. Through such events as Bitburg, speeches to expellee associations, Kohl’s notorious gaffe in Israel in which he claimed the “grace of a late birth,” and

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large fortieth anniversary commemorations, a new image of the Nazi past was fashioned, which can be summarized as follows. The Nazi past was now viewed as just that: distant historical past. It was now to be seen, taught, and represented as an historical epoch among many others in a longer history. And of course, all countries had aspects of their own histories of which they were ashamed; the responsible attitude was to accept that those things had happened, and to understand them in the context of national history as such, but not to allow them to spoil identity and limit policy. Germany’s problems with its past, then, were portrayed as being, to a large degree, universal problems like those confronting all open societies. There was nothing particularly special about Germany in this regard, certainly not now that forty years had passed and had made clear that the Nazi past was not Germany’s fate. In this way, Kohl and his associates employed a comparative historiographical strategy that was relativizing (maintaining that everyone had these problems, and that they were only one aspect of German history), revisionist (seeking to rewrite the orthodoxy that the Holocaust was something so momentous as to stand outside history), and ultimately normalizing (arguing that Germany was entitled to draw upon its history for legitimation just like any other nation, and that its policy could not be hindered by demands for ritualistic self-­flagellation on the basis of that history). However, the generalization of the horrible German past during the period of the “moral nation” may be seen to have laid the groundwork for this revision in an important way. The Social Democrats, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, had been the first to generalize away the specificity of the Jewish genocide, though they had obviously done so in a different way. Even so, this loss of specificity may in some form have prepared the way for this later reconstruction. In contrast to the vision of history in earlier eras, the image of the “normal nation” thus implied no particular debts for the Federal Republic other than ritual acknowledgment and perhaps philo-­Semitism, certainly more of the latter than in the “moral nation.” Speakers in this period were ostensibly more careful to accept responsibility for the past. But, on closer examination, such statements did not seem to be redeemed; being responsible for the past seemed to consist mainly of making sure one stated that one accepted responsibility for the past. Throughout the 1980s, then, two distinct senses of the term “normalization” were widespread in German public discourse. The first sense was the one that became famous in the Historians’ Dispute and in the Bitburg ceremony, and that pervaded Kohl’s rhetoric through many occasions: normalization as relativization. The German past had its horrors, the argument went,

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but so did the past of other countries. The Nazi past was not particularly special, and the German past contained many more things that were beneficial as points of orientation. The twelve short years of Nazi rule had not exhausted the extent of the German past, which had to be “accepted with all its highs and lows.” Germany was thus like other nations, normal in the statistical sense. Everybody had trouble with the past, and Germany’s past was really not all that different. Under Helmut Schmidt in the mid-­1970s and early 1980s, this meant that West Germany faced the same “normal” problems of other modern welfare states—­rising unemployment, economic downturn, terrorism, loss of faith in endless growth, and so on—­in the same “normal” ways. Kohl’s style of normalization, however, was more aggressive, embodied in an ideological program for cultural change, which included pride in German history, the celebration of heroes, national museums and monuments, and a distancing of past misdeeds, which had since lost their specificity: all the victims were the same. On this basis, West Germany sought to undertake a greater role in world politics. The second sense of the term “normalization” is that of regularization or ritualization. After forty years of West German history, the commemorative apparatus had become a rather well-­oiled machine. Acknowledgments of  historical responsibility had become expected features of the political liturgy. As we have seen, distinctive genres had evolved: the themes of administration, guilt and expiation, suffering, and traditions each had their own appropriate style and language; and as time went on, those languages, styles, and contents became increasingly regular. Whether or not the German past was a normal one, it thus became to a large extent a normal part of West German political ritual. It was largely domesticated. But normalization in the 1980s—­in both senses of the term—­failed as much as it succeeded. Relativization failed not because the idea was new, but because it was pursued more openly and aggressively than before, and because Kohl insisted that other countries participate. Domestically, it was widely appreciated. The problem was to get the rest of the world to accept the claim that Germany was normal. Bitburg, and Kohl’s earlier statements on a 1984 trip to Israel that he was the first German chancellor to have the “grace of a late birth,” were problematic not because of the claims they implied—­which were neither substantively new nor untrue—­but because they demanded a change in international and diplomatic attitudes toward West Germany. They required the rest of the world’s complicity in a process that had been going on for a long time within the country. Relativization thus disturbed the delicate ritual strategy that had taken years to construct—­one that demanded certain

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symbolic performances, but belied the de facto status quo of German power and position. It was surely too much when Schmidt claimed that German foreign policy was being “held hostage” to Auschwitz, or perhaps only that it was illegitimate to do so. But the nation’s foreign policy was in fact clearly con­ strained by memory. Within this climate of  heightened sensitivity, even standardized atonement rituals could be a fairly delicate matter, requiring substantial symbolic, diplomatic, and even material resources, especially when things did not go according to plan. The Jenninger affair of 1988 is a poignant example of how easy it was to go wrong. Jenninger’s mistake did not reside purely in the substance of his comments, but in the fact that he violated the entrenched expectations of the occasion. He did not deliver the relatively vapid declaration that ritual definitions required. Normalization as ritualization was thus no more without pitfalls than was normalization as relativization. Nevertheless, the fact that Jenninger’s error was a failure of ritual rather than of substance evoked a different response from neoconservatives than their usual: they accepted Jenninger’s resignation with regret, but without significant challenge. The comparison is between this acceptance and the intensity with which the Kohl administration had defended the Bitburg visit three years earlier. In practice, however, the overall strategy of  “normalization” was not unsuccessful in relieving the Federal Republic of specific administrative burdens from Nazi history: reparations had been paid, diplomatic relations with Israel had been normalized, peace had been made with West and East, and it was claimed that authoritarian residues and elite privileges had been eliminated as much as was possible within a social market economy. The Federal Republic looked as much to its own history as to the Nazi past for basic political principles. Indeed, the Nazi period was even used during these years, by way of a revival of the geographical Land der Mitte (land of the middle) concept, to argue that while Germany had an obligation to the Western Alliance, it also had distinct interests requiring an increasing degree of diplomatic independence. This revival, it turned out, was prescient, and it certainly prepared the ground for the Federal Republic’s reaction to the unanticipated events of 1989.

* Part 5 * Conclusions

Chapter 18

Epilogues: Berlin Is Not Bonn

In many ways, the end of  West Germany, or its transformation into a much larger Federal Republic including the territories of the German Democratic Republic, marks the end of the discourse we have been examining. But just as the story beginning with the founding of the West German state in 1949 is not comprehensible without an analysis of the situation that gave rise to it, neither does it make sense simply to declare the story over with the “reunification” of Germany. In the first place, the institutions of the Federal Republic were transformed, not replaced (though the same cannot be said of the German Democratic Republic). And, in the second place,  just as memory is always made in the present (though out of the materials of the past), the analysis of memory is ultimately always interested in the present as well. How, then, did the history of German memory from 1949 to 1989 underwrite the transformations that led to the present, and in what ways are the struggles of the present constituted by, and in dialogue with, the memory of the earlier story? Before telling the story of  West German memory from 1949 to 1989, I laid out a set of prologues—­intentionally using the plural to indicate the variety of themes and patterns. Here it will be interesting to exlore the epilogues—­also plural—­of the West German story.

U n i f i cat i o n a n d t h e G e r m a n P a st ( s ) The obvious starting point for discussing the changes since 1989 in official German memory of the Nazi period is the fall of the Berlin Wall and the press toward unification. West German leaders had always characterized the division

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of Germany as the result of power politics at Germany’s cost. With the exception of Brandt, as well as a few other speakers in the 1980s on guilt occasions, they consistently denied that there was any connection between Germany’s crimes during the Nazi period and its postwar division. These official positions were matched in public opinion. As recently as 1989, 72 percent of respondents to a West German opinion poll disagreed with the statement that division was a deserved punishment for the crimes of the Third Reich (Noelle-­ Neumann 1991, 68). But, rhetorical protestations and the arbitrary realities of Potsdam aside, there was no doubt that some within Germany at least admitted the association, even if they did not accept it, and that many abroad viewed division if not as punishment, than at least as insurance against German militarism in the center of Europe. It is no surprise, then, that there was significant apprehension in the world about the possibility of German unification. Two West German moves served to exacerbate that concern. First, rather quickly after November 9, 1989—­the day the Berlin Wall opened—­Chancellor Kohl proposed a ten-­point strategy for unification. Many commentators abroad felt bulldozed. In a high-­level discussion, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is reported to have referred to stereotypically negative German national characteristics in an expression of her distaste for a powerful united Germany in the center of Europe; there was no masking her hesitancy about the whole idea. Historical memories were quite alive through the entire transition process. As Konrad Jarausch (1994, 181) has written, “foreign apprehension of  the Teutonic threat was slow to disappear because it was focused on the past rather than the present.” His implication was that this was not a realistic fear. As we will see next, however, the German government’s rhetoric did not unequivocally work toward assuaging those historical concerns. Jarausch was correct, though, when he wrote that “historical anti-­German anxieties could complicate but not prevent unity.” The second problem was Kohl’s refusal to make any clear statement regarding former German territories east of the Oder-­Neisse line. Favoring right-­wing votes over diplomatic clarity, Kohl worried many observers; this was not because they thought he truly had designs on those territories but, first, because they did not like the choice for domestic votes over international assurances and, second, because they did not like the interest groups he was assuring and thereby legitimating. This was only the first of many post-­Wall moments in which the Kohl government was charged with legitimating right-­ wing interests. The main point is that throughout the unification process, the German official line denied that historical concerns were legitimate in evaluating contemporary positions.

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Indeed, even prosaic language caused debate: Was Germany unifying or reunifying? If the latter, then what kind of a return was implied? A German national state had been more of an historical oddity than an enduring taken-­ for-­granted in history. And it was as a nation-­state that German militarism had created most of its havoc. But without the sense of the nation naturally belonging together (and thus of re-­unification), the whole enterprise might have seemed at risk. This kind of issue came up again in the debate over where the capital of the new state was to be located: Should the modest Rhineland city of Bonn, with its traditions of stability, peace, and Western integration, remain Germany’s capital? (As we saw, there had recently been attempts to raise the status of Bonn as a capital city, certainly an indication that there was dissatisfaction.) Or should the status of capital city return to the “traditional” capital of Germany—­Berlin—­with all its historical associations with Prussian militarism, Nazi power, and Central Europe? The debate was vituperative and not necessarily along party lines, and the vote was not overwhelmingly for Berlin, but nonetheless in favor of it. In the process, parliamentarians engaged the difficult issues of Germany’s historical and contemporary image (Herles 1991). All sides were heard, but that of German tradition, power, and prestige won out over concerns about historical associations, the advocates of which did not get far enough by arguing pragmatically about cost. German history—­again as Jarausch has argued—­was powerful enough to cause a debate, but not powerful enough to change its outcome. Commentators came to refer (first sometimes facetiously, later without irony) to the new Germany as the Berlin Republic, playing on the terms “Bonn Republic” and “Weimar Republic.” Bonn was not to be Weimar (as discussed in chapter 4 above), but it was not yet clear what continuities and discontinuities would exist between Berlin and Bonn; any transformations would have to proceed slowly and carefully. Even the timing of the Berlin Wall’s opening posed significant symbolic difficulties. As already mentioned, the date November 9 had been a traditional moment for commemorating German crimes—­particularly the pogrom committed on so-­called Kristallnacht in 1938 (and so problematically commemorated by Jenninger fifty years later). Would the spontaneous euphoria associated with that day in 1989—­when the Wall opened—­overshadow the established association? Would collective memory of  German national feeling eclipse the acknowledgment of  what had been done “in Germany’s name?” German leaders were especially careful—­particularly after October 3, 1990, the day of official unification, became the date to celebrate—­not to displace Kristallnacht entirely (having learned the lessons of the past decade). Later,  January 17—­the anniversary

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of the liberation of Auschwitz—­was added as a general day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism. By 1993, after long months of right-­wing violence and significant concern in the international press over German xenophobia and neo-­Nazi violence, the fifty-­fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht clearly took precedence in official circles over memory of the Wall. In fact, Bundestag president Rita Süssmuth (CDU) explicitly avowed the importance of remembering Kristallnacht as a response to presidential candidate Stefan Heitmann (CDU), who had recently made by-­now familiar remarks to the effect that it was time for Germany to move on from such historical preoccupations. Like other new regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Germany also faced the problem of dealing with leaders of what it considered to have been a criminal regime. But unlike the remnant states of the fissiparous Eastern Bloc, Germany had a model for “mastering the past.” Collective memory—­and mythology—­about denazification was quite strong in West German political culture, and so the second “mastering of the past” was frequently brought into relation to the first. The problem is that concern with the second Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mastering of the past) displaced the first, both historically and rhetorically. The confrontation with the Nazi past now seemed like ancient history, something that had been accomplished for better or for worse. History had clearly moved on, and the legacy of  Nazism was not considered to be part of the contemporary scene. Rhetorically, the referent for the word Vergangenheitsbewältigung—­a term pervasive during the 1980s, even beyond Germany, in debates about memory of the Nazi period—­shifted. It now referred seemingly only to the problem of dismantling and confronting the Stasi (Staatssicherheit, the East German state police) and the remnants of the Communist regime. Like the Nazi past, the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung had lost its specificity. As such, one commentator (Sa’adah 1998) has even referred to this shift of reference as “Germany’s second chance.” In fact, this replacement of  the first Vergangenheitsbewältigung by the second served as another potent normalizer. First of all, Germany was just one of a number of formerly Communist countries going through the same kinds of problems. Comparison thus served the trope of relativization. And second, Germany’s historical problems were now those of communism and police informants and shoot-­to-­kill orders for border guards—­problems of state violence—­and not those of concentration camps and Nazis in the government—­problems of genocide. Indeed, even before 1989, Kohl had referred to communist “concentration camps”—­thus equating the two systems, just as totalitarian theory had always done—­and, in a June 1991 wreath-­laying ceremony in Buchenwald, he referred indiscriminately once again to all the victims of oppression.

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The historian Hans-­Peter Schwarz expressed a common desire when he asserted that the communist past would now represent the main theme of Vergangenheitsbewältigung for future decades, at the cost of continuing to work through (aufarbeiten) National Socialism. He argued that this made sense, given that the East German regime had lasted three times as long as the Nazi period (Greiffenhagen and Greiffenhagen 1993, 64). Martin and Sylvia Greiffenhagen have argued that this was an unrealistic expectation because the direct comparison of the two regimes is illegitimate. But it may, too, have been an unrealistic expectation that the new Germany would acknowledge that difference too clearly. A claim advanced by historian Anson Rabinbach in the aftermath of the Historians’ Dispute—­that changes in West German sovereignty always involved shifts in constructions of the Nazi past—­seems to apply well to the transition period. One of the first acts of noncommunist East Germany, for instance, was to acknowledge responsibility for the Nazi past and to promise some form of reparations, though, given East Germany’s fiscal collapse, there was not much to back up the promise. This gesture, of course, marked a complete turnaround for the GDR, which had always argued that fascism was an outgrowth of capitalism, and that a socialist state was thus de facto antifascist. East Germany had argued that it represented the opposition to fascism and thus bore no responsibility for the crimes of the regime it had replaced. The gesture of offering reparations was therefore significant, and did much to make the transition more palatable to Israel and Jewish groups, who were nonetheless still concerned. Acknowledgments of Germany’s past were also a significant presence in the pomp surrounding unification itself, though they took the form of general statements about responsibility for the whole of German history, and avowals of peaceful intentions. Some Jewish groups, moreover, objected that the unification treaty itself did not have the desired acknowledgments in its preamble, though there were statements about responsibility for history buried later in the document. The statements were there, but heroic gestures of atonement were by no means front and center.

The New Germany in the World The new Germany also faced images of the Nazi past in the context of significant world conflicts that arose, and the debates over these images had significant implications for the bearing of the Nazi past on future German power. Debates over the first Gulf  War, Yugoslavia, and Somalia provided connected occasions

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for discussing Germany’s future role. In the process, the legitimacy of the past as a constraint on German activity was seriously discredited. The first Gulf War (1990–­91) could not have been designed as a more complex minefield for Germany. What should Germany’s role be? Financial? Military? None at all? Two world wars, forty-­five years of superpower troops facing off along the inner-­German border, and the threat of nuclear destruction had produced a quite strong pacifist presumption in wide segments of the German population. Indeed, pacifism seemed to be the clear lesson of the Nazi experience. But now a concerted world coalition had come together to oppose Saddam Hussein, and Germany’s allies demanded a contribution, while German leaders argued that this was Germany’s responsibility. And there were further difficulties for Germany: Saddam Hussein threatened the existence of Israel, for whose interests Germany obviously had to be concerned. The participation of German firms in arming Saddam’s war machine, furthermore, provided a dicey public relations problem. On top of these issues was the significant cost of the operation at a time when the German government was just beginning to face the real costs of unification. Usually the world had condemned and feared any German military activity. Now they demanded it. The German peace movement opposed participation because of the Nazi past, but Israeli security was at stake. All signs were thus reversed, and it was easy to see that there was no correct solution, and that no solution for this problem would generalize well to other situations. The ropes twisting around German policy were now clear enough, and the impossibility in such circumstances of correct action made Germany’s problems obvious. A second such moment came in facing the Yugoslavian collapse. After having been criticized for not doing enough in the Gulf War, the Kohl government sought to lead the pack, and pushed for quick European recognition of Croatia. This matter, too, was twisted in the ropes of the German past: a Fascist puppet regime in Croatia had worked with the Nazis against the Slavic populations of other regions. German support for Croatian independence was thus connected to the old Nazi-­Croatian alliance. United Nations “humanitarian” missions to protect the Kurds and feed the Somalis also made the German constitutional prohibition against overseas military action seem like a barrier to fulfilling German responsibilities. The convolutions of these closely packed moments contributed to a general consensus in German government circles that some changes had to be made, and that the particular responses to the Nazi past embodied in the German Basic Law had outlived their practicability. Of course this was not the first time that international crises had raised complex issues for German policy, nor was it

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the first time West German leaders and commentators had complained about strictures raised by memory. In the Yom Kippur war of 1973, as we saw, West Germany debated whether or not to allow American supply planes headed to Israel to refuel at bases in Germany; the fear was that doing so would upset Germany’s relations with Arab countries. And there was Schmidt’s 1982 statement that West Germany foreign policy should no longer be held hostage to Auschwitz. But Somalia was perhaps the first time that there was little consensus in Germany and among the allies on what the right solution was, especially given that several of the allies shared similar situations. Germany was thus both too big and too powerful, and world events too complicated, for old formulas. And the apparent schizophrenia of the international community in its expec­ tations of and fears about Germany helped as well.

A N ew C o m m e m o r at i v e R e g i m e ? This long list of issues hardly begins to exhaust the important moments since 1989 for images of the Nazi past. Such events as the 1991 return of Friedrich the Great to Sanssouci, for instance, are illustrative of the new German history politics under the banner of normalcy, and this event in particular demonstrated the successful reacquisition of a German tradition. The Nazis had moved the German king’s body in the last weeks of the Second World War to protect it from Russian troops. Chancellor Kohl saw a procession to Berlin as a major symbolic opportunity for expressing the recovery of German history that accompanied unification. Critics charged that Friedrich stood for Prussian militarism, nationalism, and obedience. But Kohl’s staff staged a regal pageant, despite the ridicule evoked by the expense of reburial. Representatives of the German military participated too. At the “final” interment, Kohl intoned that Germans now needed “to stand before our entire history.” He said, “History only contains enlightening insights when we view it as a whole.” This, of course, had been Kohl’s line for years. But now he was saying it as the chancellor of the largest and most powerful nation in Europe. The ceremony, however, remained mostly a German matter, receiving relatively little attention abroad. Unlike at Bitburg, no international participation was necessary; German traditions—­even potentially nationalistic ones—­were no longer viewed as inherently dangerous, and Germany was allowed to handle its internal self-­representation as it saw fit. Other symbolic moments were more directly concerned with the Nazi period, not just with displacing it from the center of German history. There was, for instance, the matter of the Neue Wache. This was the successor to the East German monument to the unknown soldier from the Second World War. The

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unification treaty had included a clause that the Federal Republic would maintain the building as a public monument. In its new incarnation, the monument included a Pieta by Käthe Kollwitz, and an inscription to all the victims of the Third Reich. The monument thus equated all the victims, and the irony—­or even insult—­of the Christian symbolism in a representation that was meant (or perhaps not) to include Jews was apparently missed by the Kohl government, and by commentators as well. There was, too, the Bomber Harris / Peenemünde complex, which was in many ways the beginning of a newly legitimated theme in German memory discourse, that of the air war in particular and German victimhood in general, which I examine at the end of this chapter. But to set the stage: In 1992 the British erected a monument to the designer of the Dresden firebombings, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, in Trafalgar Square. The destruction of Dresden has long stood, for many, as the quintessential demonstration that not all crimes were on the German side. The bombing was thus a major moment in the commemoration of German suffering. Many Germans took substantial umbrage at the idea of a monument to the man who had planned the assault, especially when the British Queen Mother announced that she would take part in the unveiling. British supporters argued that the destruction of  Dresden had been a necessary psychological “softening up” of  German civilians in preparation for the infantry invasion. German opponents argued that the erection of a monument to the air war’s designer was the celebration of a war criminal considered a hero only because he had been on the winning side. In the process, though, German opponents to the monument never acknowledged any connection of the Dresden bombings to German attacks on British civilians. At about the same time (October 1992), private concerns in Germany proposed and organized a celebration of fifty years of space flight. The birth they located in Hitler’s secret rocket program at Peenemünde. Eventually, they were forced by criticism and lost government support to cancel the celebration. They had not seen fit to contextualize the event and to acknowledge the motivation behind the rocket program. Another such symbolic moment, similar to many since the early 1980s, was Kohl’s March 1992 meeting with Austrian President (and former UN Secretary General) Kurt Waldheim. Waldheim had been shunned by most of the diplomatic community because of his apparent involvement, long kept secret, in Nazi crimes in the occupied Balkan territories. Kohl resisted all pressure not to meet with the alleged Nazi, arguing that he would visit whom he wanted, when he wanted, and where. Kohl would not allow Waldheim’s past associations and their relevance for such a meeting to influence his behavior.

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Within this context, it may seem rather strange that the German government supported the conversion of the Wannsee villa in which Nazi leaders had initiated the “Final Solution” into a museum. But this apparent contradiction can in fact be understood as emblematic of the segregation of mnemonic tasks. Relativization and ritualization both proceeded along their different tracks in their distinct contexts; exculpation and expiation can occur side by side as long as they are in their proper places. Additionally, some museums can indicate a distant historicity in a way that other museums, and certainly other media or locations, do not. Indeed, at about the same time as it was developing the Wannsee museum, the German government was also seeking to influence the content of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, offering substantial sums of money to the museum to include an exhibit on the democratic achievements of the Federal Republic. The offer was rejected. In another context, the responsible government authority refused to nominate the much-­acclaimed film Europa, Europa (aka Hitler Junge Salomon) for an Academy Award because it did not want Germany to be represented by such a vivid film about that era. Subsequently, reactions to Steven Spielberg’s epic film Schindler’s List included the query as to why Germany had not produced such a film.

A N at i o n o f I m m i g r a n t s ? In the mid-­1990s however, the major issue evoking images of the Nazi past was clearly that involving the rise of the New Right, neo-­Nazism, violence against foreigners, and the debate about the constitutional right to asylum. The German and world public were flooded in the early 1990s with horrifying images that for many harked back to the 1930s, including arson attacks on dormitories for asylum seekers, and a rash of attacks on immigrants. There was much speculation about what these new images really meant for German politics and society. Was there the potential for a revival of  National Socialism? Was the apparently anti-­ Semitic and generally racist violence of large numbers of German youth a serious political matter, or merely one of youth, not entirely specific to Germany? The answers to these questions were that the threat was probably not serious, that it was nonetheless disturbing, and that there was some implication for the German center—­if not that it would collapse, then that it would shift. Indeed, similarities among New Right groups in Germany, France, and Italy paradoxically served the trope of relativization, making Germany’s problems seem like the same “normal” ones shared by their neighbors: right-­wing xenophobia and violence were widespread in the Europe of the 1990s.

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There are two important aspects to the German government reaction to this set of issues. First of all, the Kohl administration worked hard to frame the problem as one of disaffected youth and ridiculous extremists. The official line was that acts of vandalism and even murder were a shame and an embarrassment, but not a serious indicator of anything but fringe sentiment. This way of framing the issue, of course, had a long history. During the wave of anti-­Semitic vandalism in 1959 and 1960, Konrad Adenauer’s government had also worked hard to convince the world that such attitudes were rare and such activities only the work of mischievous teenagers. At that time the reaction had been immediate and significant. In the late 1990s, however, the German government was clearly slow to act. And the response was anything but seriously concerned: such activities were “a shame for Germany,” but were threatening more as an international public relations problem that anything else (and in that regard, not too different from 1959). Most of the government reaction can thus be seen as international damage control. As Eike Geisel wrote, though in a quite polemical manner, “When neo-­Nazis torched a Jewish memorial shed on the grounds of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the federal government did not send agents from the Federal Criminal Investigation Office to the site of the crime to search for the arsonists. Instead, it sent its secretary of foreign affairs to save Germany’s reputation.” In the context of attacks on foreigners, Kohl assiduously avoided attending funerals, arguing that it would be “political tourism.” A second aspect of the issue is that debate within the government and public arena served to legitimate the sentiment, if not the expression. Conservative leaders had for many years been arguing that Germany was being overrun by foreigners, and the numbers were indeed truly significant. Control of abuses of the system and the general problem of economic refugees clearly required some attention. Conservatives pushed for a constitutional amendment to limit the handling of asylum seekers. The right to asylum was a constitutional clause that clearly had been conceived as a response to Nazi political persecution. Because Germans had both committed and suffered such persecution during the Third Reich, the constitutional framers saw the right to asylum as an important feature of  West Germany’s new rule of law. In contrast, conservatives argued that the situation in the 1990s was untenable, while the Social Democrats and others argued that the principle, because of its anti-­Nazi context, was inviolable. The weight of public opinion and the measure of the problem eventually led the opposition to give in. That move is of interest here for at least two reasons. In the first place, the shift was quite problematic politically, because it seemed as though the right-­wing violence had worked, and that the government had accepted at least part of the xenophobic argument of the violent

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youths and right-­wing leadership. But second, the matter is interesting as an indication of the fate of the Nazi past. The number of people seeking asylum in Germany, for whatever reason, was perceived as a strain on resources in a time of economic difficulties—­not merely something incidentally caused by the costs of unification. One reason why the problem was worse for Germany than for other countries was the legacy of the Nazi past, both institutionally and in the political culture: Germany could not turn its back on immigration without evoking historical memories. The clear need to manage the problem, however, discredited the power of such an anti-­Nazi–­based argument. The past could no longer legislate in the face of such a problem.1

Assessment While rather long, this list of issues does not exhaust the moments in which images of the Nazi past played a role or were affected in the decade after 1989. Nor has it been possible to delve into the interpretive complexities necessary to a serious study of each of these moments. But constructed images of the Nazi past were clearly strong constitutive presences in German political culture both before and after 1989. In what ways, however, had things changed in the first decade after 1989? It seems as if relativizing strategies were consistent across the divide: the blurring of victim categories, the historicization of the Nazi years, the search for history “with all its highs and lows,” and the argument that the German past should not impinge on the “responsible” exercise of German power were all long-­standing and continuing features of neoconservative rhetoric through the 1980s and 1990s. And it is clear that there were plenty of moments other than ordinary speech occasions when the specter of the past loomed potently. There was nonetheless a subtle shift—­one partly of substance and partly of context. Substantively, new issue complexes forced certain traditional rhetorical constraints into obsolescence. The examples here are the Gulf War / Croatia / Somalia / Kurd complex and the immigration problem. In both of those matters, positions based on images of the past became clearly untenable, at least in their convolutions (the Gulf War) and in their obstinacy (the immigration/asylum issue). 1. One especially problematic move was an agreement Germany negotiated with Romania. In return for monetary and other incentives, Romania agreed to accept deported Sinti and Roma refugees without procedural hassle. The mass deportation of Gypsies clearly raised difficult associations with Nazi persecutions.

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The context had changed as well. Tough talk from West Germany had earlier sounded shrill, even hysterical, while the same language now seemed more appropriate from the larger new Germany. There was much talk of the new Germany’s identity crisis. But there was much less of a problem since unification than in the years of division. These were now internal problems. Actual solidarity had to arise to fill the space opened by rhetorical gestures, but it surely did so. This seemed much less worrying than the German nation in the cultural sky that has caused so much trouble since Hegel and Fichte. The context of unification also made the historical symbol work propagated by the Kohl government seem somewhat less important. History politics seemed more inwardly directed in unified Germany. In West Germany in the 1980s, controversial historical symbolism had been played as much for the international audience as for the German public, often making demands on diplomatic partners for acknowledgment; it was aggressively aimed at changing Germany’s status. But now that Germany’s status had been changed, the same rhetoric seemed not quite as aggressive. The government was thus careful to make the right noises at the right times—­at least careful enough to make critics appear picky. Symbolism and pomp—­historical and otherwise—­were to be expected at such a major moment of transition, and no one could be surprised at national celebrations (which otherwise would have seemed out of place), no matter how distasteful one might have found even good-­willed expressions of German national joy (another example is the patriotism that emerged in the context of Germany’s 2006 hosting of the football World Cup). And the Kohl government became somewhat better at the game. It did perform well when it had to, ritually accepting responsibility in the right places; it seemed to have learned that the desire for relativization could be fulfilled better by ritualization than by challenge or avoidance. As a result, the controversy over Steffen Heitmann was not nearly as momentous as it might have been. In 1993, Heitmann (CDU) was Kohl’s candidate to replace the popular Richard von Weizsäcker as federal president. However, Heitmann was dropped quickly after he commented that he thought it was time to draw a line under the German past, to acknowledge its significance but to move out from under its shadow.2 Heitmann thus failed an early test of ritual performance. His replacement as CDU/CSU candidate, President of the 2. Heitmann also made disparaging comments about mothers who worked outside the home. His comments about the past were thus placed with others to demonstrate a general unsuitability, rather than a particular problem of  history politics.

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Constitutional Court Roman Herzog, was probably little different in his views of the German past, but performed the ritual better—­an important skill for the largely symbolic presidency. These differences between the 1980s and 1990s were especially clear in the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the end of the Second World War on May 8, 1995. Ten years earlier, events surrounding the fortieth anniversary had formed a major international controversy: the Bitburg affair. For more than a year, public discourse in the Federal Republic had been galvanized by the debate. By contrast, the 1995 commemoration went off with only slight difficulties. Polish President Lech Walesa demanded inclusion in what was originally to have been a purely German affair; the conservative parliamentarian Alfred Dregger once again led a campaign against portrayals of May 8, 1945, as a day of liberation because such portrayals, he argued, downplayed the innocent suffering of Germans; and a synagogue in Lübeck was firebombed shortly after being newly consecrated. But the government responded briskly and nonconfrontationally to each of these challenges, demonstrating a newfound agility in performing “correctly” in symbolically dangerous waters. It was arranged for the Polish foreign minister to address a special session of the Bundestag as a substitute for Walesa participating in the official commemorations; the government did not pick up Dregger’s challenge in any significant form; and Kohl’s cabinet responded briskly and with appropriate outrage to the firebombing.

The Fall of the Old Regime Neither German history nor German memory, of course, ended or even shifted immediately at the moment the Wall fell, on the day of unification, or in the immediate aftermath. But there is a sense in which a new story—­or at least a new chapter in an older story—­did begin in the years after the institutional transformations of the early 1990s. By the end of the 1990s, claims of normalcy no longer seemed defensive denials of an absence, or too vigorous assertions of an unfulfilled wish. This was in part because of  how Germany’s post-­unification leaders interpreted and represented the process. While this was a gradual process, perhaps no single moment marked it better than the fall of Kohl’s center-­right coalition in 1998. Or at least that was the claim advanced by those who replaced him. By 1998, Kohl had led the CDU for twenty-­five years and had been chancellor for sixteen—­longer than anyone in the Federal Republic, even Adenauer, and second only to Bismarck in German history. For a while, there had been rumors that Kohl would step aside as

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party leader and chancellor candidate in favor of  Wolfgang Schäuble, who as minister of the interior had survived an assassination attempt in 1990 and was widely seen as Kohl’s most prominent legatee. But in 1997, Kohl announced he would seek a sixth term, putting off a transfer of power to Schäuble to a point following anticipated European unification. Kohl’s popularity, however, had been declining for a while, likely in large part due to economic difficulties, many of which stemmed from the enormous expense of unification, and which were accompanied by accusations of mismanagement. In particular, unemployment had risen to more than 9 percent, and former East Germans staged protests against unemployment and cuts in social welfare programs. Despite this, the CDU’s campaign strategy was based largely on Kohl’s reputation and experience, under the slogan “Safety, not risks”—­redolent of Adenauer’s “No experiments!” At the same time, a power struggle within the SPD between Oskar Lafontaine and Minister President Gerhard Schröder of Lower Saxony (not to be confused with the foreign minister of the same name under Adenauer) was settled when Schröder led the SPD to an impressive electoral victory, proving that he was more popular than Lafontaine, who in response withdrew his candidacy for chancellor. Lafontaine and Schröder had frequently clashed—­and would continue to clash—­over differences in policy and style. Lafontaine had long been the standard-­bearer of the SPD’s left wing, while Schröder represented a more centrist neoliberal agenda (some analogies to the Brandt-­Schmidt contrast apply). The FDP had also been weakened in the previous few years. As a result, despite his neoliberal economic policies, Schröder was able with the Greens to form the first left-­wing government in the history of the Federal Republic (the Brandt and Schmidt years had been center-­left coalitions with the FDP). Schröder’s first Regierungserklärung spent great energies marking the end of an era and heralding the beginning of a new one. It did this, however, only through very slight but nevertheless significant modifications of earlier positions. For instance, Schröder began with words Kohl would surely not have disapproved in principle, if perhaps in the result: namely, that the change in government was “an expression of democratic normalcy and the expression of a matured democratic self-­confidence.” In a standard congratulatory ritual, Schröder asserted pride that Germany had rejected right-­wing radicalism and xenophobic tendencies. Schröder went on, however, to characterize the normal development in German politics as also expressing a generational change. The “great majority” of those present, he argued, had lived through and participated in the political

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movements of the Seventies and Eighties, which represented an awakening and departure from the prior period of “restoration.”3 For Schröder, these were the “biographies of a living democracy,” the contrast being between those who had come of political age in an earlier and perhaps still tainted period, and those who had stood for “publicmindedness and civil courage” against authoritarian structures (namely those of the early Federal Republic), and a willingness to try new things. For Schröder, there was thus a clear difference between the experiences of this new generation and even those who had come of age immediately after the war. In direct contrast to Kohl, however, Schröder argued that it would be dangerous to interpret the change in generation as a release from historical responsibility: “Every generation bequeaths burdens to the following one . . . .” More pointedly, Schröder continued, “No one can excuse himself by claiming ‘the grace’ of a ‘late birth.’ ” Substantially later in the speech, Schröder hit notes not entirely unfamiliar to the previous decade’s rhetoric of national self-­confidence: We are proud of this country, of its landscape. Of its culture, of its creativity and the productivity of its people. We are proud of the older generation who built this country after the war and who created a place for it in a peaceful Europe. We are proud of the people in the east of our country who overthrew the authoritarian system of the communist dictatorship and brought the collapse of the Wall.

There was, he said, nothing at all inappropriate about this pride: “What I am formulating here is the self-­confidence of a grown-­up nation that does not have to feel superior or subordinate to anyone, that has risen to the challenge of  history and its responsibility, but that, for all its preparedness to engage with it, is nevertheless looking forward.” One could easily mistake these words for those of Kohl. But somehow the claim to normalcy seemed less shrill. To be sure, such assertions were by then well coupled to a specification of historical responsibility. As I foreshadowed at the beginning of this book’s introduction, so many pages ago, and as we saw in the discussion of more recent Kristallnacht commemorations, Schröder once again adumbrated the multiple, yet hierarchical, referents of November 9: 3. Green Party leader Joshka Fischer, who had a profoundly radical past as a member of the extraparliamentary opposition in the 1970s, was to serve as foreign minister in the new coalition.

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For us Germans the foregone day November 9 is burdened with history and ambivalent like no other. No other date in our history symbolizes pride and pain, joy and disgrace as much as this November 9. It is a date on which the first German republic arose. It is the date on which, for million of East Germans, the Berlin Wall became passable. But it is also the date of the pogrom night, when in 1938 Germans in racist madness set fire to synagogues all over the country, destroyed the houses and businesses of  Jewish countrymen, and killed Jewish citizens.

Perhaps notable in light of all the forgoing analysis is the displacement of the claim of greatest ambivalence from Theodor Heuss’s May 8. Schröder concluded, appropriately, “Much of what the fathers and mothers of our constitution undertook happened above all in memory of this National Socialist reign of terror. This common history obliges all of us.” But the point of this acknowledgment was clear; it showed that “in the meantime—­and it is good thus—­our democracy is no longer a delicate seedling, but a strong tree.” On numerous subsequent occasions, Schröder and others hit the right notes in the right places. In February 2000, for instance, Federal President Johannes Rau spoke before the Israeli Knesset, and what he had to say there was not surprising. Rau accepted responsibility unequivocally: “We Germans will be led forever by the image of murder for which the Germans are responsible.” To be sure, this responsibility is shaped by having become historical rather than personal: “The perpetrator may carry personal guilt to the grave. The generation that comes after him carry the consequences of guilt that shattered the foundation of human morality.” Rau thus denied that the past would or should pass away: “When the eyewitnesses have died, the knowledge will certainly be put in the hands of the youth.” Nevertheless, in a typical reflex, Rau asserted in front of the Knesset that this was an obligation owed not only to the victims, but also to the Germans who at the time “behaved correctly when it counted.” In January 2005, at a Holocaust commemoration, Chancellor Schröder deployed a by now quite familiar formula: The vast majority of the Germans living today bear no guilt for the Holocaust. But they do bear a special responsibility. Remembrance of the war and the geno­ cide perpetrated by the Nazi regime has become part of our living constitution. For some, this is a difficult burden to bear. Nonetheless, this remembrance is part of our national identity. Remembrance of the Nazi era and its crimes is a moral obligation. We owe it to the victims, we owe it to the survivors and their families, and we owe it to ourselves.

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One difference from earlier statements, however, is that Schröder no longer saw standard denials to be necessary. Thus: “It needs to be said that the Nazi ideology was something that people supported at the time and that they took part in putting into effect.” (This contrasts with Rau’s comments before the Knesset, just quoted.) Nevertheless, the positive memory of memory is clear: “Germany has faced this responsibility for a long period of time now with its government policies and court decisions, supported by a sense of justice on the part of the people.” To be sure, that was in reality—­though not in public discourse—­a rather partial interpretation. Four years later, in 2008, Schröder’s successor as chancellor, CDU leader Angela Merkel, also spoke before the Knesset, once again asserting the general importance of memory: “I most firmly believe that only if Germany accepts its enduring responsibility for the moral disaster in its history will we be able to build a humane future. Or, to put it another way, respect for our common humanity is rooted in our responsibility for the past.” The real challenge by that point, Merkel argued, would be how to keep that memory alive when “all those who experienced it firsthand have passed away.” It would be necessary, she asserted, to develop a “culture of remembrance.” Once again invoking the memory of memory, however, Merkel attributed the foundation for that culture of remembrance to David Ben-­Gurion and Konrad Adenauer.

A Moral Cudgel? Has German Geschichtspolitik (history politics) changed significantly in recent years? Can one say that ritualization has continued to lead relativization? I believe the answer is a qualified yes, but the qualifications are important. In the first place, ritualization had its critics. And in the second place, the generational and other politics were not as unequivocal as dominant narratives might predict. An example of the first is the so-­called Walser-­Bubis debate of 1998 (Klotz and Wiegel 1999, 2001). The debate began in October 1998 with a speech the writer Martin Walser made upon winning the Peace Prize of the German Publishers Association, in which he argued that “the intellectuals who reproach us with . . . our historical burden, our everlasting shame” bogusly saw themselves as being aligned with the victims. These intellectuals, Walser implied, instrumentalized the past, and thus corrupted more genuine forms of memory, which in Walser’s opinion were private. On this basis, Walser rejected what he saw as the “monumentalization of shame” in the Berlin Holocaust Memorial,which was then in the planning stage.

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The chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignaz Bubis, responded in a speech on the sixtieth anniversary of Kristallnacht by accusing Walser of “spiritual arson,” in many ways treating Walser’s comments as a replay of the conservative position in the Historian’s Dispute. On the face of it, Walser did appear to be another conservative member of the older generation rejecting the burdens of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and seeking to minimize the memory of the Nazi past, so as to not unduly restrain German patriotism. In this first response to Walser’s remarks, Bubis saw a legitimation of—­or at least an opening to—­radical right-­wing identity politics and the denial of history. But in further discussions, both Bubis and Walser moderated their tones, and Bubis accepted at least some of Walser’s position, which was indeed different from those held by Nolte and Stürmer during the Historians’ Dispute in the Eighties. Most important, Walser had called not for an alternative public memory, but for memory’s privatization, which is a rather different affair. In this way, his argument was not a mere return to relativization. Walser may not have approved of the form the Berlin memorial was taking, but he was also not trying to alter the substantive interpretation of the past. Instead, he wanted to change its role in public discourse, or its public quality per se. He certainly had a point, more­ over, that there was something bogus about those who claimed, without sufficient irony, to identify with the victims. By the same token, the claim that guilt was a matter of individual and private contemplation rather than public discourse or ritual was one as old, or even older, than the Federal Republic itself, and in many ways a strategy of exculpation and disinclination to commemoration. In some ways, however, Walser’s position could be read as being more radical than conventional leftist positions, because his rejection of public memory implied a rejection of the complacent ritualization in which the left had in many ways acquiesced.4 Then again, the novel published by Walser in this context, Death of a Critic, was a thinly veiled attack on the reputation of the famous (mostly through his television show, Literary Quartet) literary critic Marcel Reich-­Ranicki, one of the Federal Republic’s most prominent Jews. The novel had already become a scandal before it was published, when the usually 4. Here I should not be misunderstood as supporting Walser, whose position I find deeply problematic. Walser called for a privatization of memory to avoid what he saw as the instrumentalization of public memory by the advocates of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, but in doing so employed questionable notions of Innerlichkeit, or inwardness, among others. This latter concept had a long history in Germany, and was often associated with a claim to have retreated from politics. Overall, there was something disingenuous about this response, particularly in its pose of naiveté about how significant a statement it would be.

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conservative editor of the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, Frank Schirrmacher, refused to publish excerpts, charging that the novel was anti-­Semitic. Wherever one stood on the issue, there was thus no question that Walser’s intention was to provoke, and this shed retrospective light on his debate with Bubis. In subsequent commentary, the Walser-­Bubis debate was often contrasted directly with the one surrounding Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, in which Goldhagen, a young American political scientist from Harvard University, argued that the Holocaust had been caused by an “eliminationist” anti-­Semitic ideology shared by the vast majority of ordinary Germans. The book quickly became a best-­seller, and Goldhagen toured Germany, speaking widely to throngs of  young people, many of  whom embraced his apparent charges of collective guilt. Where Walser called for quiet reflection and was seen by some as just one more older German calling for silence about the past, the reception of Goldhagen manifested the younger generation’s enthusiasm for acknowledging German culpability. Walser apparently signaled a decrease in public memory, Goldhagen an increase. In many ways, however, the Walser and Goldhagen positions manifested the same accumulated structure of German historical consciousness. The Goldhagen reception, from this perspective, could be seen as exactly the kind of instrumentalization of the past that Walser had rejected, but one that was allowed because of the different generational profiles. The young people enthused by Goldhagen, after all, had nothing to lose, particularly since Goldhagen believed in a total break between National Socialism and the Federal Republic—­one in which the Federal Republic bore no vestiges of Germany’s earlier pathologies. Like their parents from the Sixties, the university students of the late 1990s could reject the world of their grandparents completely, because they had no organic connection to it. But unlike the Sixty-­Eighters—­those who came of political age in the crucible of the protest movements of the late 1960s—­Goldhagen’s proposed memory required no reworking of the Federal Republic. As a result, a great deal of the criticism of Goldhagen came from the left, which saw itself as the champion of German culpability, rather than from the right, which often wanted to diminish it. And there was the rub: Goldhagen’s penance-­free guilt provided exactly the kind of legitimation for the Federal Republic that many conservatives wanted, if  without the revival of nineteenth-­century rhetoric some may have preferred. Goldhagen offered an almost pleasurable guilt to young Germans because, exactly as Walser implied, through it they could identify with the victims. Goldhagen showed once again that less aggressive strategies of normalization worked best: acknowledge as much guilt as you want, but just make sure it is an

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historical guilt without real connections to the politics of today. Goldhagen’s guilt, it seems, was less threatening to Walser than was that of  Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, or other left-­wing critics who demanded long-­term “working through” of the past and the centrality of  Holocaust memory. And it clearly matched the memory proffered by the new Germany’s post-­unification leaders in places like the Knesset. Anyone who looks historically at German memory, of course, has a strong feeling of deja vu all over again. If the Walser-­Bubis debate reminds one of the Historians’ Dispute (though falsely, I’ve just argued) or of the Broszat-­ Friedländer exchange preceding it in the mid-­1980s (cited in the previous chapter), Goldhagen reminds one in some ways of the Fischer controversy (deep origins of German belligerence), and in other ways of the debate over the Holocaust TV miniseries in 1979–­80 (empty sympathies born of kitsch—­for in many ways Goldhagen’s book, with its evocative prose and totalistic argument, was historiographical kitsch—­versus serious reflection on historical complexity). Naturally, this could be said about all of the major commemorative debates in the history of the Federal Republic; each generation worked through the same issues in its own way. For many contemporary scholars, to be sure, the Historians’ Dispute remains a benchmark for all German Geschichtspolitik. Of course, as just noted, it was not without precedent, nor was it ever really “concluded,” despite some identifications (my own included) of  Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech to the German Historikertag as a symbolic end. But there was something pivotal about the Historians’ Dispute which set it apart from all the debates before and after. The conservatives, as Habermas charged, aimed at something of a discursive coup, a real attempt to “normalize” not only the past but previously taboo positions within debates about it. The goal was not only to settle the political costs of National Socialism once and for all, but to delegitimate anyone who might dissent. Where the Historians’ Dispute had aimed to obliterate the distinctiveness of the German past, Walser aimed only to reduce its political role. This was still problematic, but not quite as final.

B e yo n d G e n e r at i o na l P i e t i e s ? One quality the Historians’ Dispute and the Walser-­Bubis debate shared was that, though both debates were public, neither directly involved official statements, unlike many other scandals in the history of German commemoration. And while the Berlin Holocaust Monument required the participation (i.e., money) of the government and was debated by politicians, it was originally

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a private initiative. This fits well with the pattern I have suggested, in which governmental memory sticks closely to a script. The difference between the Historians’ Dispute and the Walser-­Bubis debate in this regard is that official postures were at stake in a somewhat more direct way in the mid-­1980s, and seemed to be at the center of what German governance was about. The Holocaust has since remained important, but German governance is now judged, as already indicated, by more geopolitical concerns. Holocaust memory is now cultural memory, as Angela Merkel put it; not political memory.5 Nevertheless, it also became clear in the last decade of the old Federal Republic that while the neoconservative instigation to the Historians’ Dispute certainly was, as Charles Maier (1988) argued shortly afterward, the last gasp of a dying generation—­the generation of the “fathers” who had sinned—­the generational dynamics were never quite that straightforward. In the first place, while it is true that there was an existential difference between those who had been of age during the Nazi years and those who came of age afterward, there were a lot more than two existential generations. After all, not all of the “fathers” of the Federal Republic were the same age. There was a difference, for instance, between those who had been in positions of mature responsibility in the Weimar Republic and afterwards—­for instance, Adenauer (b. 1876), Heuss (b. 1884), or Kiesinger (b. 1904)—­and others who may have been of age during the Nazi years but who were youths during the war (the so-­called Flakhelfer [anti-­aircraft auxiliary] generation)—­for instance, Schmidt (b. 1918) or Scheel (b. 1919)—­and those whose political awareness really only grew after 1945—­for instance, Kohl (b. 1930). In the second place, there were obviously large differences even among members of the same generation—­for instance, between Adenauer (an internal emigrant) and Kiesinger (a collaborator). Brandt (b. 1913), moreover, had a rather different experience as a youthful political opponent than did Schmidt. 5. In his early work on “collective memory,” the sociologist Halbwachs distinghuished between history and memory in terms of their relationship to the present; in his view, history was “dead” memory, memory to which one no longer had an “organic” relationship. In contemporary memory scholarship, Jan and Aleida Assmann have distinguished between what they called “communicative memory” and “cultural memory”: the former is the past that is transmitted in the course of about three generations, and to which the recipients have a living relation, while the later is a more deeply sedimented inheritance, often beneath the level of consciousness. As discussed in chapter 2 above, communicative memory works in the short term, while cultural memory operates in the frame of what Mikhail Bakhtin called “great time.” Merkel’s reference to the Holocaust as cultural rather than political memory thus reflects, intentionally or not, some of this cultural theory.

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It can be useful to distinguish among those who came of age in the late Wilhelmine era, in the Weimar Republic, under the Nazis, in the aftermath of defeat (the “Forty-­Fivers” [Moses 2009]), and in the reformed Federal Republic (the “Sixty-­Eighters”). The later category in particular—­the Sixty-­Eighters—­was especially salient as a marker of identity: a generation that saw itself as effecting a decisive break with the “sins of the fathers.” Again, however, there were several generations of fathers, those generations were internally differentiated, and—­ most important for the present analysis—­even the Sixty-­Eighters included a diversity of age groups and existential experiences. Many whose ideas had provided frameworks for that generation’s critique of the founding fathers’ suppos­ edly repressive memory—­Alexander Mitscherlich (b. 1908) Karl Jaspers (b. 1883), Theodor Adorno (b. 1902), Herbert Marcuse (b. 1898), Peter Weiss (b. 1916), and Gustav Heinemann, among others (all of whom I discussed in my earlier book [Olick 2005])—­were themselves part of the older generation. And many of the iconic figures of the new generation were in fact a bit older than they appeared, and had more complex experiences than they acknowledged. Generations, then, are less objective markers of social transformation than they are claims made by real people—­both politicians and analysts—­for particular purposes in particular times and places. There are always stakes in marking a generational distinction and in ascribing particular figures to one or the other alleged sensibility. Exactly how complex the reality behind popular representations of the relevant generations was, however, has been revealed especially in the past decade, when two public debates called into question the longstanding claims about generational identity that had shaped public and political understandings since at least the 1960s.

The Return of the Repressed? The Air War The most recent revision of Germany’s generational narrative—­which, again, was always something of a political piety—­began with a 1997 lecture by the novelist and critic W. G. Sebald, “Air War and Literature,” which Sebald delivered in Zurich shortly before his death in an auto accident. The lecture appeared as the anchor piece, along with essays on the writers Alfred Andersch, Jean Amery, and Peter Weiss, in a book titled On the Natural History of  Destruction. Sebald’s topic was the putative German repression of the past in the 1950s. In many ways, Sebald’s account was redolent of Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich’s landmark 1967 book The Inability to Mourn, one of the central texts for the younger generation’s rejection of the putatively repressive memory of the 1950s. The Mitscherlichs had argued that Germans had suffered from

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a “successful defense against melancholia.” Melancholia would have resulted from normal mourning of their lost leader, who, according to the Mitscherlichs, embodied a “collective ego-­ideal” and “narcissistic object.” But acknowledging that Hitler was a lost source of positive feelings, the Mitscherlichs argued, would have compromised Germans’ “intense defense against guilt, shame, and anxiety, a defense which was achieved by the withdrawal of previously powerful libidinal cathexes.” Instead of confronting their past, Germans thus “de-­ realized” it and threw themselves into reconstruction, as if erasing the physical remains of the destruction they had brought on themselves could alleviate their guilt for having done so. According to the Mitscherlichs, this led to “a striking emotional rigidity” when Germans were confronted with the suffering they had caused for others. All these were aftereffects of unacknowledged collective guilt. Where the Mitscherlichs had begun with repressed love for the Führer (tyrannical leader), however, Sebald began with what he claimed was the repressed memory of the air war against German cities—­or, more precisely, with German suffering. “The sense of unparalleled national humiliation arising from the destruction of the German cities and the horrors of the bombing nights never really found verbal expression,” Sebald wrote. “Those directly affected by the experience neither shared it with each other nor passed it on to the next generation.” Sebald had thus grown up, he wrote, with the sense that something was being kept from him. Responsibility for this silence Sebald laid at the feet of Germany’s writers, who, he argued, were duty-­bound “to keep the nation’s collective memory alive.” On this basis, he charged, “If those born after the war were to rely solely on the testimony of  writers, they would scarcely be able to form any idea of the extent, nature, and consequences of the catastrophe inflicted on Germany by the air raids. . . . The works produced by German authors after the war are often marked by a half-­consciousness or false consciousness designed to consolidate the extremely precarious position of those writers in a society that was morally almost entirely discredited.” To be sure, all that Sebald had to say about literature, my previous chapters make clear, was also true about political speech (if indeed it was actually true about literature, which is debatable). In fact, quite along the lines of the Mitscherlichs and others, Sebald diagnosed a more general syndrome of which the writers were only an especially lamentable example. He thus described a peculiar obliviousness of ordinary people to the destruction around them as they went about rebuilding their lives: The destruction, on a scale without historical precedent, entered the annals of the nation as it set about rebuilding itself, only in the form of  vague

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generalizations. It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness, it has been largely obliterated from the retrospective understanding of those affected, and it never played any appreciable part in the discussion of the internal constitution of our country.

Again sounding very much like the Mitscherlichs, Sebald continued: “The new Federal German society relegated the experiences of its own prehistory to the back of its mind and developed an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression: one that allowed it to recognize the fact of its own rise from total degradation while disengaging from its stock of emotions.” There were, however, some important differences between Sebald’s account and that in The Inability to Mourn. For instance, Sebald challenged im­ portant myths of the Sixty-­Eighter generation, for whom the Mitscherlichs’ charges against the Federal Republic’s founders were so important. In his essay on Alfred Andersch, for instance, Sebald charged a continuity not between Nazis and the older generation, but between Nazis and the younger generation, the Sixty-­Eighters. According to Sebald, Andersch’s occupation-­era journal, Der Ruf, heralded itself as the voice of the younger generation, denying for them complicity in the crimes for which they had paid the price on the front. Nevertheless, Sebald charged, “the articles written by [co-­editor Hans Werner] Richter and Andersch derive their inspiration almost without exception from the period before 1945. . . . Der Ruf is a positive glossary and index of fascist language.” This was a significant challenge, since so much of the writing inspiring the New Left in the 1960s was a product of the literary salon known as Gruppe 47, which formed in the wake of Der Ruf ’s prohibition by the American military government. In his essay on the survivor Jean Amery, Sebald seconded Amery’s disdain for “the alacrity with which the literature [of the Sixties] was now reclaiming ‘Auschwitz’ as its own territory.” Amery rightly saw, according to Sebald, that this “was no less repellent than its previous refusal to broach that monstrous subject at all.” In contrast to the Mitscherlichs, however, Sebald was thus very much a man of his times, free of the older orthodoxies of the West German memory wars. For decades, as we have seen in vivid detail throughout this book, the politics of memory in West Germany was divided between those who feared “too much” memory and those, like the Mitscherlichs and many others, who believed that Germans needed to work through their collective guilt if they were to overcome the symptoms of repression. Sebald did indeed pose a strong ethical and political-­cultural imperative to remember, but his lecture was controversial because the lost memory it lamented was that of German suffering,

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a claim which theretofore had been the rallying cry of the extreme right. In this regard, Sebald was only one example of a surprising recent interest in the memory of German suffering from the left, though given the discourse we have examined in the foregoing pages it is perhaps not all that surprising. Examples of this interest in German victimhood included a new novel by Günter Grass and a bestselling book on the firebombing of Dresden by a scholar—­Jörg Friedrich—­known largely for his indictment of what he had critically charged was a “cold amnesty” for Nazi war criminals in the 1950s. How legitimate was this new interest in German suffering, previously associated with nationalist revanchism and discreditable positions? The answer depends on the purpose. The Mitscherlichs, too, believed it was necessary for Germans to acknowledge their sense of loss that went with Hitler’s death; without this acknowledgment, unworked-­through guilt would continue to produce resistance and narcissism. At times this was Sebald’s point as well, and it seems right to recognize the very real traumas many ordinary Germans suffered. Did girls in Berlin get what they deserved when they were repeatedly raped by Soviet “shock” troops? Did the fears and injuries of German children under aerial bombardment not count because their parents worshipped Hitler? Insofar as Sebald’s argument reminds us that human suffering is never, in the last instance, entirely political, and that there is a difference between the necessity and the justice of war, the ethical imperative is clear and sobering. But there are also passages in Sebald not entirely reconcilable with the overwhelming insistence in the critical response to his essay that he does not succumb to historical relativism, denying important distinctions between how we evaluate the suffering of the Germans and the suffering they inflicted. Sebald referred, for instance, to the bombing of the German cities as “destruction . . . on a scale without historical precedent.” Moreover, he equated the “right to silence” claimed by Germans in regard to their own traumas and “that of the survivors of Hiroshima.” On the one hand, he stated clearly that “The major­ ity of Germans today know, or so at least it is to be hoped, that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived,” and that “scarcely anyone can now doubt that Air Marshal Goering would have wiped out London if his technical resources had allowed him to do so.” On the other hand, he referred to “the devastation wrought by Germany’s wartime enemies,” and, writing of his adopted homeland in England, to “the more than seventy airfields from which the war of annihilation was waged against Germany” (emphasis added). He characterized the mania for reconstruction as “tantamount to a second liquidation in successive phases of the nation’s own past history” (emphasis added to indicate the use of the term “liquidation,” often associated

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with the extermination of the Jews). He also somehow seemed to lament that “the question of  whether and how . . . [the firebombing of Dresden and other such acts] could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945,” though he understood why this would have been inappropriate. He also argued that the lack of portrayals of the air war was “the tacit imposition of a taboo.” Finally, the following formulation is rather unsettling, though in many ways emblematic of so much of the commemorative discourse we have examined: “Our vague feelings of shared guilt prevented anyone . . . from being permitted to remind us of such humiliating images as the incident in the Altmarkt in Dresden, where 6,865 corpses were burned on pyres in February 1945 by an SS detachment which had gained its experience at Treblinka.” This does not quite equate the German victims in Dresden with the Jewish victims of the Ho­ locaust, but it does juxtapose them. How well, then, does such a formulation—­and so many others like it—­stand up to the charge of historical relativism? Given Sebald’s massive talents as a writer, one cannot help but feel that he was being at least somewhat disingenuous when he claimed he was surprised by the controversy surrounding his lecture; in such sentences as those just quoted, he was indeed playing with fire. Nevertheless, at his best, Sebald posed a powerful antidote to the self-­ righteousness of the Sixty-­Eighters, but in such a way that we are left with alternatives other than a positive reassessment of the 1950s, as has been the strategy of neoconservatives. Containing as it did all these different tropes and elisions, in many ways Sebald’s book was a synthesis (or perhaps merely a hodgepodge) of many of the tendencies—­positive and negative, self-­critical and evasive, upright and shady—­that we have seen in the long political discourse, but somehow it manages to include many of these elements in one place.

The End of a Moral Institution Just how right Sebald was about the Federal Republic’s generational pieties—­ only one small example of which was evident in Schröder’s first Regierungserklauerung, when the new chancellor differentiated between the generation of former student radicals and the generation that claimed the “grace of a late birth”—­became even clearer with revelations about the German literary star Günter Grass. Long West Germany’s most revered author, Grass was perhaps best known for his Danzig Trilogy, and especially for its first volume, The Tin Drum, an magical realist work tracing the war experience through the figure of Oskar, a dwarf who was part of a troupe entertaining soldiers during the war,

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and who after the war is confined to a mental institution. This and other key works by Grass were widely considered landmarks of the left’s confrontation with the Nazi past (and an interesting case for Sebald’s claim about the failures of  postwar literature). The film adaptation of The Tin Drum won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1979, and Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999, with the citation—­which would later appear ironic—­that his “frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of  history.” To be sure, the Nobel Prize was not without its political background. For many years, Grass had been a mainstay of the SPD’s cultural platform, having vigorously supported Willy Brandt, criticizing what he saw as the “snail’s pace” of democratization in the 1950s. Grass was a frequent political speaker and essayist throughout the Sixties and Seventies. Later, after 1989, he came out strongly against unification because he believed that a large, unified German nation-­state would return to its history of nationalist belligerence. Signficantly, Grass had also lambasted Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan during the Bitburg Affair, when the central issue seemed to be that the Bitburg cemetery contained graves of Waffen-­SS soldiers. He was thus a mainstay of the left—­ old, new, and reconstituted. It was, then, no small irony, and no small scandal, when Grass revealed in 2006 that, after an earlier unsuccessful attempt at age fifteen to join the U-­ boat service, he had himself become a member of the Waffen-­SS, which he “ex­plained” in terms of his youth and his desire to gain independence from his parents. By some on the right, Grass was consequently branded a hypocrite for his stance on Bitburg. From the center and left, there were a variety of responses and silences. The playwright Rolf Hochhuth, for instance, known for his indictment of the Catholic Church’s complicity with the Nazis, accused Grass of “political correctness,” which he called “disgusting.” Grass’s birthplace and literary muse, the city of Gdansk (formerly Danzig), for its part, revoked his honorary citizenship. Grass’s biographer, Michael Jürgs (2002), declared Grass’s admission “the end of a moral institution.” The institution he meant was Grass, but by extension it was also a good piece of the Sixty-­Eighters’ self-­identity, based as it was on the claim that they were the generation that had finally come to terms with the Nazi past correctly. Clearly, this was far from the whole truth. But it was a truth that perhaps could only be seen a full decade after reunification, not during the historiographic brinkmanship of the 1980s. The shrill hypocrisy of Grass’s history politics became even clearer in 2012, when he published a poem called “What Must Be Said.” In it, he criticized Germany for its military support of Israel—­in particular, for its provision of a nuclear submarine, with which, Grass claimed, Israel could “wipe out the

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Iranian people.” There was, of course, no evidence of such an intention on Israel’s part, and the poem furthermore was particularly one-­sided, given that it was the Iranian regime that was calling for the destruction of Israel (and pursuing weapons with that stated intention), not the other way around. Grass’s relationship with Israel had long been a problematic one. His books were generally well received in Hebrew translation, but on an earlier visit (accompanying Chancellor Willy Brandt), Grass had been met with protest and was pelted with tomatoes, though this was more likely a general protest against any official visit from Germany at the time than a personal rejection of Grass. In 2012, Grass was met with an entry ban by the Israeli government, though he was not trying to go to Israel. Grass equivocated, saying that he was really aiming at the right-­wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu and not at Israel as a whole. But quite a lot of damage had already been done.

Conclusion The purpose of presenting Sebald’s work and the scandal surrounding Günter Grass here is neither to illuminate their details nor to take a critical position; there is much to be criticized all around. Rather, here at the end of this long narrative, they are interesting because, like the Walser-­Bubis debate before it, they crystallize and reveal many of the constitutive complexities of German memory politics, while also illustrating the very different languages of the political and literary fields. What they also show is that the dominant memory of memory—­ based on overly clear generational claims, in which both left and right colluded, that the postwar period of reconstruction was followed by a period of revolt, which was in turn followed by a period of normalization—­obviously hid as much as it revealed. Perhaps the only way to achieve anything like a normalization was not with the direct point-­counterpoint between those who claimed to remember correctly and those who believed there was no such thing, but through a process that Grass himself had also captured in the title and central metaphor of one of his recent books: a “crabwalk.” In sum, can we say that the Federal Republic of Germany has really succeeded in becoming a “normal” nation? The facile answer is that there is no such thing. And, as we have seen, because national identity always depends on a sense of the past, being facile about the normalcy of nations distracts from the very real question of whether Germany has found a “healthy” way to live with the legacies of its past. Germany’s past will never be normal. The question, then, is whether Germany has “come to terms” with its past and its implications for national identity. Germany is a very big place, and “Germany” has

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many and diverse meanings. One thus answers such questions at risk—­really with a guarantee!—­of being wrong at least in some ways. What we can say is that many Germans, including many political leaders, have continued to struggle with these questions, and that in itself is a good sign. Trouble seems to be truly bad only when there is an effort to put an end to, or to delegitimate, such questioning. The history of  German memory apparently contains both of  these tendencies at once. This is a great, but not unequivocal, achievement.

Chapter 19

History, Memory, and Temporality

History, according to the cliché (a version of a line from Kierkegaard), is lived forward and written backward. Like most clichés, this one makes intuitive sense, but gets at least as much wrong as it gets right. To see history as written only backward, for instance, is to treat history writing as an enterprise separate from life, and ultimately to undermine the argument for writing history at all. We recall here the important statement by Yosef  Yerushalmi (1996, 101) quoted in chapter 2: “An historiography that does not aspire to be memorable is in peril of  becoming a rampant growth.” That does not mean that epistemological standards are to be abandoned, or are to be weighed only against the meaning value of  history for life. But distinguishing between memory and history cannot lead us to think that history is not meaningful and ordering, or that it is not itself a form of memory. That would be selling the historians rather short (though some historians who are heavily invested in distinguishing their enterprise from memory studies often seem ready to make that sale!). History can be written (and told) backward, but always, implicitly or explicitly, with a future in mind. And this is true whether those writing and telling history are professional historians, authors, politicians, or ordinary individuals. It is possible, of course, to go too far in the other direction: the idea that life is lived only forward neglects not only the fact that the ways in which we live are shaped by the past and our understandings of it, but the fact that a good portion of our living forward involves an explicit contemplation and reworking of that past. Even in the most revolutionary times, as Karl Marx pointed out, “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.” And one need not take quite so negative a view of tradition to

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appreciate the sociological point: that positively, negatively, or otherwise, the past weighs on the present, and one of the central ways it does that is as memory, even when that memory takes the form of history. We tell history in well-­worn grooves, often whether we want to or not. Like history writing, other ways of referencing the past—­for instance, efforts to commemorate it, to distance ourselves from it, or to forget it—­are part of orienting ourselves, of coming to terms with our existence in time. Memory may not be life itself, but it is the medium through which we experience life as meaningful and locate ourselves within its temporal flux. In a very different context, the sociological theorist Harold Garfinkel (1967) described human beings as engaging in a constant retrospective and prospective temporal reckoning. This is a very good way of describing the work of memory, which is not only about the past, but about finding our relation to the past and our location in it. Doing so is a continuous and ever-­changing process in time. The central question in the many foregoing pages has thus not been about the epistemological status of  history versus memory, but about how memory of the past “weighs” on the present, and particularly about how German memory has weighed on the continually moving present of the German state. How have Germany’s leaders made sense of the past, and of the present by means of the past? How have the ways in which they undertook these tasks at any particular time shaped the ways they did so in later moments? How have they oriented themselves, their country, and their policies and projects in and by representing the past? In trying to understand why speakers have said what they have said, I have emphasized that people do things with words, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. And these circumstances have included not  just the event being commemorated and the needs of the present, but an accumulating sense of past ways of speaking (or not speaking) about various issues on various occasions. The challenge has been to highlight this duality of action (people doing things with words) and structure (in the circumstances they did not choose) without overemphasizing one or the other, and without treating them as separate things. The dialogical approach I have followed—­ listening closely to the work these speakers did to interpret not only the German past but earlier memory of  it—­is a response to this challenge, an effort to develop an analytical vocabulary with which to capture the duality of action and structure appropriate to its nature as a process in time. In doing so, it is important to note, I have been inspired not only by the scholarly literature on collective memory, but by discussions among historical sociologists that have lamented the apparent disciplinary division between history and sociology (e.g., Hofstadter and Lipset 1968; Tilly 1981; Abbott

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1991; McDonald 1996; and Clemens 2007). One of my goals has been to show how this distinction can be addressed by thinking about memory, and that thinking about memory is crucial to the discussion. To address the third term in this book’s subtitle—­as well as to develop further the methodological considerations I outlined in chapter 2—­I thus devote a few pages to some further thoughts on method before reviewing the lessons of the narrative we have witnessed Germany’s leaders telling.

H i s t o r y, S o c i o l o g y, a n d T i m e The foregoing pages, it should be clear, represent an unusual hybrid of   histor­ ical and sociological approaches. For historians, listening to a particular set of actors telling (changing) stories about the past may be a rather strange endeavor, especially since there are better authorities on what actually happened, and the stories our subjects have told are so often tendentious. At the same time, for sociologists, placing so much weight on actual words in actual contexts, and not merely as indicators of interests and underlying patterns, may be equally as unusual. I have proceeded with due respect for each of these disciplinary predispositions, with the hope that such distinctions may by now be obviously false. Alas, that is unlikely. The distinction between the disciplines—­ despite some quite profound efforts—­remains operative. One of the most eloquent statements charging that the opposition between history and sociology is spurious comes from Philip Abrams, who in 1982 published a manifesto of sorts for overcoming the division between them—­ called, pithily, Historical Sociolog y. For Abrams, the disciplinary division is, at the limit, nonsense. “In my understanding of history and sociology,” Abrams wrote, “there can be no relation between them because, in terms of their fundamental preoccupations, history and sociology are and always have been the same thing.” The problem, as Abrams and many others have pointed out, is that both historians and sociologists have had trouble recognizing this. As Cahnman and Boskoff (1964, 1) put it, the cliché is that “sociology is history with the hard work left out; history is sociology with the brains left out.” Historians, for their part, often disdain theory because they believe it dissolves their narratives into constituent elements that, outside of time, have no meaning. Thus, in a famous statement, E. P. Thompson (1966, 357) wrote: Sociologists who have stopped the time-­machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine-­room to look, tell

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us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can find only a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status hierarchies, and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion—­ not this interest and that interest, but the friction of interests—­the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise.

Defending sociology against this historian’s critique, however, Abrams noted that he knew of many historical accounts by sociologists that do in fact capture such processes in motion—­and that, as a result, “many sociologists might have to be forgiven for being puzzled to know just what Thompson expects them to find controversial in such a statement.” Abrams admitted, though, that the charge does apply to many other sociologists. Indeed, one of Abrams’s inspirations, the sociologist Norbert Elias (1994), had long lamented the tendency of sociology to engage in “process-­reduction,” the removal of temporality from sociological concepts and accounts. For Abrams, however, historians have had to admit that their inherently processual narratives, insofar as they reduce complexity to achieve some order, also employ, consciously or not, general theories, and thus are not completely alien to the abstracting goals of the sociologist. Historians are not mere “fact grubbers,” immersed only in unique stories in unique times and places. Arguing with sociologists as well as historians, Abrams and others have also pointed out the error we make when we assume that just because sociologists might in fact be dealing with the past, they are necessarily doing historical work. Abrams and others whom we might label “new temporalists” (e.g., Hall 1984; Somers 1994; McDonnell 1996; Abbott 2001; Sewell 2005) in historical sociology thus echo Thompson when they argue that many of the most prominent examples of   “historical sociology” are not genuinely historical at all—­not because they do not analyze facts from the past, but because they employ an analytical method that, like the one just described by Thompson, takes all the process (that is to say, temporality) out. Here the favorite examples are those historical case comparisons that seek to test the effect of variables by comparing historical cases in which these variables are present to those in which they are absent (e.g., Skocpol 1979; see also Ragin 1987). Aside from the problem of the small number of cases and the fact that one cannot manipulate historical data experimentally as one could, say, in a biology or psychology laboratory, such approaches, the new temporalists argue, miss the fact that the central problems for both history and sociology are processes in time. As Abrams put it:

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It was not so much the relevance of  history that sociologists failed to see as the relevance of time. Even when interest in the sociology of past societies was at its highest, and even among those who were themselves working on such historical questions, sociologists retained an impressive ability to ignore the fact that history happens in time. Accordingly, they also managed not to see either the possibility or the need to reconstitute the action and structure antinomy as a matter of process in time, to re-­organize their investigations in terms of the dialectics of structuring.1

Indeed, this last sentence has been one of the central motivations behind my choice of analytical and organizational principles for the foregoing pages. By adopting a “dialogical” approach to culture and highlighting the processual nature of remembering—­by conducting mnemohistory rather than traditional historiography, or more simply, by observing my subjects making sense of  history in time—­I have sought to redeem Abrams’s demand that “sociology must be concerned with eventuation, because that is how structuring happens.” Memory, as the continual working and reworking of images of the past, I have argued, is indeed the central faculty of this eventuation. So at the most abstract level, this book has been an effort to demonstrate the centrality of the problem of memory, in all the various ways in which that faculty might be conceived.2

Foreshadowing and Back shadowing This is not to say that attention to eventuation—­to the facts of our existence in time and to our ongoing efforts to confront them—­does not carry its own risks. A major challenge here is that even the most processual accounts can mix up the retrospective, prospective, and analytical gazes in an effort to discern 1. A subtle but important shift in the language of sociological theory indicates the problem: Where writers like Abrams still referred to “dialectics,” an inherently temporal understanding, much recent theory refers to “dualism,” a much more spatial frame. Part of the reason for this is to avoid analytical or political association with Marxism; but the effect—­often despite protestations to the contrary (i.e. Giddens)—­is to reduce the temporality of the account. These are, of course, not the only causes or effects of the move from dialectics to dualism. 2. It is interesting to note that in turning to the more cultural work of Aby Warburg, Jan Assmann, the founder of mnemohistory, believed he was overcoming the ahistoricism of collective memory’s seminal theorist, Maurice Halbwachs. “Being a sociologist,” Assmann (2006, 170) wrote (erroneously, in my view), “Halbwachs had only limited interest in the past, in the ‘vertical anchoring of mankind.’ ”

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narrative coherence, which may not in fact exist. There are also differences among the narrative viewpoints of speakers in particular moments, their sense of where they were in a narrative after the fact, and the identification of narrative patterns by the historical analyst (one of the many reasons for being wary of autobiography). For this reason, the literary critic Michael Bernstein (1994) has warned against the temptations of what he calls “foreshadowing” and “backshadowing” for narrative analysis. The former interprets the actions of an historical figure (or a character in a novel) in terms of outcomes we know came next, but could not have known at the time; thus a genuine mistake or accident can be read as a harbinger of something to come, retrospectively credited with an intention or significance beneath the consciousness of the actor. Such a logical error came into play, for instance, when later commentators argued that Konrad Adenauer had it right all along when he avoided too much public guilt out of  fear that it would undermine support for his government and for the new state. He may indeed have had it right, though one can imagine a trajectory in which the same policy would have turned out less well. Adenauer and subsequent speakers also continuously engaged in such foreshadowing themselves, predicting the future they could not know, as well as retrospectively asserting that they in fact did predict a particular outcome, whether or not they actually did so at the time, or could have done so with certainty. Backshadowing is the related error of looking at only those aspects of the past we know turned out to be important even though there was no real way of knowing it at the time. A good example of this is the way in which the secondary literature, this book included, treats particular historical figures in periods before they became famous as having had more influence than they might have had at the time because we know they would become important later; we thus read a lot into their earlier actions. More interesting, however, is to look at the ways in which speakers themselves engaged in backshadowing, assigning great significance to events after the fact, when that significance only became clear later (or was made significant only by their later claim about it). A good example of this is the ways in which later speakers referred to reparations payments to Israel, often seeming to credit Germany as a whole with having done the right thing for the right reasons; in the process, they mischaracterize the many contingencies along the complex path to the agreement and the extensive opposition it faced. I have frequently referred to this as the memory of memory, which is often as tendentious, partial, and innacurate as the memory of anything else, and often more so. Another example is the commonplace claim that there was a silence about the past in the 1950s. As we have seen, this

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was far from the case, whatever concerns one may have about exactly what was said, and how. Processual analysis, like any analysis, always involves some reduction and selection; and the honest analyst must try to acknowledge this selectivity rather than suppress it. The main goal of narrative analysis for Bernstein, however, is to engage in what he called “sideshadowing,” portraying past moments accurately as being structured without being determined. That is, we must portray historical actors not in light of what we know happened next, or as somehow having been especially perspicacious, but as constrained by their circumstances without being entirely determined by them. We must write history, in other words, in a way that appreciates determination without sinking into determinism, a way that captures trajectories but that, in the language of Bakhtin, remembers that those trajectories are “unfinalizable.” Mnemohistory—­listening to the continous process of historical and mnemonic revision as well as participating in it—­is uniquely well suited to this task. Part of writing historical sociology in this way—­avoiding analytical foreshadowing and backshadowing—­thus goes hand in hand with recognizing the ways in which historical actors in fact engage in these temptations all the time. Political leaders, for instance, foreshadow and backshadow constantly (we have seen them doing it), sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. This is what I meant above by retrospective-­prospective temporal reckoning: political actors—­and the rest of us—­are continually orienting and reorienting themselves with reference to the past (which is constantly receding), and are continually anticipating the future. Much of the narrative in this book has sought to capture exactly this process of constant foreshadowing and backshadowing, of retrospective-­prospective temporal reckoning, by political speakers. Of course, such retrospective-­ prospective temporal reckoning is wrong as much as it is right. A good example of this is the mnemohistorical work of German leaders in the couple of years before November 9, 1989, which was clearly undertaken with expectations radically different from what came to be. It might thus be tempting to dismiss those interpretations as moot, since they were based on unredeemed expectations. But there is a difference between being wrong about something that exists or that existed, and being wrong about something that does not exist or has not yet happened. So the relevance of that mnemohistorical work is changed, but not negated. Indeed, lack of preparation for an event or outcome is as consequential as a redeemed anticipation. Even though the anticipations of Germany’s leaders before the fall of the GDR turned out to be wrong, they still shaped the way in which those transformations were perceived and enacted.

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In this context, it is important to remember that the task of mnemohistory is distinct from the task of   historiography, the effort to judge statements about the past as right or wrong. As the oral historian Alejandro Portelli (1991, 26) put it, “The discrepancy between fact and memory ultimately enhances the value of oral sources as historical documents because such discrepancies reveal how ordinary people caught up in historical events make sense of their experiences. This too is worthy of historical analysis.” And we can say the same about official speakers’ constantly changing characterizations of the past. Speakers are not only wrong about the past but are wrong about the future, and they are wrong about the past’s relevance to the future. Again, this does not mean that the ways in which they were wrong were not relevant for how they acted, even under significantly new circumstances.

From Structures to Structuring As discussed in chapter 2, understanding memory as “dialogical” is also meant to redeem the insights of  historical-­sociological approaches that emphasize the cultural structuring of action—­the fact that speakers and other kinds of actors draw on repertoires, tool kits, and other resources in fluid ways, expanding and refining those storehouses in the process—­and that speakers are motivated by mentalities, deep structures, climates of opinion, and the like without being reducible to them. But dialogical analysis aims at doing so in a way that avoids treating culture as too highly organized, a series of relatively discrete elements defined in relatively coherent ways outside of their use. There is certainly an advantage to the repertoire or tool-­kit models put forth by sociologists of culture or of social movements (e.g., Tilly 2006; Swidler 1986; Lamont and  Thevenaut 2000), which avoid the pitfalls of determinism, instead emphasizing the improvisational character of social action. But such metaphors, it seems to me, still sometimes imply a “system” that contains distinct elements defined separately from their use. It is a helpful way of thinking because it shows how actors are creative with the resources available to them, rather than seeing creativity as freedom  from culture, as the conventional opposition of individual and society seems to imply (e.g., when we describe socialization as a taming of the instincts). But these approaches, for all their benefits, still seem to imply that the organization of cultural resources is prior to action, not a part of it, and that the elements stand in some definitive logical relationship to each other. Dialogism makes no such assumption, seeing whatever patterns or types that emerge as just that: emergent. Genres, as we have seen, are not ideal forms,

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but accumulated traditions.3 Cultural approaches to politics that see cultures as static—­comprising elements available for use beforehand and replaced afterwards for future use (even though one may point out that we change the elements by using them)—­can also miss the narrative ordering of culture as a process in time when they treat culture as a structure outside of it. The only way to account for change in such an approach is to emphasize the discontinuity between one cultural structure and the next. Indeed, I have risked this error because I have made clear section divisions between epochs, which I have then described as presenting legitimation profiles. But this false impression of discontinuity is mitigated in two ways. First, I have emphasized the ways in which elements of other legitimation profiles were always already present in earlier moments and persisted into later moments. For instance, I highlighted elements of rule of  law, second guilt, and relativism arguments in all three epochs. I also highlighted temporal complexity across boundaries—­for instance, in the section on the “moral nation,” which I began with Ludwig Erhard, whose rhetoric did not yet fit with the “moral nation,” but whose declaration on the end of the postwar and negotiations with Israel could be seen as the beginnings of a shift. The reason for dividing the narrative up in this way, then, was not wholly a matter of achieving length balance among the sections! The second way in which I tried to mitigate the impression that legitimation profiles were epochal blocks separated by gulfs of temporal and ideational discontinuity was to allow the profiles to speak for themselves over time, and to discern their central principles only after having let them unfold. In other words, that is why I limned the profiles only at the end of each epochal section. Beyond this, it was also clear that specific occasions, while favoring particular genres, did not line up exactly with any particular formulas; sometimes this was acceptable, and sometimes it was not. Returning to the concerns of the narrative analyst, there is also a danger inherent particularly in three-­part chronologies for social-­scientific interpreters: we often tend to see such sequences as a version of thesis-­antithesis-­synthesis. And there is something of this form to the account I have offered. I have identified the “moral nation” as a response to the profile of the “reliable nation,” and 3. Bakhtin’s understanding of genre, as we saw, rejected formalist aesthetics and the philosophical idealism from which it derived in favor of a realist understanding of genres as accumulated traditions. Norbert Elias (1991) leveled a similar critique against Max Weber’s emphasis on “ideal types,” demanding instead that sociologists identify “real types.” Real types are no less structuring than ideal types, but theirs is a structuring that requires no metaphysical assumptions to identify.

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the “normal nation” as a return to elements of the “reliable nation”—­though now with thirty years of  West German history, as well as the changes of the middle period, making the return to conservative principles a move forward to something new. The account may therefore seem a bit too neat, but there are good reasons for this. First of all, I think it is an accurate reading and characterization of the major legitimation profiles in West German history, though of course any such clear delineation is always a typification. Second, there is also reason to think that such basic narrative patterns are indeed powerful shapers of social reality.4  This claim about narrative order is thus not a claim of analytical coherence, but an observation of actors’ efforts to make coherence as they live life forward by telling the past. In the process, they enact coherence, which is not the same thing as discovering it in their world, or as the analyst discovering it behind their actions.

P a t t e r n s o f P o l i t i c a l C u lt u r e : S o c i o l o g i c a l A n a ly s i s o f t h e T h r e e E p o c h s Duly skeptical of imposing too much external narrative coherence, or of reifying official memory as either an independent or a dependent variable in causal explanations, we may nevertheless find it possible to suggest that the three epochs loosely provide distinct models for the different places that official memory may take in the overall scheme of things. And since one of my main purposes has been to theorize the role of official memory in the state, this is particularly important. I therefore suggest that each of the epochs is characterized by a different place of official memory, both within the legitimation profile and within the broader institutional and structural contexts.5 4. The sociologist Fred Davis (1984), for instance, has suggested that the label a society confers on a past decade will have an influence on the way it enacts subsequent decades. Davis hypothesized that this may be one reason for archetypal epochal sequences usually being three decades long. Scholars like Michael Walzer (1985), Paul Ricoeur (1967; 1988), and Hayden White (1973; 1987), among others, have also suggested archetypal narrative forms that may shape the unfolding of  history. Social psychologists (e.g., Bruner 1990) and psychiatrists (e.g., Spence 1982), among others, of course, have long argued that narrative constructions may shape the way individuals live their lives. The concept of a career is just one of the most common embodiments of this idea. 5. While I am identifying for each epoch a predominant relation among official memory, political culture, and institutional context, again I do not mean to imply that the identified relations are exclusive at any given point. The descriptions, rather, are typifications meant to capture a general pattern. Moreover, the more general point is to demonstrate the multifarious ways in

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In the “reliable nation,” for instance, the official image of the past as mainly involving a faulty constitution, as well as the longer-­term European condition of nationalist belligerence, implied that concrete institutional and policy changes were necessary. Of  course, I am not saying that the images of  the past, rather than the commands of the occupation authorities, are what made the structural changes necessary. Nonetheless, I think there is good reason to believe that within the parameters set by the Allies, the image of the past did have some decisive formative influence on particular institutional decisions and policy agendas in this period. The discussions in the Parliamentary Council of 1948 were, after all, genuine. The 1949 election was free among approved parties, with a real alternative between the SPD and the CDU. And the Adenauer government—­while restricted by the Allied High Commission—­did exercise substantial freedom on both basic legitimation and policy choices. Of course, the images of the past in this period were themselves often sharply focused on institutional questions, and thus fit well with institutional solutions. Different images of the past, however, might have demanded different solutions, and there were certainly opponents of both the images and solutions offered. For this first period, then, a picture emerges in which many images of the past implied and instructed the redesign of institutional structures, and the reorientation of policy. Images of the past were a crucial source of these other dimensions, and were therefore a primary node in political life as a whole. Official memory in this period may thus be seen as a leading force of political culture (though this explains why the changes in the political culture were not as dramatic as some had hoped: the images of the past did not require it); they were also decisive for institutional and policy outcomes, not simply by raising administrative challenges (e.g., denazification), but by suggesting solutions to them. Images of the past (collective memory) → institutional structure and policy → political culture

For the “moral nation,” somewhat in contrast, evolved differences in generational experience and the perceived (and perhaps real) exhaustion of which official memory may work, thereby refuting those approaches to collective memory that treat it as an undifferentiated phenomenon, usually the reflection of something else more “real.” Rabinbach (1988; see note above), for instance, hypothesized a relation between images of the past and sovereignty across forty years; but in my analysis I seek to specify that relation more precisely.

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immediate postwar policy lines appear to have altered the very foundations of the political culture as a whole. A new image of the past seemed to be part and parcel of   both the changed generational structure as a whole and the new general outlooks that this younger polity purveyed across so many fields of social life in the Federal Republic. In this sense, the image of the past—­while still an important element in the political culture as a whole—­appeared to be more derivative than primary. The archetype here is one of structural, institutional, and policy dimensions leading changes in the overall political cultural profile, which in turn helped produce and advance the new image of the past. Political culture and official memory may therefore be said to have followed those broader social structural trajectories. This claim is paradoxical because it was precisely in this period that people saw themselves as being motivated primarily by images of the past, and as finally confronting the legacies of the past “properly.” Generational structure and institutional changes → changes in political culture → changes in collective memory

For the “normal nation,” it seems as if the political culture was the decisive point. That is, a shift to neoconservative outlooks led to changes in official memory constructs. A new, detoxified historical consciousness was required to meet the demands of the new paradigm for identity and orientation. The neoconservative program explicitly undertook to alter the image of the German past so that it appeared less problematic. Additionally, within this new political cultural paradigm, new policy lines and postures also came to the fore—­especially internationally. The picture in this epoch is thus one in which the political culture was the primary node, shaping the official memory and policy outcomes (die Wende). Change in political culture (neoconservatism) → changes in policy → changes in official memory

Once again, it is important to emphasize that these characterizations are abstractions, meant to capture a trend rather than being intended as ironclad, one-­directional causal hypotheses. All directional arrows in the diagrams can also be drawn in the opposite directions at the same time; those directions were simply less prominent in the given period. Ultimately, identifying the image of the past in political culture as a whole, or of institutional and social structure as the ultimate source of all other dimensions, is a chicken-­and-­egg problem.

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The Genres of West German Memory Nevertheless, describing these archetypal differences among the epochs, in which different elements give the profiles their overall contours, goes only so far to help us understand the dynamics of this process and to avoid the charge of process-­reduction. And this is where genre comes in. My version of a “dialogical” approach is meant to grasp the ordering of commemorative speech as a process in time, rather than as a series of consecutive structures at different times in some kind of a narrative relation. This is the reason for my caution in identifying archetypal epochal profiles. Again, I have tried to think about and to portray memory not as a “dependent” or “independent” variable—­the former indicating the separate forces that lead us to represent the past in a particular way, the latter indicating what those representations of the past lead us to do—­ but as a sort of guidance system, the way in which we are continually locating our presents at the ever-­shifting intersection of past and future. In this way, I have found it is useful to think about memory as a sort of gyroscope, a mechanism for mediating between the weight of the past (momentum) and forces in the present (gravity). As such, memory is essential for locating ourselves in time, and simultaneously in space. Perhaps the metaphor is not as elegant as Elias’s description of social life as a dance, but it does describe a mechanism that unifies synchrony and diachrony—­the momentum a moving object has and the new forces that act on it—­in such a way that the two are inseparable. In this metaphor, genre is the momentum and profile is the force field through which our moving object, “memory,” passes. Speech about the past is thus driven by the past toward the future through a force field in the present; but it has a certain velocity that provides resistance to the newly impinging forces. This, then, is a way to think about the problem of structuring—­ which takes place in time—­that Abrams and others have recognized is the central challenge for a genuinely historical sociology. Memory is the gyroscopic mechanism that mediates between historical vectors and contemporary pressures, as well as their result. The search for an appropriately sensitive language for grasping social processes rather than social things will continue to be one of the central problems for sociological theorists, and I do not propose that I have solved it here once and for all. The problem, after all, may be as Elias described it, that our languages are constructed in such a way that we can often only express constant movement or constant change in ways which imply that it has the character of an isolated object at rest, and then, almost as an afterthought,

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adding a verb which expresses the fact that the thing with this character is now changing. . . . This reduction of process to static conditions . . . appears self-­ explanatory to people who have grown up with such languages.

But dialogue seems to me to be a step in the right direction. The bottom line, of course, is whether it helps us to see anything about collective remembering (rather than collective memory) that we might otherwise miss. To answer this question, it will help to review the argument about genre. Genre It would have proven rather awkward to tell the story of German memory structured solely in terms of genre (though in fact I tried to do so in an earlier draft!); this would have entailed distinct tellings of the history of German memory as a sort of sociological Rashomon, starting over and over again from each different set of occasions. While organizationally disadvantaging genre, as I have done by organizing the book as a single chronology, is just as costly as doing so for profile (which is what would have happened had I organized this book as four sections on the genres, each organized chronologically), the latter would have been a greater violation of our own genre expectations for a readable book. Also, as I have argued throughout, the accumulation of ritualized formulas for commemoration brings the genre distinctions into more vivid relief only over time. Again, this is due in part to the obvious fact of historicity; other considerations aside, a trajectory is clearer after fifty years than it is after ten. Telling this part of the story again and again for each genre would thus have been less coherent than a more straightforwardly chronological narrative. Nevertheless, this should not lead us to forget about genre, the organization of speech into different kinds on different occasions, and the accumulation and contours of such speech over time as analytically separable. Because I did not organize this presentation more than opportunistically in terms of genres of speech (I have pointed out when genre seemed to be the obvious differentiating principle, and have occasionally traced the history of certain themes over longer periods of time more explicitly than a purely chronological account would have encouraged, but have never traced a whole genre, or even a representative occasion, clearly within a particular genre), it might be helpful to trace two such examples here. Two important dates in the political liturgy—­which I did not discuss in any detail in the main body of this book—­are the commemorations of the  July 20, 1944, assassination plot against Hitler, and People’s Memorial Day, which

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occurs annually in the middle of  November. Both of these occasions share the fact that they can be seen, depending on the perspective, as both tradition and suffering occasions, and indeed part of the question through these occasions is which genre is appropriate to them. As we will see, they have raised the problems those genres demand in very different ways. In the next few pages, I thus sketch brief accounts of  the history of commemoration on these two occasions as a clear demonstration of genre analysis,6 and then review the contours of the four genres I highlighted more generally. The aim is to show even more clearly why genre is an important analytical and organizational principle than my chronological account allowed. July 20, 1944, in West Germany The issue of how the opposition was celebrated is, of course, a tremendously complex one, worthy of much more attention than I can give it here.7 But again, a brief overview will give us a sense of the long-­term trajectory of the occasion. The  July 20, 1944, assassination/coup attempt was led by a group of prominent military leaders in conjunction with some conservative opposition groups. The folly of Hitler’s belligerence was by this point undeniable, and the war’s loss inevitable. The groups behind the attack had drawn up plans for a new government that would immediately pursue a negotiated peace and bring back to Germany its more traditional conservative national government. The failure of the assassination attempt yielded a vicious wave of retribution, resulting in the executions of thousands from many different segments of society, and from many different opposition circles. The variety of different circles (with widely diverse political implications) as well as the timing of the attempt have, however, yielded a rather malleable legend—­one that changed over the years in the Federal Republic, but which was also important throughout the forty years in its different conceptualizations. The early speeches on July 20 anniversaries were concerned first and foremost with establishing that the activities of the opposition were legitimate, providing a valuable legacy for the new state. First of all, early West German leaders were concerned with avoiding any new “stab in the back” legend, like the one that had grown around the First World War surrender and had served 6. I did this as well for May 8, 1945, anniversaries not only in the foregoing pages, but as a case study of genre in Olick (1999). 7. There have been a number of  histories of the postwar image of the opposition. See especially Holler (1994); Überschaer (1998); Mommsen (1986); Steinbach (2001); and Large (1991).

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as one basis for rebellion against that peace. But second, they faced an additional dicey issue. The Twentieth of   July conspirators were military people under a solemn oath. In the first major speech about the opposition—­given on the tenth anniversary in 1954—­President Theodor Heuss thus worked a fine legalistic line, trying to define the right to opposition without simulta­ neously implying an obligation to opposition. On the one hand, large numbers of Germans were unwilling to accept that disobedience to an oath was accept­ able under any circumstances (one element of the problem). On the other hand, if Heuss were to establish that there was a duty to oppose this regime on the part of the opposition members, it would seem as if it were a concomitant duty for everyone. Those who had not opposed would thus be in disrepute. Heuss’s arguments were rather arcane, legalistic ones about the juridical status of oaths and the like. This obscurity reveals the extreme sensitivity of such issues as obedience and resistance in the early years of the Federal Republic. The main goal of the speeches in the early years, however, was to establish the existence of an indigenous and active “other Germany.” This was part of the argument at that time against notions of collective guilt. Since there were Germans who had resisted the Nazi regime, Germany itself could not, it was argued, be identified absolutely with the Nazis, who were portrayed here as an unloved criminal regime. In the early years, celebrations of the Twentieth of July were therefore constructed as important legitimating moments, because they allowed the postulation of a purportedly truer German spirit that was not implicated in Nazism. In this way, the occasion provided a basis for a defensible—­even proud—­German identity, because it argued that real and hon­ orable German identity transcended those times. Speeches from the early years also drew anti-­totalitarian lessons from the opposition, thereby serving in the international rhetorical posturing of the day. They interpreted the legacy of the opposition to be the lesson that individuals as well as whole peoples must stand up to dictatorship; they argued that dictatorship came in many different colors, red as well as brown. In many speeches of the 1950s and early 1960s, therefore, we find a linking of the Twentieth of July assassination attempt and the East German uprising of   June 17, 1953 (Emrich and Nuetzold 1984). During the grand and social-­liberal coalitions, however, the connection of the Twentieth of   July opposition to the seventeenth of  June, or to resistance against the Wall, receded. The goal seemed to be much more to create a consciousness of democratic traditions in German history by referring to things like the aborted revolution of 1848. During the Sixties and Seventies, on the basis of earlier scholarly research that had pointed to the Twentieth of  July

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movement’s inherent, even radical conservatism and not insignificant anti-­ Semitism, among other things, we see a broadening of reference to include many different kinds of opposition, including that of communist circles.8 The speeches of the late Sixties and early Seventies also addressed many of the changes West Germany was going through at those times. The speeches therefore seemed less concerned with confronting the past than with confronting contemporary problems and circumstances. A central legacy of the opposition was seen to be its desire for the reestablishment of the rule of   law, which was now brought into connection with contemporary threats to the democratic order, especially from the radical left as well as from terrorists. Some of these groups had asserted that they were exercising the right to opposition that was built into the Basic Law; speeches in these years (especially in the late 1970s) thus sought to draw clear distinctions between the Twentieth of July conspirators, who opposed dictatorship, and contemporary opposition movements, which opposed a state run according to the rule of law. Within this comparative framework, the latter movements appeared illegitimate. Some critics went so far as to argue that in misusing the right to opposition, the latter groups defiled the memory of the “real” opposition. In the 1980s we see an apparent boredom with the topic of the opposition, demonstrated by an increased ritual repetition of basic themes as well as an emphasis on the Twentieth of July Conspiracy’s historicity. Many speakers began by asking, after all the time that had passed and all the history that the Federal Republic had created, whether anything new or useful could possibly be said about the Twentieth of July opposition. Speakers therefore looked for more general lessons, and used the occasion to talk very broadly about value orientations as well as about their neoconservative belief that history in gen-

8. As Hans Mommsen (1991, 151–­52) argues, historiographical interest in the opposition had already declined somewhat by the early 1960s, due in part to what historians and critics had learned about the opposition. It was argued, for instance, by such notables as Hannah Arendt and Henry Pächter, as well as by the historians Gordon Craig and Sebastian Haffner, that large segments of the opposition were not the mainstream democrats West German political leaders were suggesting. Also, it was argued that much of the resistance surrounding July 20 was more pragmatically than ethically grounded, given, for instance, the late date at which the opposition finally acted—­indicating that it was meant only to save Germany from further destruction. While Mommsen points out that these critiques did not immediately affect the political mythology, I would argue that some of these points were indeed taken up in official presentations, though not for a few more years. These critiques of the standard political mythology were thus at least one small point in the more general critique that subsequently emerged in the mid-­Sixties.

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eral was an important resource for West Germany. Thus, in 1983, the minister for intra-­German relations,9 Heinrich Windelen, said, The Basic Law of our state and its actuality are an unavoidable sign of how much German history, which is certainly longer than those dozen years, formed our present. . . . The period of National Socialism has not divided us from German history. . . . Through it reach the binding ties of spiritual flows, which are not cut off. The women and men of the opposition stand for this tradition of values.

And this statement was typical of Christian Democratic speeches on the Twentieth of  July throughout the 1980s. Memorial Day (Volkstrauertag ) Early Memorial Day speeches were dominated by two themes: first, a general justification for the celebration, which, it was claimed, required finding a meaning in the all-­pervasive deaths of the war; and second, a defense of the German soldier. As part of defining the meaning of Memorial Day, many early speakers tried to make clear that they were using it differently from the Nazis, who had used it to promote hero-­worship of soldiers and Nazi leaders and to glorify nationalistic war and death. In 1954, for instance, the president of the German Association for War Graves Conservation (a major sponsor of these events), Gustav Alhorn, complained, “Memorial Day was misused and distorted into a heroes day by a state leadership that with incomparable hubris lost humility and forgot suffering.” Federal President Theodor Heuss argued that the Nazi worship of heroes and the romanticism of what he called “soldierly death” was no longer possible in an age of highly technological mass destruction. In 1952, the first Memorial Day after the war, Heuss said with pathos, “Ach, it’s all over with heroization; all that is left is limitless suffering.” In these early speeches, among others, the meaning, it was claimed, was to be found in the self-­sacrifice of the soldiers, who, it was also claimed, died for the fatherland and not for the criminal regime they supposedly unwittingly served. This required establishing and defending the values and motives of 9. In 1969, as part of the same reorganization that subordinated the Ministry for Expellees to the Interior Ministry, Brandt also changed the name of the Ministry for Collective German Matters to the Ministry for Intra-­German Relations, a name that had a less aggressive tone, thereby fitting well with the new policy of rapprochement.

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these soldiers. In 1960, for instance, Federal President Heinrich Lübke said, “It can only be said of them that they bear guilt when it must be said of them that they knew what leader they were aiding.” As Vice-­Chancellor Franz Blücher (FDP) claimed in 1955, “The dead fell in the belief in a good and upright fatherland.” And in 1957, Adenauer said, “How little these dead wanted this war. And then it broke over all of   humanity, like a fate with elemental violence.” Others gave stern moral warnings against judgment: Blücher, for instance, said in 1955, “Let’s not make the individual guilty where a fate that we all must carry met us.” In 1964, Walter Trepte, president of the War Graves Conservation Association, said, “All measures of  judgment that apply in normal times fail here.” And in 1957, the Catholic theology professor Anton Vögtle stated at the official ceremony, Who would even dare to take upon himself the decision about whether and to what degree the individual under the circumstances at that time—­with the opaque jumbles of all diplomacy, with its open and secret lies, with the seductive power of an omnipresent oppressive propaganda—­was able to come to a clear judgment about the moral grounding of the war? Add to this that general experience in no way allows that guilt and innocence,  justice and injustice, lies and truth, sin and virtue, may in this world divide themselves unambiguously and a hundred percent on one or the other side.

As President Lübke put it in 1960, “Those years were rich in shadowings and gradations.” In serving their fatherland, German soldiers, it was argued, were in the same situation as all other soldiers all over the world. In 1952, Heuss referred to the “sovereign equalizer, death.” Or, as Minister of the Interior Gerhard Schröder put it in 1958, “The dead soldiers sacrificed the last and the highest, their lives. They gave them like the soldiers of every other land, in the confidence of  being able to protect their country and families against a will to destruction which had arisen on all sides. This sacrifice, the soldier’s death, unites our dead with the dead of other peoples.” As early as 1957, Adenauer spoke about the time that had passed since the deaths that were being memorialized, claiming that those deaths “fade slowly into the background in the face of new occurrences.” In the Sixties there was much discussion of  what possible relation this new world order could have had to that of the Second World War. In 1963, for instance, Walter Trepte stated, “With chronological distance from the last war, the meaning of Memorial Day grows for the great existential questions of   humanity in the present and in the

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future.” And in 1969, the mayor of West Berlin, Klaus Schütz (SPD), argued for a more general lesson from the past: “Out of mourning can come a turn towards the world which prescribes the protection of life and the overcoming of    hate. . . . Memorial Day must be adapted in the form of reality, so that no new occasions for mourning come about in the future.” And he went on to refer to the new Ostpolitik—­with its goal of reducing tensions for ostensibly humanitarian reasons—­as a good way to fulfill that lesson. As Willy Brandt said in 1971, “Our task for the future consists of making the spirit of reconciliation and of understanding fruitful for all of Europe.” This theme of a broader application of  the “lessons of the past” appeared once again in Bundestag President Annemarie Renger’s 1981 speech, in which she used Memorial Day to argue against deployment of the so-­called Euromissiles. Another interesting change occurred in the course of the social-­liberal Sixties and early Seventies. As Defense Minister and future Chancellor Helmut Schmidt put it in 1971, “We have finally found the courage to acknowledge that the death of millions of German men and women and children had no point, that they were not sacrifices for a good cause.” In stark contrast to earlier speeches, in which leaders were quite concerned with vindicating the reputation of the German soldier, Schmidt stated, “It is also correct that the death of German citizens in the Second World War belongs in a different category, compared with the death of citizens of other states which were attacked by Hitler.” The “also” was telling. In 1975, the theme of  historical consciousness and the good side of German history appeared when the president of the War Graves Conservation Association, Willi Thiele, argued, “Nostalgia, on the one hand, and abstinence from the historical, on the other, are two concomitant forms of flight from history.” In 1983, Chancellor Helmut Kohl referred to historically shared experiences as the foundation of unity—­in this case, the national unity of divided Germany: “People and peoples are bound by common historical experiences.” He added, “If we want to live with our history, if we want to prove ourselves worthy of its inheritance, then we must accept our history as it truly was: with its great but also with its gloomy and sad chapters.” In 1985, the Social Democrat Hans-­Jochen Vogel had the podium, and he took the opportunity to make clear what he saw to be the implication in Kohl’s earlier statement, with its emphasis on the “good and bad” in history. Vogel said, “Not only do Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing belong to our history, but also Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels; not just cathedrals and castles, but also gas chambers and crematoria; not only the ideas and teachings of great theologians, philosophers, humanists, and jurists, but also the inhumane dogmas

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of dictatorship and of the murderers in judicial robes.” Whereas Kohl always said yes, there was the terrible, but don’t forget the great, Vogel said yes, there was great, but don’t forget the terrible. Vogel thus implied, as did many others at the time, that Kohl’s “balanced” treatment of  historical events in fact served to de-­center those of the Third Reich. In one of the most noted of all Memorial Day speeches—­most noted in part because of its relation to recent events at Bitburg—­the leader of the Christian Democratic Parliamentary Fraction, Alfred Dregger, argued in 1986 for actively de-­centering attention away from the events of 1933 to 1945. In that speech, Dregger raised old defensive claims about the soldiers, of which he was one. Without saying what it was they had known nothing about, he said, “Most German soldiers knew little or nothing about it.” But, he said, “The soldiers knew of Churchill and Roosevelt’s demands for an unconditional surrender. . . . Whoever decided for Hitler under these circumstances faced a tough decision, but a worthy one.” As a result, he argued, “all the dead of the war and of tyranny earn the same reverence. It is not right to view the dead German soldiers as perpetrators as compared to the other victims. They weren’t perpe­ trators. . . .” He added, “One cannot do justice to the deep tragedy of the occurrences with simple black-­and-­white clichés, as broke out around Bitburg.” The Powers of Genre This side-­by-­side presentation of the entire sweep of two occasions characterized simultaneously by two different genres (both of which included elements of German traditions and German suffering, rather than administration or guilt) is a useful way to begin evaluating the power of genre as an organizational principle in time. Clearly, many of the broad contours of the different commemorative trajectories were common to both, as they were to others. These are the force fields of profile through which every commemorative trajectory passes. But each had distinct issues, and distinct kinds of responses to those issues. In the opposition commemoration, the task was to legitimate an action—­rebellion—­ that in older cultural frameworks was considered thoroughly illegitimate. The problem, faced particularly in Heuss’s 1954 speech, was to legitimate opposition without requiring it. The reason for doing so was that if one could tread this fine line, the legitimating benefits would be invaluable as an “alibi for the nation,” as a common cliché about the opposition put it. In this way, the suffering and sacrifice of the opposition heroes could serve as a relegitimation of discredited German traditions of   honor and duty. The task was to redefine that

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duty and honor to different objects: to greater Germany, rather than to Hitler or National Socialism. Similar but reversed strategies appear in the Memorial Day speeches. There the problem was a great tradition delegitimated retrospectively. How then could this old tradition be rescued from the dustbin of history, and with it the ability of   “ordinary soldiers” to see themselves as good men even though they had fought on the wrong side of  history? Here, passivity rather than activity was emphasized. The way to reestablish the legitimacy of this tradition, rather than to condemn its subjects to perpetual suffering, was to portray them as having been caught up in forces beyond their control—­indeed, beyond the control of ordinary people. This is not a fate to which one would want to condemn anyone, and thus the silent suffering of the soldiers deserved respect as an honorable pose. The contours may thus have been similar, but the tropes and the ways in which they were deployed were distinct. The uniqueness of the topoi thus led speakers on these occasions to respond to circumstances differently. Nevertheless, while speech on these occasions was clearly structured by sets of choices, those choices, and the necessity of particular answers, were obviously in continuous flux. Speech at any given moment was thus clearly not  just the application of a static structure, a recombination of given elements, but a response to three things: the event being commemorated, earlier ways of commemorating the event, and the circumstances of the present. We can thus understand each commemoration not as a version of a general structure, nor as having been shaped in each instance by a new structure, but as an ongoing structuration. Just as no particular photograph of a person is the “right” one, no particular statement is more faithful than any other to an ideal form. What, then, can we conclude very generally about the trajectories of the four genres I have highlighted throughout this narrative: administration, guilt (expiation), traditions (legitimation), and suffering (exculpation)? Guilt Early speeches—­those up until perhaps the mid-­to late 1950s—­shaped by (and shaping) the “guilt” genre were, as we have seen, primarily interested in the issue of collective guilt, and more specifically in rejecting that there could be such a thing, as well as expiation of any residues that could not in fact be denied. This was an especially difficult position because it took place in the context of negotiating and arguing for the reparations treaty with Israel. There

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was a fine line between denying guilt and denying the responsibility to make retribution. Yet a gesture of remorse was essential to establishing the existence of a “new Germany.” This image of a “new Germany” was also pursued during these early years in Week of Brotherhood addresses, where speakers often defined the Holocaust as a German-­Jewish problem as well as Jewish-­Christian problem. The solution to these entrenched and virulent antipathies was absolute support of basic human rights and freedoms, as well as efforts to increase cooperation and mutual understanding. This was one provenance of   West Germany’s official philo-­Semitic posture. The past was horrible, but through such reforms, gestures, and good intentions it could be overcome, and would cease to be such a burden for daily politics. Throughout most of the 1950s in this genre, the horrors of the past were commemorated as something that could be closed off after institutional lessons were accepted and debts were paid. Again and again, it was demonstrated that any sort of deep questioning was already no longer relevant—­and could even be disruptive, as the widespread negative reaction to denazification made clear. Questions about the pasts of particular individuals were characterized as unseemly, and as attempts to discredit the new state’s Western orientation. If there was a moral accounting to be made, it should be done in private, within the individual’s own conscience, where it could not have much effect on policy. By the late Fifties, though, it became more difficult to maintain this attitude that anti-­Semitism and extremism were entirely things of the past. Anti-­ Semitic vandalism in 1959 and 1960, as well as the rise of the ultra-­right-­wing National Democratic Party in the early 1960s, were indications that all was not quite as historical as Adenauer and his ministers maintained. Their response was to discount the importance of these matters, but the very fact that they had to make such statements raised the issue of history’s difficult and not-­yet-­ worked through presence. The German guilt genre changed significantly from the early 1960s on. Events such as the Eichmann trial, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, and the 1965 parliamentary debate over the statute of limitations all engendered a greater level of  public introspection about the past, about the role of individuals in ac­ tively creating that past (this was helped by the creation of the Ludwigsberger Zentralstelle), and about possible forms of continuity from the Nazi period to the Federal Republic. Speakers in the mid-­1960s and into the early 1970s thus often referred back to the earlier moments in this genre—­like the reparations treaty as well as the rapprochement with France—­but pointed to the need for

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contemporary West German society to contemplate these issues further and more openly. In this period, vehement rejections of collective guilt receded somewhat as the central focus, and the memory of the past was now portrayed more as a potent motivator for social challenge and reform of all kinds, both domestically and internationally. In the context of the new Ostpolitik, Chancellor Brandt accepted more unequivocally than ever before Germany’s responsibility for the war. Discussions of purportedly mitigating circumstances like the Treaty of Versailles, the Great Depression, the so-­called European civil war, and the Hitler-­Stalin pact declined in frequency. Beginning, however, with Schmidt’s strong moves towards normalization with Israel in the mid-­to late 1970s, discussions in the guilt genre began to characterize the Nazi past as a burden only in the broadest humanistic and historical sense. Attempts were made to deny that it should any longer have a potent influence on day-­to-­day German politics. Under Kohl in the mid-­1980s, speech events like Bitburg and the fortieth anniversaries served as occasions to establish that debates about guilt and responsibility were now quite old; it was time, speakers emphasized, to accept the very general lessons, but to move beyond what was now seen as excessive attention to the legacies of Germany’s Nazi past. German history, after all, was a multifaceted one, with highs and lows, in which the Nazi period was only thirteen out of many hundreds of years. German Suffering In the “German suffering” genre, we saw how even basic themes changed over time. We saw how the prominence of the expellees from the Eastern territories, as well as the understanding of soldierly death, waxed and waned through the years. In the early years, speakers worked to establish that a large segment of Germans had suffered horribly during and after the war, and in this way argued against an image of Germany as the perpetrator and everyone else as the victim. Expellees and soldiers were patriots, could not be blamed for defending their country, and therefore should be pitied for their tragic suffering. Little effort was made to draw a nexus between German responsibility and German suffering; Germans too were Hitler’s victims. From about the time of the grand coalition through Brandt and Schmidt, it no longer seemed as important—­indeed, it was antithetical to current interests—­to harp on German victimhood; the Social Democratic leadership embraced a more ecumenical image of the whole world as victim, against the earlier apparent comparative reckoning of German against Jewish suffering.

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Under Kohl, victimhood was framed in a context of traditional values—­ willingness to sacrifice, duty, patriotism, and love of Heimat. In the late Eighties, however, it often seemed—­especially in Alfred Dregger’s speeches—­that Germany was being portrayed not simply as an equal victim to the Jews, not even as one among countless victims in all of humanity, but as the victim par excellence. As we saw in the previous chapter, the return to a focus on German victimhood in the 2000s was thus well prepared, and can be seen as a reaction to too much denial in the 1960s (more on this below). Traditions In the “German traditions” genre, including older and newer traditions, we also saw interesting changes over time. For instance, the difficulty with overt traditional symbolism in the early years lessened over time, though it never fully disappeared. On the other hand, during those years explicit emphasis was placed on the continuity of the German nation at the same time as it was placed on the radical discontinuity with the Nazi system. This served to define the Nazi period as an aberration. In the years beginning with Brandt and continuing through Schmidt, speakers sought to emphasize progressive and other elements in German history not usually highlighted by Adenauer’s conservatives, including the revolution of 1848 and the variety of opposition movements to the Third Reich. At the same time, there was a concomitant disuse and avoidance of conservative traditions and naturalistic national identity—­which was now understood as being attitudinally based. With Kohl, of course, traditionalism came back stronger than ever, now claiming to be free of the purportedly undue burdens the Nazi past seemed to have placed on all German values and symbols. Kohl also benefitted here from the accumulated West German tradition. While in the early years, German values had been seen as barely holding on in the heroic deeds of small opposition circles and the so-­called “other Germany,” the longer historical view from the 1980s saw these virtues as more obvious and dominant features of  German life. Administration In the administration genre, images of the Nazi regime as a criminal political organization provided perhaps the chief point of reference in the early speeches. Great effort was taken to investigate and to eliminate the roads such elements could take to power. But as early as the mid-­1950s, the Nazi past

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gave way to the Soviet present as the chief political demon image. Already by Adenauer’s 1957 Regierungserklärung, the prominence of Nazi-­past–­related issues had receded and, when mentioned, was already fairly ritualized. In his speeches in the early 1960s, Chancellor Erhard may have employed more colorful language, but the message was more embellishment than substance. By the time of   Kiesinger and the grand coalition in the mid-­Sixties—­par­ ticularly in the context of discussions of the new Ostpolitik—­a slightly more open discussion of German responsibility as a general principle seemed to be in the making, though it was combined with a growing emphasis on chronological distance from the events. Brandt, as we saw, appeared to combine a general acceptance of the past as a broadly relevant moral impetus for German politics and postures with a generalization of the matters to such a degree that they seemed to lose much of their historical specificity. Speeches by Schmidt and Scheel in the late Seventies appear to have involved an implicit push towards avoidance under the guise of  “normalization.” In characterizing West Germany as a normally functioning democratic state, they turned their attention away from a direct impact for the Nazi past on the day-­to-­day operation of the government, both domestically and internationally. With Kohl and his neoconservative regime, this impulse became much more explicit and highly developed. The claim was that legitimacy depended on overcoming an overemphasis on the Nazi period in the legitimation work of the Federal Republic. The Relative Autonomy of Genres It should be clear, then, that while there are important similarities and common trends across the genres, they nonetheless do have some independent contours, no matter how conveniently I have used leadership shifts to mark the changes in all of them.10 Each is subject to somewhat different rhythms, determined both endogenously and exogenously. The “guilt” genre, for instance, responded to such occurrences as the Eichmann trial, the statute of limitations debate, and occasional anti-­Semitic outbreaks. These kinds of events shaped 10. In discussing discursive versus other causes of political action in what follows, I will consider the proposition that all the major changes may be explained as changes in leadership personnel. This discussion of relative genre independence, however, demonstrates that the correlation between leadership changes and discursive changes is not as absolute as we might assume, and that the arrow of causation is not always in one direction. That is, discursive shifts can bring about leadership changes as much as leadership changes bring about discursive shifts.

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the way this genre unfolded, both by requiring statements at particular times and by providing new materials for discussion within it. Also, different major anniversaries were more and less prominent in the different genres: forty, for instance, was more important in “guilt” than in “traditions” (the opposition); ten was a more important anniversary for the opposition than for the war. The genres also reacted to context differently, and the balance among them shifted over time. Certain aspects of the “traditions” genre, for instance, became so important in the 1980s that they overflowed the boundaries of particular speech occasions and became part of virtually every speech, just as administrative issues had in the 1950s. General war guilt was more important than Holocaust guilt in the Sixties, though less important in the Fifties. The genres also resonated differently in different issue cultures, like war guilt with Ostpolitik or tradition with neoconservatism. Additionally, in any given period, serious confrontation with the past might have taken place more in one genre than in another: for instance, in the Fifties, discussions of the opposition were richer than they were in the 1980s, while discussions of guilt were more circumspect in the Fifties than in the Eighties. As part of this, the valence of different occasions rose and fell (and sometimes rose again) over time. In discussing the genres as trajectories and patterns of change, we should nevertheless be careful not to lose sight of either the way earlier moments shaped and constrained later ones or the consistencies across time within each genre. Also, though there was subsequent variability, the occasions and places for commemoration in the Federal Republic were selected early on. When one chose to mark a certain event or place in the early years, this set a frame of reference for ceremonies in later years. Later leaders had to respond in one way or another to that precedent, either by repeating it or rejecting it, implicitly or explicitly. This was also true substantively. Speakers were clearly aware of   both the kinds of things appropriate to a given situation, and, as part of this, what kinds of things previous speakers had said in such contexts. Indeed, there was a great deal of reference to earlier moments in the genres by later speakers. Even when later speakers were distinguishing their positions from the styles and substances of earlier remarks, they were responding to, and were shaped by, those earlier moments. This memory of memory was both explicit—­as when later speakers drew on and referred to earlier speeches and occasions—­and implicit—­as when they followed on conventions established earlier without direct or intentional reference. By the same token, there were some striking consistencies both across the four genres as well as throughout the forty years. As we have seen, there was a standard repertoire of grammatical, syntactical, and other rhetorical moves

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that, though they appeared more and less frequently in different times and genres, nonetheless consistently recurred. This included such expressions as “in the name of Germany,” the passive tense, the general actorlessness of the past, and the identification of a small clique as the only responsible actors. There thus seemed to be a deep-­rooted commitment to formulations that distract attention away from “ordinary” Germans being implicated in supporting Hitler. Even in analyses that explored the social-­systemic bases of  National Socialism, Hitler never disappeared as the ultimate evil. Whatever social-­ scientific debates there may have been between so-­called functionalists and intentionalists, these positions always appeared to varying degrees as polar alternatives (sometimes juxtaposed) in official discourse—­moving between impossible burdens on the German people and the evil machinations of the Nazi leadership. More balanced treatments were rare, and—­as in the example of  Jenninger’s fortieth anniversary of Kristallnacht speech—­often problematic. Indeed, Jenninger’s infamous Kristallnacht speech may be seen as an especially poignant example of the power of genre constraints, as well as of the rhetorical taboos they engendered. It would be difficult to explain it any other way. Unlike other speeches in the guilt genre, Jenninger spoke of the issues confronting real existing Germans in the early 1930s. In doing so, he breached the genre by focusing on German problems, and breached the wider taboo structure by admitting that many real people supported Hitler for a wide variety of reasons, to say nothing of the neoconservative trend at the time to treat the whole matter as ancient history. The focus on how Hitler made sense to some people violated the absolute demonization of Hitler, and focusing on German problems—­for whatever reasons—­seemed inappropriate in a context reserved for commemorating victims, not perpetrators. Other explanations that focused on party conflict and the like as causes of the controversy show that they may have been necessary, but were not sufficient: opposition parties are always ready to seize on gaffes. The question is why this speech was seen as a gaffe. Jenninger might have been able to say the same things in a different genre without the same fallout, but the speech would nonetheless have been difficult, however we might judge his remarks in retrospect. It was the combination of the genre and epochal constraints, as well as of the more general structure of discursive constraint that made the speech so problematic.

A lt e r n a t i v e E x p l a n a t i o n s The ultimate value of a reading in terms of discursive genres, however, is whether it adds anything to the conventional understandings and explanations

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of West German history and of the role of official memory in political processes. What, then, does such an analysis contribute in comparison to more conventional social-­scientific approaches? Work like that presented here can be seen as a sort of what sociologist Jason Kaufman (2004) has called “endogenous explanation” in cultural sociology. According to Kaufman, “endogenous explanation” turns away from the determination of cultural outcomes by extra-­cultural processes in favor of a “focus instead on causal processes that occur within the cultural stream.” In many conventional approaches to culture, extra-­cultural factors, for instance “social structural, technological, or material change,” are investigated as determinants of cultural outcomes (e.g., images of the past or collective memories); in contrast, “culturalists” have demonstrated the ways in which cultural factors (including images of the past or collective memories), affect extracultural factors. In contrast to both of these approaches, endogenous explanation in cultural sociology argues that “language, thought, and expressive culture not only shape the meaning we attribute to material things and human relationships but also influence one another in ways worth understanding.” Indeed, despite Kaufman’s concerns about such an approach, this is an apt description of the processes I have highlighted here: How, I asked, are identities constituted by and through images of the past? How do earlier images of the past shape subsequent ones? And how do these images affect speech and other forms of action? To be sure, wary of the sharp divide between historical and sociological concerns, I am less interested in generalizing causal explanations—­structuralist, culturalist, or endogenous—­than many social scientists. For me, highlighting the ways in which images of the past are meaningful is not reducible to the question of  what they cause or what causes them: their import is sui generis because making sense of our existence in time, of the ways who we are and what we want are constituted by the pasts we acknowledge (or fail to acknowledge), and observing actors—­individual and collective—­struggling with these questions, is at the heart of understanding what it means to live together in society; and causal explanations of these matters, it seems to me, always involve an element of  “explaining away.” Nevertheless, because I have indeed made a reasonably strong claim about the independent power of earlier images to shape later ones—­an endogenous process—­it is worth considering the place of this sort of explanation compared to other possible explanations for collective memory. It is important to note that I have never claimed that the sort of endogenous process I identified—­namely the path dependency of memory—­was the only factor at work; the processes I have highlighted are but one part of a much more

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complex story,  just as official memory is embedded in other kinds of memory, as well as in nonmnemonic processes. In analyzing discursive contexts and structures of official memory and their role in legitimation, and in reading West German history in terms of  legitimation profiles, I have also not meant to imply that all political life, or even all political imagery, is a matter of discourse, or specifically of discourse about the Nazi past. Many other factors, including other discourses, policy cultures, institutional and international contexts and events, as well as social-­structural dimensions, provided materials and occasions for these genres of memory in West German politics, and rhythms that shaped them. My point here has merely been to hypothesize and to support the claim that discursive dimensions are important in the production of official memory, in the practice of legitimation, and in political life generally. Doing so does not exclude or discount the relevance of these other factors. Such factors—­those in terms of which I did not choose to frame the analysis, but which are still obviously important—­can be divided into three categories: (1) additional bases of explanation for images of the past and legitimation profiles, (2) other diachronic trajectories and issue cultures (e.g., the cultural fields issues, discussed in chapter 3, that significantly shaped the course of West German history), and (3) impinging contexts. Again, by not focusing on these explicitly, I was not seeking to discount them; I meant only to claim that the terms of my analysis are the most empirically and analytically interesting for the questions I have asked, namely about how we make sense of our place in history and our responsibility towards it. It may nonetheless be useful to review briefly some of these other issues before drawing conclusions about the importance of the discursive structuring I have presented. Party In the first place, certain structural features of the West German polity and society provide important alternative (or complementary) bases for analyzing images of the past. The political parties, for instance, have historically stood in different relations to the past, though not in as fixed a way as would make for easy analysis. For instance, it is clear that the CDU and conservatism in general have had an outlook on the past different from that of the SPD. And this is not simply a result of the parties’ policy and ideological positions. Rather, the SPD—­especially in the battered form of its first postwar leader, Kurt Schumacher—­was able to claim a less problematic past than conservatives. The SPD had been officially opposed to Hitler, and many of its leaders had either gone into exile or been inmates in Nazi concentration camps. In the

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early years of the Federal Republic, the SPD thus saw itself as occupying the moral high ground. By contrast, conservative circles bore the legacy of association between conservative factions and National Socialism. While this was one reason why Adenauer and Heuss (FDP), and figures like Eugen Gerstenmeier (CDU), worked hard to establish connections to the so-­called “other Germany,” it was not until the mid-­1970s that German conservatism clearly emerged from ideological timidity in this regard. This was the return of the repressed legacies of radical conservatives like Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger, whose reputations never rode higher than in the 1980s and 1990s.11 These differences in outlook on the past manifested themselves in many moments throughout the history of the Federal Republic, though not always in straightforward ways. It was largely the SPD, for instance—­whose members saw themselves as relatively free of complicity—­that supported Adenauer’s reparations initiative, and that was more open to notions of collective guilt (see, for instance, Carlo Schmid’s comments on the Eichmann trial). At the same time, it was the CDU/CSU that—­partly as a result of Cold War support for Israel as an outpost of democracy—­unequivocally supported Israel and general philo-­Semitism. Though the SPD was generally philo-­Semitic in the 1950s and 1960s, we have seen how Israel to some degree lost its special place in West German policy during the new Ostpolitik. The Liberals (FDP) are a bit harder to pin down, having drawn members from many different backgrounds (not that the other parties did not). In the early years they were generally opposed to past-­oriented initiatives, though their leader, Theodor Heuss, was among the most prominent speakers on such matters as federal president (which required giving up party affiliation). In the Sixties, of course, the party was radically split between those favoring alliance with the conservatives and those favoring it with the progressives, and these factions had different views on the past. The Greens have also been somewhat enigmatic, vociferously attacking Kohl’s cultural policies, yet also with factions espousing sometimes strongly conservative nationalistic views. Despite the brevity of this sketch, it should be clear that party is a strong predictor of image of the past, though in ways that changed over time. But this is limited in several ways. First, party cultures were complex and evolving, so the ways in which party as an indicator predicted were varied. Second, even within party cultures at any given time, there was still a wide range of individual 11. For a discussion of these three figures in particular, see Olick (2005), chapters 12 and 13.

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variance. CDU leaders like Adenauer and Gerstenmeier, for instance, had significantly different relations to the past from each other, not to mention from people like Hans Globke, Adenauer’s notorious chief of staff. Third, the overall range of choices within which a party formulates its position—­the point in a discourse—­is continually changing, and is shaped both by factors exogenous to the party cultures and by other issues in them. Confession A second major cross-­cutting basis for analysis is religion. Protestantism and Catholicism not only have significantly different moral cultures in regard to sin, collective responsibility, and forgiveness, but also had different histories in the Third Reich. While one of the most significant changes that occurred in German political structure after the war was the declining importance of re­ligion as a basis of party affiliation and political position (Linz 1959), the re­ ligious background of individual leaders was still a significant feature of their presentation styles. Nonetheless, the ways in which these backgrounds played themselves out is also quite difficult to get at, and by no means a direct predictor. Religion combined with party affiliation and region in complex ways. Protestantism, for instance, was often associated with Prussianism, thus leading to greater sympathy for pan-­Germanic positions. This can be seen in both parties—­both in Schumacher’s pressing of the SPD to reject Western integration, and in early, more social versions of Christian Democracy in intraparty opposition to Adenauer. But Protestantism, though associated with Prussia, also had a more progressive impulse and stronger traditional associations with Social Democracy. At the same time, it was the conservative Catholic Adenauer who sided with the SPD in favor of reparations, though against collective guilt. There seemed to be a greater willingness of   left-­leaning Protestants to accept collective guilt, though right-­leaning Protestants in the CDU opposed it vehemently. Also, some of the impact of religious affiliation was shaped by the different historical positions in the Third Reich. Of course, there was a variety of positions in the leaderships of both religions during the Third Reich; both had their martyrs and their accomplices. But the Catholic Church came under harsher criticism after the war for an apparent policy of nonintervention and appeasement. Part of this criticism may have been the comparative legacy of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. While this statement was the occasion for a mighty struggle within the Evangelical Church, it was still a great deal more

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than what came from the Catholic Church. Many, but not all, of the prominent opposition members were Protestant, though many of the most prominent of these were quite conservative. Generations Time—­as represented in generations—­may also be said to be a major structural feature of  West German society shaping images of the past. As has already been discussed in several places in this book, generations related to the past in intrinsically different ways. As speakers have so often pointed out, a generation that grew up after the war cannot have the same relation to the crimes of the past as do those who lived through that past as adults. The issue of how the guilt of the “fathers” bears on the “sons”—­the main topic of this study—­has obviously been a major topic of discussion in the Federal Republic. How­ ever that question is answered, it is clear that the change of generations inexo­ rably altered the terms and bases of the discussion. Analytically, it seems as if there are three major generational categories that bear on the construction of the past. First, the generation that lived through the Weimar Republic and the war stood in the most difficult relation to that past (though, as we saw in the epilogues, there were actually several generations of the Federal Republic’s founding fathers). The result of that implicated relation was often a process of repression and avoidance. As we saw, a new generational stance emerged in the Sixties, when many of those who had grown up after the war vehemently rejected virtually the entire moral world of their parents, and in the process both accepted the past as a reality in a way their parents were unwilling to do, and distanced themselves from it by denying that it was their reality. The third major generational argument seems to come with Kohl, who, as he told the whole world, was the first German chancellor of the postwar generation. The point here was not only about Kohl himself—­who generationally was a bit too old to have been a Sixty-­Eighter, but who was, rather, what Dirk Moses (2009) has called a “forty-­fiver”—­but about the younger Germans he was addressing. If a major leader like Kohl was himself not implicated, younger citizens just coming of age with his chancellorship bore yet another relation to the events. A significant portion of the West German population now were not just the children of those who had experienced National Socialism, but their grandchildren. The first generation was elderly and dying, and with it memory was turning into history. Indeed, as already noted, the intellectual historian Charles Maier (1988, 7) argued that the Historians’ Dispute of 1986 “may have been a last reveille for those whose lives may have turned out otherwise.” In the

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language of Maurice Halbwachs, by the mid-­1980s memory was in danger of dying, turning into mere history because the past as experienced or transmitted was no longer generative (a term not incidentally related to “generation”). To say that memory changed because the generation changed, however, can leave one with a sense of tautology. As the sociologist Karl Mannheim (1923) argued in his seminal theory of generations, generations are defined and marked by historical experiences in common; as a result, it is perhaps more descriptive than explanatory to say that memory changed as the generation changed, since historical experience is what constitutes “generations” in the first place. We have already seen as well that generations are complex constructs, covering as many differences as similarities, and that similar generational attitudes can be held and represented by figures of different ages. The concept of generations is thus useful as shorthand for shared experiences and differing existential relations to events.12 In the end, however, generation does not seem to provide very much explanatory purchase on transformations in discourse; changed discourse is itself constitutive of generations. Other Discourses and Trajectories In addition to these different ways of dividing up the same materials, there were also important matters around which interesting and significant discourses formed: discourses that bear on the one that took center stage in this study, but which are not directly about memory of the Nazi past. I will mention just two of these: the discourse surrounding the so-­called German question, and the relatively independent juridical trajectories. In the first place, the so-­called German question—­in these years, the question of Germany’s division and position in the world order—­had its own rhythms and contours. As we saw, such things as the exhaustion of  Western integrationist policy lines in the early Sixties—­brought into stark relief   by the Berlin Wall—­and, later, the debate over the Euromissiles were taken up in, and provided spurs to, various representations of the past. The construction of the past and the discussion of the German question in this way had some bearing on each other, exercising some degree of  “ideological constraint” (Converse 1964; Archer 1988; Martin 1999) over each other. That is, certain positions fit together because of discursive logics. The generalization of war guilt, for 12. There is by now an extensive sociological and other literature on generations. Particularly salient is the line of work begun with Schumann and Scott (1989). For an excellent review of the concept more generally, see Erll (2014).

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instance, fit well with the new Ostpolitik; or, the matter of diplomatic relations with Israel was clearly tied up with the German question, as it was only possible and only followed necessarily when Egypt violated the Hallstein doctrine. We also saw how matters of the juridical confrontation with the Third Reich, though forming part of the guilt genre, had some contours of their own that were somewhat distinct from the rhythms of official presentations. The creation of the Ludwigsberger Zentralstelle in 1958, for instance, was an indepen­ dent initiative of Land governments, purportedly in response to inadequacies in the collection and management of evidence. The debate over the statute of limitations, though dealt with in different ways at different times, was also partly a numerical matter, set by a constitutional provision written two decades earlier (thus partly, though obviously not completely, insulated from day-­to-­ day politics). And of course the occurrence of prominent trials was to a large degree beyond the control of  West German leaders (Pendas 2010; Wittmann 2005). Other Fields The third major category of interest that I have analytically bypassed, though I hope I have not completely ignored it, is impinging fields. These include academic historiography, literary production, popular culture, public opinion, the arts,  journalism, and criticism, among other areas. In the foregoing analysis I have provided only a bare-­bones and occasional account of these matters (for instance, with the analyses of the Walser-­Bubis debate and the Grass poem about Israel in the previous chapter). As I said in the introduction to this book, a complete analysis of the relations among these fields and official memory construction can only make sense after one has first looked at them relatively independently. Of course, the other fields always figure in the analysis of each as background. As I argued earlier, however, it is important not to mistake a change or an image in one field for the dominant position in another field. There are, of course, other factors relevant at this level of focus that fall somewhere between the categories of cross-­cutting dimension, other discourse, and impinging but separate field. One of these is the economy, which was obviously a major factor in the course of West German history, shaping legitimation profiles as well as other aspects of politics and society. We saw, for instance, how Chancellor Erhard was faced with recession in the early 1960s, as well as how oil-­price shocks affected the economy in the mid-­1970s. We can also only conjecture what images the past, let alone West German politics in general, would have looked like in the 1950s without the “economic miracle.”

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Personalities, too, are clearly major factors in politics, at least in the brief time-­frame I have examined here. Individual styles, including biographical circumstances, often seem to be the most decisive determinants of images of the past. But I think this is true only within the narrowest focus—­on one speech, or on only one point in time. The wider view I have tried to provide, I believe, demonstrates that while individuals do have some choice of what to say, there is nonetheless a broader patterning of discourse that transcends the individual and shapes the horizon from which and in which any individual speaks, and which also selects for certain kinds of individuals in leading positions. Personality as an indicator, therefore, is not entirely independent of discursive and social context. This apprehension of discursive contexts and the social dimension of personality is not incompatible with the idea of individual choice. It does not imply anything like the disappearance of the author (a well-­known trope of poststructuralist literary theory), but merely points to the supra-­individual frame limiting the range of choices any individual has in any given situation. This is the core of the sociological project. An extension of explanation in terms of biography is an explanation in terms of regime change. But this is not as illuminating as it might at first appear. First of all, a change of regime or speaker is more precipitous than the gradual change in background that leads up to it. Some discursive shifts begin long before a regime comes into power, and some do not develop until the regime has already been in power for a while. Also, it is difficult even to mark regime changes. For instance, was the election of Gustav Heinemann the major point of change to the social-­liberal era? Did that era not begin until Brandt’s first Regierungserklärung? Or could it be traced back to the beginning of the grand coalition? All three dates and the period encompassing them are starting points for the “moral nation.” It is difficult to choose one over the others. Some will indeed find my division between Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, which places Schmidt in the same profile as Helmut Kohl, problematic. My answer can only be in terms of the argument I made: the ways in which Schmidt’s rhetoric about the Nazi past seemed to me to share more with Kohl than with Brandt, despite the obviously greater affinities between Schmidt and Brandt and between Schmidt and Kohl in other regards. In the second place, if we can establish any role for images of the past in changing regimes—­and obviously I believe we can—­then any argument which seeks to demonstrate the simple causation of the dependent variable “image of the past” by the independent variable “regime change” ends up as a tautology. That is, of course, true only if we insist on discovering unilinear bi-­or

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multivariate causation to the exclusion of multidimensional and multidirectional patterns. And I think reality is more complex than can be captured by standard monocausal or even limited multicausal models in the social sciences. This is one reason why I am interested in describing discursive profiles—­ fraught as they are with multiple connections, materials, and contradictions—­ rather than with testing straightforward causal hypotheses. I am working backwards from the complex reality I have discovered to understand one dimension of political life—­the discursive structuring of  legitimation by official memory—­without seeking to assign a coefficient that would fix its probable share in causing the entire outcome. I have thus not sought covering laws with predictive power in terms of single or small groups of major variables. As I noted at the beginning of this book, this work supplements rather than supplants analyses in terms of other variables: I have sought to demonstrate the importance of one dimension—­the discursive—­among these other important shaping factors, and to have captured the fluidity of political discourse as a process in time. I believe I have demonstrated this in several important ways. First of all, the validity of the genre and of the epochal categories can be demonstrated with the following plausibility test. Do the categories provide good classificatory predictions? That is, could one take any given speech without any further information and—­using the described features of the genres and epochs—­place it correctly? While I have not undertaken such an experiment (it would be quite difficult to make sure subjects were using only genre and epoch aspects to make their decisions), I maintain that the categories would predict substantially better than randomly. I believe I have provided enough evidence for the reader to decide whether this claim seems plausible. Though there is significant variation within the genres and epochs, the distinctions I have described are, I believe, sufficiently clear and noticeable. The Jenninger case is but one demonstration of the power of the approach. The hypothesis that the described discursive contexts are important not just for images of the past, but for legitimation as a whole as well as for more concrete political outcomes, may thus be judged as an empirical as well as a speculative claim. It should be clear that explicit images of the past were significant parts of the legitimacy claims of the government in every period. Even when the past was less prominent, this was usually an explicit and intentional act. And images of the past were parts of virtually every major moment in West German political life; hardly a speech on any subject went by without some reference to National Socialism and its legacy.

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Secondly, among all the major attention-­getting moments in the political life of the Federal Republic, past-­oriented ones were some of the most prominent. Concomitantly, virtually every past-­oriented moment received significant notice. Very few other kinds of events so consistently attracted so much attention throughout the forty years. There should be no question, then, that constructions of the Nazi past were major features of   West German legitimation. The thesis I advanced in chapter 1 of this book—­that political discourse in the Federal Republic of Germany has been centrally shaped by the effort to avoid collective guilt, though in different ways at different times—­seems patently obvious in retrospect. The main point of this study, however, is that this analysis of the different roles of official memory in West Germany suggests a more supple understanding of collective memory in general. Instead of a concept that treats collective memory as the medium of social-­structural features like generations (Mann­ heim 1952; Schuman and Scott 1989), as the malleable product of political culture (Lowenthal 1985; Schwartz, Zerubavel, and Barnett 1986; Schwartz 1991), or as simply irrelevant (Katzenstein 1987), a more detailed empirical picture has emerged. Collective memory—­understood in its own terms as discourse, rather than only as product or indicator—­shapes both itself and other dimensions of social life as well as being shaped by them. And, as endogenous approaches predict, it unfolds within contexts that are partly of its own making. The more speculative part of my claim about official memory and symbolic legitimation work—­the self-­images and justifications that the state’s leaders continually provide—­is that they ultimately make any difference. After all, institutional form explains much. From one perspective, we want it not to be true that collective identity is anything but the expression of institutional forms and structural positions: these matters seem easier to control. If they do not explain everything, then we are faced with the seemingly intangible and irrepressible. Things like the retrenched ethnic conflict all over the world, for instance, would thus promise to be permanent features of human civilization, limiting the promise of universalism. By the same token, collective identities—­be they ethnic, national, religious, political, or otherwise—­do seem to be universal features of human society, though they vary in the degree to which they are points of contention (Isaacs 1989). The evidence seems to be in that identity and identity work matter, even in complex modern societies. The political scientist Murray Edelman (1965, 114), as I have already quoted, once wrote, “If politics is concerned with who gets what, or with the authoritative allocation of values, one may

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be pardoned for wondering why it need involve so much talk.” By extension, one may wonder why it involves so much talk about identity. Even when they are not talking about identity, leaders demonstrate its importance because it is embedded in their roles—­they construct the audience merely by addressing it. Whether discourse about identity—­with images of the past virtually permanent features in it—­ultimately explains more or less than institutional analyses does not matter as much as the fact that people believe it is important. W. I. Thomas’s famous maxim is still true today: situations defined as real are real in their consequences. And people—­especially leaders, and of all stripes—­clearly do define identity as real. So even when, in a particular regard, the discourse of identity is not how politics works, it is always what politics means. Insofar as this symbolic dimension is a powerful force in shaping our world with and within its institutional frameworks, the kind of analysis presented here—­one that highlights such issues in their own terms, rather than as residues of something else—­thus advances our understanding of these processes.

The Ethics of Memory and the Politics of Regret In 1955, members of the reconstituted Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt—­the so-­called Frankfurt School—­published a book reporting research they had conducted in 1950 and 1951 into the attitudes of the postwar German population about the Nazi past. The study adapted empirical methods the researchers had learned during their US exile, especially including “focus groups.” Skeptical of the individualizing, polarizing, and other problematic aspects of surveys, the focus group research they employed aimed at capturing the process of opinion formation in time and through discourse in group settings, rather than adding up preconstituted responses of isolated individuals. The Frankfurters thus led a large number of discussions with variously constituted respondent groups about aspects of the Nazi past. In particular, the researchers presented the groups with a letter (artificially contrived for the project) by a fictional occupation soldier, claiming that Germany would never be trustworthy because Germans were unwilling to accept responsibility for what had been done in their names, or indeed for what so many of them had supported. The 1955 book (Pollock 1955) included both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the discussion transcripts. In contrast to much of the opinion polling conducted after the Second World War, which showed rapidly developing commitments to and understandings of democracy, the Frankfurters’ analysis showed a strong residue

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of protofascist attitudes—­what they called a hidden “nonpublic opinion”—­ which, they worried, could be reanimated relatively quickly, or which at the very least laid a problematic foundation for West German democracy. This was the origin of the claims by the study’s intellectual leader, Theodor W. Adorno, that he was more worried about fascist tendencies within West German democracy than such tendencies opposed to it—­a statement that, as already mentioned, was taken as inspirational in the 1960s for the New Left’s rejection of what it saw as the compromises of the first generation (the “sins of the fathers”). In the 1955 publication, Adorno charged his respondents with a “collective narcissism” that manifested itself in the virtuosic deployment of defense mechanisms corresponding “to the extent of unconscious guilt one has to suppress.” The transcripts were rife with such defenses, alongside not insignificant residues of disturbing prejudice. This study is important in the present context not only because many of its claims jibe with the empirical materials I have presented in the foregoing pages, but for the kind of reaction it evoked. In particular, the work was critically reviewed in 1957 by the conservative social psychologist Peter Hofstätter. In his review, Hofstätter (1957; Olick and Perrin 2010) charged the research with being an exercise in muckraking, a matter of front-­loading the argument to its desired conclusion: already believing their respondents to be harboring residual fascist, antidemocratic, and anti-­Semitic attitudes, the Frankfurters employed a method that, according to Hofstätter, merely provoked the participants into this predetermined response (and in fact overinterpreted a minority of such responses as indicative of the hypothesized condition). In other words, the research discovered what it was looking for, not because it was there but because it had called it into existence. Hofstätter thus characterized the analysis as “nothing but an accusation, that is to say a summons for genuine psychic contrition.” These “accusations,” however, were for Hofstätter “misplaced or pointless,” and did nothing but express “the indignation of the sociological analyst.” For Hofstätter, “there is simply no individual feeling that could satisfactorily correspond to constantly considering the annihilation of a million people.” The Frankfurt researchers, with their implied condemnation of postwar German political culture, were simply asking too much! Were they? And if not, by what criteria are we to judge the call for memory or specify its appropriate form? To be sure, my own dissatisfaction with various images or interpretations of the past, similar to that of Adorno and his colleagues, has come through not infrequently in the foregoing pages of this book. Among the greatest successes of official memory in the Federal Republic of Germany—­not to minimize sixty years of solid democracy and protection of

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human rights!—­is the belief that Germany has done something unprecedented with the memory of its atrocious past: it has kept it alive and present in political discourse. One implication of my analysis has been that this widespread characterization of Germany’s political culture as having gotten memory right—­and as thus qualifying as a model for memory elsewhere—­is overstated. I have, in fact, frequently found the history of German memory to be less of an unequivocal success story than is often claimed. Or perhaps a more ironic formulation captures the tone better: I have found much of serious concern in the history of German memory—­many inadequacies, many disturbing elisions, and much persistent defensiveness—­but I nevertheless find the history of German memory to be quite impressive. Germany’s leaders have done an inadequate job that is nevertheless virtually unprecedented and quite admirable. In making this assessment—­and I have made it implicitly, line by line, in the empirical presentation—­it is important to recognize that there are strong arguments for and against the politics of regret and its neobiblical exhortation, “Zakhor! Remember!” As we saw many pages ago, Nietzsche had already posed the question in the nineteenth century, when he identified the dangers of both monumental history and memory born from the resentment of history’s losers. For Nietzsche, there was no greater enemy to noble morality, to true ac­ tion, than “It was.” And one need not be a Nietzschean believer in noble mo­ rality—­to say nothing of an apologist for atrocity, as it turned out Hofstätter was (Olick and Perrin 2010)—­to be concerned about the paralyzing effects for both nations and individuals of too many obligations from and toward the past. In the contemporary period, there have indeed arisen many strange pieties of memory, and many troubling results of memory discourse. For instance, “Never again!” has been intoned no more often than some condition or event (for instance, an oppressive regime, or mass slaughter) is pronounced not to qualify for this proscription; indeed, there is quite a semantic politics over what qualifies for the label “genocide,” and it turns out that very little does. There has also arisen a rush to claim the status of victim in contemporary politics, and many groups have recognized the benefits that go along with such a status, so much so that there often seems to be a sort of  “competition of   victims” (Chaumont 2001). Many commentators thus lament the apparent impulse of some people to classify every bad act an atrocity, every injury “traumatic,” every event “the worst”—­and to transform this status into a justified demand for the politics of regret. One such critic in the current climate is the journalist Michael  Jeismann. In a 2000 essay,   Jeismann reported on the January 2000 Stockholm Holocaust conference, attended by governmental leaders from all over the world, in which

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leaders of countries not directly implicated in the Holocaust declared, among other things, that they pledged themselves “to create a basis for a better future on the grounds of a bitter past,” while examining their own histories for residues of guilt. In his essay,  Jeismann declared the event to be a sad charade, bemoaning the fact that a transformation had occurred in which it was no longer adequate for the leader of a nation to assert his nation’s innocence of crimes: “Since the Nineties, there has been nothing more to be gained politically by referring to one’s own moral irreproachability.” Instead, one now has to join in the rush of announcing minor failings. We have moved,   Jeisman implied, from a competition of the victims to a perverse competition of the perpetrators over who can offer the best apology. (This theme was even captured in a satirical novel by Jay Raynor called The Apologist, about a restaurant critic who apologizes for a bad review, and is so good at apologizing that he becomes “apologizer-­in-­chief ” for the United Nations). Jeisman is but one example of those who criticize—­both in Germany and elsewhere—­what they see as a “culture of complaint” (Hughes 1993). To be sure, there is something to the charge that our rituals of repentance have sometimes wallowed indiscrimately in what Karl Jaspers referred to more than sixty years ago as “metaphysical guilt.” This concern is shared by the avatars of regret, who worry that acknowledgments of the past have lost their meaning because they have become empty and overly ritualized. And, as Jeismann tried to show about the Stockholm conference, ritualization can lead to relativization, though one senses that Jeismann is less concerned with relativization than with conspicuous displays of repentance, which do not strike him as a good idea. The same position could be found in the Walser-­Bubis debate, when Walser accused advocates of regret of using the Holocaust as a sort of “moral cudgel.” It is worth noting here that uncritical advocacy of the politics of regret was a central commitment of the German left in the 1960s, which, as we saw, asserted a kind of pride in its repentence: We went through the process of atoning for the past, and thus we can now show the rest of the world how it is done. This attitude, as already noted, has recently even earned its own sarcastic name, Sühnestolz (repentance pride), and justifiably attracts concern. Neoconservatives in the 1970s and 1980s thus accused the left of wanting Germany’s leaders to “go around in hair shirts in perpetuity”—­hardly an attractive image, especially for those nationalistically inclined. But many theorists, myself included, share the perception that our culture is irreversibly stamped by trauma, and thus are reassured by efforts like the one in Stockholm to underwrite a collective memory founded not, or not only, on the celebration of heroic deeds, but on the commemoration of atrocious

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misdeeds. Critics like Jeisman, in this respect like Hofstätter before him, do tend so often to undermine their own credibility. Jeisman, for instance, attributed such “rituals of repentance” to “representatives of  Jewish interests above all in the United States, who have been able to attain more and more attention and influence.” While Jeismann’s “more and more” clearly refers to the power of  Jewish interest groups—­a vulgar enough slur that should really be perceived as quite tiresome by this point—­his broader implication is that the politics of regret, which he and many others seem to see as a liability, is an inverted form of power politics, one without even the courage to admit it. Hofstätter, for his part, turned out not only to have served in very troubling ways as a Wehrmacht psychologist who supported Nazi racial doctrine, but in the years after his debate with Adorno came out vigorously against including the Holocaust in school curricula, as well as against prosecuting Nazi war criminals in the notorious 1963–­66 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, though one should be at least somewhat wary of such ad hominem critiques as this. For his part, Adorno followed up his debate with Hofstätter by articulating his support for the kind of awareness I have called the politics of regret. He argued in 1959, “The oft-­invoked working through of the past has to this day been unsuccessful and has degenerated into its own caricature, an empty and cold forgetting.” Nevertheless, in a rare optimistic statement, Adorno asserted that “civic education, when it is practiced earnestly and not as a burdensome duty, does more good than is generally believed.” The reason for this is that it seemed to him “that what is conscious could never prove so fateful as what remains unconscious, half-­conscious, or preconscious. Essentially, it is a matter of the way in which the past is made present; whether one remains at the level of reproach or whether one withstands the horror by having the strength to comprehend even the incomprehensible.” From this perspective, the politics of regret is indeed a salutary development, something new in history; and its continued influence in Germany and elsewhere is to be celebrated. The past, in this light, serves as a warning rather than as a model, and can limit the more egregious excesses of power, demanding an individual and collective response to inhumanity. Whatever the limitations, an awareness of   history, an imperative to atone for it, and a commandment that such things should happen “never again,”—­no matter how inconsistently and problematically applied—­is good and appropriate, and we can work toward, and hope for, the model to spread to the holdouts. Germany, perhaps more than any other state, has struggled with the costs and benefits of these dilemmas. How are we to evaluate the lessons of the German experience? Lessons for whom? What kind of  lessons? And in what sense

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are lessons really possible? The German case, it seems to me, is our best example of why the struggle over the legacy of the past, about the responsibility of the parents and the inheritance of the children, is so important. As a central dimension of identity, the perpetual examination and confrontation with the past—­not the uncritical acceptance of myths—­is an essential part of the human project. Thus, to the extent that the history of the Federal Republic of Germany has involved attempts to avoid, to silence, or to define once and for all the terms of this discussion, it is a cause for concern, even horror. When, over the years, I have read German historians or heard German politicians arguing that enough is enough with the horrors of the past—­and such arguments appear regularly enough, though not without changing—­I fear that the possibility for human learning from that past has dimmed. This is the worry one has when one looks at the continual eruptions of ethnic hatred around the world today, though such eruptions are perhaps not quite as far in the forefront as they were in the immediate wake of the Soviet collapse. It does seem to me a matter of choosing sides between increasing humanization and regressive parochialism. The knowledge of where uninhibited parochialism can lead, however, warns against the impulse to look away from the source of inhibition. To the extent, therefore, that the struggle with a difficult memory has remained or even increased as a central presence in the politics of Germany and of the world, there is still reason to hope that we will be able to shape the future in ways that are more humane. That the urge to forget has not yet overwhelmed the discourse in Germany and elsewhere is thus an achievement to be credited and nurtured.

Appendix: Leaders of the Federal R e p u b l i c o f G e r m a n y 1 9 4 9 – 2­ 0 1 0

Chancellors Konrad Adenauer (CDU): 1949–­63 Ludwig Erhard (CDU): 1963–­66 Kurt-­Georg Kiesinger (CDU): 1966–­69 Willy Brandt (SPD): 1969–­741 Helmut Schmidt (SPD): 1974–­82 Helmut Kohl (CDU): 1982–­98 Gerhard Schröder (SPD): 1998–­2005 Angela Merkel (CDU): 2005–­

Federal Presidents2 Theodor Heuss (FDP): 1949–­593 Heinrich Lübke (CDU): 1959–­69 Gustav Heinemann (SPD): 1969–­74 Walter Scheel (FDP): 1974–­79

1. Following Brandt’s resignation on May 7, 1974, Vice-­Chancellor (later Federal President) Karl Carstens served as acting chancellor. 2. Officially, federal presidents give up their party membership. 3. From September 7 to September 12, 1949, before Heuss’s election to the presidency, Karl Arnold (CDU), as president of the Bundesrat, was acting head of state.

472  Appendix Karl Carstens (CDU): 1979–­84 Richard von Weizsäcker (CDU): 1984–­94 Roman Herzog (CDU): 1994–­99 Johannes Rau (SPD): 1999–­2004 Horst Köhler (CDU): 2004–­10

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Index

Abrams, Philip, 438; Historical Sociolog  y, 428, 429–­30 Adenauer, Konrad: on anti-­Semitism, 127, 128, 140, 142, 159, 179–­81, 183, 207, 312, 406, 448; appointment of Hans Globke by, 134, 159; choice of   legitimacy over justice, 78; and the Cold War, 214, 373; on collective guilt, 103, 126, 128, 129, 130, 145, 431; and culture of remembrance, 413; on denazification, 90, 126, 127; early career of, 101, 123–­24; on education about Nazi past, 195; election of, 118–­19, 184–­85; on extremism, 169–­70, 207; generation of, 417; on German soldiers, 136–­37, 349, 444; on German suffering, 102, 126, 128–­29, 197; on German traditions, 173, 451; on Germany’s reliability, 180, 183; on individual rights, 125, 142; Kohl’s admiration for, 326; lack of specificity by, 176–­77; on large capital, 103–­4; meeting with Ben-­ Gurion, 231,  fig. 6; on nationalism, 162, 214–­15; photographs of, 63–­64, 75,  fig. 3; on Polish suffering, 223–­24; on prosecution of Nazis, 127, 171, 194, 195–­97; on rearmament, 248; relation to the past of, 27, 106, 124–­29, 173, 196, 278, 456, 457; and reparations to Israel, 139–­47, 180, 191–­92, 206, 311; on residual sympathy for National Socialism,

158–­60; resignation of, 213; rule-­of-­law and, 23; speeches and statements by, 101–­4, 124–­ 31, 136–­37, 139–­47, 158–­60, 166, 167, 169–­ 72, 173, 176–­77, 179–­81, 183, 191–­92, 195–­97, 223–­24, 260, 270, 278, 311–­12, 315, 340; and the Spiegel Affair, 213; steps onto the carpet, 64, 75,  fig. 3; visit to Bergen-­Belsen, 182–­83; and Western integration, 123–­24, 130, 170–­ 72, 207, 214 administration, 70, 71, 72, 450–­51, 452 Adorno, Theodor, 17, 181n2, 416, 418, 465, 468 Africa, 186, 266 “Air War and Literature” (Sebald), 418–­22 Alexander,  Jeffrey, 51n19 Allemann, Fritz René, Bonn Is Not Weimar, 114 Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, 139, 270, 311, 312 All-­German Peoples’ Party (GVP), 248 Allied Occupation Statute, 82 Amery, Jean, 418, 420 Andersch, Alfred, 418, 420 Anderson, Benedict, 15, 16, 17 anti-­Semitism: centrality of in National So­ cial­ism, 377, 381; Communism and, 157, 159, 207; denial of, 207; justification of,

498  Index anti-­Semitism (cont.) 379; measures against, 140, 142; Nuremberg Racial Laws, 134, 159, 377, 380; pop­ular sup­port for, 379, 382; reframing of, 153–­60; silence about, 9, 9n11; slippery slope of, 107; vandalism in Cologne, 178–­83, 186–­87, 406, 448; vandalism in Lübeck, 409. See also Holocaust; Jews; Kristallnacht Apologist, The (Raynor), 467 appeasement, 226 Arab nations: relations with Federal Republic of Germany, 143, 146, 147, 218, 219, 230, 231, 243, 269–­70, 306–­10, 390, 403; rela­ tions with Soviet Union, 231. See also Egypt; Saudi Arabia Arafat, Yassar, 307 Arendt, Hannah, 442n8 Assmann, Aleida, 33n44, 44n6, 60n29, 417n5 Assmann, Jan, 39–­40, 44, 44n6, 58, 60n29, 75, 417n5, 430n2 asylum seekers, 116n6, 406–­7 Augestein, Rudolf, 213 Auschwitz: Catholics at, 328; commemoration for liberation of, 400; Kohl’s visit to, fig. 14; Schmidt’s visit to, 304–­5. See also concentration camps Auschwitz Lie Law, 367 Austen, John, 52n21 Austria, 404 awareness. See knowledge backshadowing, 431–­32 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 58–­60, 58n28, 67, 68, 69, 417n5, 432, 434n3 Baring, Arnulf, 246 Bark, Dennis L., 217, 247 Barzel, Rainer, 275 Basic Law: approval of, 114–­18, 259,  fig. 2; civil service in, 133; commemorations of, 177, 244, 245, 274, 293, 294, 302–­4; criticisms of, 244, 245; education about, 318; right to opposition in, 442; state power in, 185, 186; statute of  limitations in, 199; uni­

fication in, 114, 124, 258; use of term constitution instead of, 372. See also founding of Federal Republic of Germany Bavarian Party, 118 Beer Hall Putsch, 3 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 121, 122n9, 162 Begin, Menachim, 306, 307, 309–­10, 337, 339 Bellah, Robert, 13, 17 Benda, Ernst, 245 Ben-­Gurion, David, 141, 193, 196, 231, 413, fig. 6 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 17 Bergen-­Belsen: Adenauer’s visit to, 182–­83; commemorations of liberation of, 233–­38; Heuss’s visit to, 148–­53,  fig. 4; Kohl’s visit to, 350–­52, 356–­57, 366, 378; Lübke’s visit to, 233–­38; Reagan’s visit to, 356–­57. See also concentration camps Bergsdorfer Zeitung, 319 Berlin: as cultural center, 346; Jewish community in, 347; as the nation’s capital, 399; 750th anniversary of, 335, 374; Twentieth of  July opposition movement, 346–­47 Berlin Blockade, 113, 113n1 Berliner, David, 37 Berlin Holocaust Memorial, 413–­14, 416–­17 Berlin Wall: erection of, 190–­91, 207, 214, 280, 459; fall of, 3–­4, 397, 398, 399 Bernstein, Michael, 431, 432 Bismarck, Otto von, 329, 336 Bitburg affair, 5n4, 6, 6n7, 31, 65–­67, 74, 135, 137, 347–­50, 375, 391, 392, 394, 409, 446, 449 Blankenhorn, Herbert, 127 Blücher, Franz, 444 Blumer, Herbert, 21n26 Böll, Heinrich, 282, 325 Bomber Harris monument, 404 Bonn, as the nation’s capital, 302, 335, 374, 399 Bonnell, Victoria, 50n17 Bonn Is Not Weimar (Allemann), 114 Boskoff, Alvin, 428

Index  499 Bourdieu, Pierre, 55 Brandt, Willy: campaign run against Ade­ nauer, 184; “dare more democracy” rheto­ ric, 252, 282; on division of Germany, 246, 254, 255, 398; election of, 252, 275–­76, 280; on extremism, 253; on the final line, 257, 264; generation of, 417; on German suffer­ ing, 449; on German traditions, 450, 451; on the Jews, 352; kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, 267–­68, 273, 283, 305, 310, fig. 7,  fig. 8; Kohl’s criticism of, 326; meeting with Arafat, 307; on national identity, 263–­64, 277; on Nazi past, 27; People and Politics, 247, 248; photographs of, 64–­ 65, 75, 267,  fig. 7; and policy towards the East, 256–­58, 266–­67, 268, 300; profile of, 461; relations with Israel, 231, 268–­74, 276; resignation of, 278–­79; on responsibility for the war, 449; speeches and statements by, 246, 249, 252–­54, 255, 257, 258, 263–­64, 265–­74, 276–­78, 282, 289, 295, 300, 445; support from intellectuals, 282, 325, 423; visit to Poland, 266–­68, 341; war record of, 184, 240, 267; winner of  Nobel Peace Prize, 274, 389; on the younger generation, 253–­54 Brickner, Richard, 83; Is Germany Incurable?, 83 Broszat-­Friedländer exchange, 416 brotherhood, 265–­66. See also Weeks of Brotherhood Buber, Martin, 313–­14 Bubis, Ignatz, 6n8, 414 Bucher, Ewald, 202 Bulletin of the Press and Information Agency, 302 Bundesrat, 117 Bundestag, 117, 118–­19 caesura, 24, 24n30, 203. See also final line; zero hour Cahmann, Werner J., 428 Campbell, Karlyn, 68, 69

capital city: Berlin as the, 399; Bonn as the, 302, 335, 374, 399; debates over during unification, 399 capitalism: genocide and, 283; links with fascism, 282, 283, 401; links with National Socialism, 282 carpet politics, 64, 75 Carstens, Karl, 223, 312, 313, 317–­20, 343, 373 Carter,  Jimmy, 316 Casablanca Conference, 32, 80 catastrophe trope, 97–­99, 108, 117, 128, 174, 205–­6, 243, 251, 315, 328, 329 Catholic Center Party, 101 Catholic Church, 328, 457–­58. See also churches Catholic martyrdom, 328 CDU. See Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Celan, Paul, “Todesfuge,” 5 Center Party, 114n2 Central Council of  Jews in Germany, 4, 311 centralism, 261 centralization, 120, 283 chancellors, role of, 117, 121 change of tendency, 279, 323, 326, 335, 372, 391 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 4n3; and commemoration of Kristallnacht, 4; decline of, 214, 389; delegates in Parliamentary Council, 114n2; election posters, fig. 5 in the grand coalition, 239–­41; Kohl on, 326–­27; neoconservatism in, 325; in the 1949 elections, 118, 167, 436; in the 1953 elections, 167; in the 1957 elections, 175, 184; in the 1961 elections, 191; in the 1968 elections, 247, 247n2; in the 1969 elections, 251; in the 1972 elections, 276; in the 1976 elections, 300; in the 1979 elections, 317; in the 1980 elections, 316, 323, 325; in the 1982 elections, 337; in the 1983 elections, 331; in the 1987 elections, 371; and relations to the past, 455–­57; and reparations, 143, 147; significance of Christian in name

500  Index Christian Democratic Union (CDU) (cont.) of, 103, 139; and statute of limitations, 201, 202; vote of no confidence in Brandt, 275 Christianity: Catholic Church, 457–­58; Chris­ tian values as causes of  National So­cial­ism, 283; Protestantism, 457, 458; relationship with the Jews, 187–­88, 189, 264–­65. See also churches Christian Social Union (CSU), 4n3; decline of, 389; delegates in the Parliamentary Coun­cil, 114n2; in the grand coalition, 239–­41; Kohl on, 326–­27; neoconservatism in, 325; in the 1949 elections, 118, 167; in the 1953 elections, 167; in the 1961 elections, 191; in the 1968 elections, 247; in the 1969 elections, 251; in the 1972 elections, 276; in the 1976 elections, 300; in the 1979 elections, 317; in the 1980 elections, 316, 323; in the 1982 elections, 337; in the 1983 elec­ tions, 331; in the 1987 elections, 371; and Poland’s borders, 258; vote of no confidence in Brandt, 275 churches: attitude to collective guilt, 93–­97; Catholic convent at Auschwitz, 328; criticisms of, 270; praise for, 332; role of during occupation of Germany, 93–­97; role of during Third Reich, 188, 189, 270, 457. See also Christianity Churchill, Winston, 32, 39, 80, 81 Cioc, Mark, 248n3 City, Trash, and Death (Fassbinder), 375, 375n1 civil service, restoration of, 132–­34, 200, 204, 290n1 civil society, 203 Club of Rome Report, 289 Cold War, 92, 113, 147, 167, 175, 191, 205, 223. See also Soviet Union collective crimes, 314 collective guilt: attitude of churches to, 93–­ 97; collective political guilt, 198; vs. col­ lective responsibility, 320; vs. collective shame, 107, 107n3, 155; compared to Nazi

ideology, 154, 222; denazification and, 88–­ 90, 92–­93; vs. individual guilt, 30, 88, 221–­ 22, 285, 297, 361, 414, 415; media dis­cus­sions of during occupation, 90–­93; metaphysical, 285, 467; Nuremberg Tribunal and, 87–­88; politics of, 32–­34; rejection of, 78, 100, 103, 107, 126, 128, 129, 130, 141, 145, 147–­48, 149, 151, 153, 154–­55, 225, 228, 261, 297, 358, 361, 447–­49, 463; reparations as an acknowledgment of, 147; repression of, 419; varieties of guilt, 29–­32; of younger generation, 315, 338–­39, 361, 415 collective identity: discourse about, 463–­64; of East and West Germans, 243, 254–­55; historical consciousness and, 39; storytelling and, 11–­14. See also national identity collective imagining, 12, 12n15 collective memory: analysis of, 44–­46; avoidance of, 131; vs. collective remembering, 439; comparative analyses of, 7n9; di­a­ logue and, 58–­74; of Federal Republic, 285; field theory and, 54–­58; founding of Federal Republic in, 163; genres and, 67–­ 74; meanings of, 21, 40–­44, 40n3; media for, 55n25; official memory and, 463; plu­ rality of, 44–­45; presentist model of, 45; as a process, 45–­46; profiles of, 61–­67; sociology of, 34, 35, 36–­76; traditionalist model of, 45; varieties of, 55–­56 collective psychology, 39 collective remembering, 439 collective representations, 42, 43 collective responsibility: acknowledgement of, 107, 297, 412, 413; among younger gen­ eration, 196, 315–­16; vs. collective guilt, 320. See also responsibility collective shame, 107, 107n3, 155 Cologne, anti-­Semitic vandalism in, 178–­83, 186–­87 commemorations: of  beginning of  Second World War, 161, 163, 219, 220, 222–­29, 250–­ 51, 319–­20, 383–­88; of D-­Day, 347–­48, 353; of end of Second World War, 4–­5, 67, 107,

Index  501 161, 163, 174–­75, 219, 220, 259–­64, 295–­300, 347, 359–­67, 409; fear of state pomp dur­ ing, 164, 302–­3; of  First World War, 348; of founding of  Federal Republic, 163–­67, 175–­ 77, 244, 245–­46, 293–­95, 302–­4; German traditions and, 452; guilt and, 452; history of, 37; of Kristallnacht, 3–­6, 74, 219, 310–­16, 331–­32, 374–­83, 399–­400, 414, 453; legitimacy of, 163–­67; of  liberation of Auschwitz, 400; of  liberation of  Bergen-­Belsen, 233–­ 38; national unity and, 42; of Nazis’ seizure of power, 161, 163, 219–­22, 329–­30; path-­ dependency of, 60; People’s Memorial Day, 439–­40, 443–­46, 447; political economy of, 38; professionalization of, 57; responsibi­l­ ity before history trope, 366; role of prece­ dence in, 452; 750th anniversary of  Berlin, 335; of  Twentieth of  July assassination plot, 346–­47, 439–­43, 446; of  V-­E Day, 348 communicative memory, 44n6, 60n29, 417n5 Communism: anti-­Semitism and, 157, 159, 207; dealing with Communist past during unification, 400–­401; links with National Socialism, 282 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 4n3, 114n2, 118, 158, 207 concentration camps: commemorations of liberation of, 233–­38, 400; films about, 87; forced tours of, 32, 87; Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, 192, 199, 219, 281, 448, 468; knowledge of, 151, 196, 234; photographs of, 87; visits from politicians, 148–­53, 182–­83, 273–­74, 304–­5, 348–­49, 350–­52, 356–­57, 378. See also Auschwitz; Bergen-­Belsen; Holocaust condensation symbols, 62 Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, 141 constitutive narratives, 13, 16, 17 context: meaning and, 61, 62, 67; official memory and, 68; speeches and, 69 continuities, 209, 245–­46, 249, 253, 263–­64, 420, 443, 448, 450

Council of Europe’s Convention on the Rights of Man, 142 Course of German History, The (Taylor), 85 Craig, Gordon, 442n8; The Germans, 115n4 Crusade in Europe (Eisenhower), 135 CSU. See Christian Social Union (CSU) cultural memory, 44n6, 60n29, 417, 417n5 culture of complaint, 467 culture of remembrance, 413 currency reform, 113 Czechoslovakia, 242–­43, 254, 278 Dachau, 349 Data Protection Law, 301 Davis, Fred, 435n4 D-­Day commemorations, 347–­48, 353 Death of a Critic (Walser), 414–­15 decentralization, 120 deindustrialization of Germany, 81, 97, 129 democracy: “dare more democracy” call, 252–­53, 282; discredited by Hitler’s success, 378; five-­percent rule, 116; in German society, 120–­21; German traditions of, 294; grand coalition as threat to, 239, 240–­41; Jews and, 315; militant democracy, 115, 115n5, 127, 158, 165, 207, 291, 324, 367; pro­portional representation, 116; during Wei­mar Republic, 314, 378 denazification, 24, 29–­30, 33, 63, 78, 82, 88–­ 90, 92–­93, 94, 96, 126, 127, 157, 204, 222, 254, 448 Deputy, The (Hochhuth), 270 Deutschkron, Inge, 197, 338, 339 Deutschland im Westen, Das (Grosser), 173n10 dialectics, 430n1 dialogism, 79, 433. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail dialogue, 58–­74, 75–­76. See also speeches Diary of Anne Frank, The, 281 difficult fatherlands, 250, 263, 319 discontinuities, 209 discourse, 462–­64

502  Index division of Germany, 254, 256, 359–­60, 386, 397–­98. See also East Germany divisiveness, 121 Dönhoff, Marion, 289 Dornbusch, S. M., 46n10 Douglas, Mary, 12 Dregger, Alfred, 349–­50, 409, 446, 450 Dresden, bombing of, 25, 236, 404, 422 dualism, 430n1 Durkheim, Émile, 42, 51 East, policy towards the. See policy towards the East East Germany: collective identity with West Germans, 243, 254–­55; Hallstein Doctrine, 201, 218–­19, 230, 231; rebellion of  June 17, 1953, 335, 335n4, 441; recognition of, 255, 263, 274; relations with Egypt, 231; relations with Federal Republic of Germany, 201, 334–­35; responsibility for Nazi past, 401; terms for, 125n14, 255. See also Berlin Wall; division of Germany; unification Eban, Abba, 271 Eberan, Barbro, 79 economy: deindustrialization, 81, 87, 129; economic miracle, 163, 167, 207, 213, 460; effect on legitimation profiles, 460; taxation, 239, 290–­91; unemployment, 289, 290, 410 Edelman, Murray, 463–­64 education, 182, 188, 195, 318, 468 Egypt, 218, 230, 231, 307, 460 Ehlers, Hermann, 163–­65, 175 Ehre, Ida, 5,  fig. 13 Eichmann, Adolf, 192, 193–­99, 231, 448, 451, 456 Einstein, Albert, 336 Eisenhower, Dwight, 33, 90, 91, 135, 136, 168, 205, 349; Crusade in Europe, 135 Elam, Yigal, 40n3 elbow power, 119, 119n7 Elias, Norbert, 429, 434n3, 438–­39 emergency powers legislation, 245

Enabling Act, 119n7, 123, 252, 261 endogenous explanation, 68n36, 454 Engelhard, Hans, 331–­32 equalization of burdens, 290, 290n1 Erhard, Ludwig: ambitions of, 184; as ar­chi­ tect of social market economy, 155n6, 214; distancing from the past by, 215, 216, 241; early career of, 213–­14; and econom­ic issues, 460; election of, 213–­14; on expel­ lees, 373; on German identity, 215; on Ger­man traditions, 451; on guilt, 216, 223, 227; on Hallstein Doctrine, 218–­19; on Kristallnacht, 312; on nationalism, 214–­15; on relations with Israel, 232; resignation of, 239; rhetorical skill of, 214; shift to moral nation, 434; speeches and statements by, 214–­19, 223, 226–­27, 232, 278, 312; on statute of  limitations, 218; on structured society, 217 Erll, Astrid, 19n22 Eschenburg, Theodor, 87 Euromissiles. See nuclear weapons Europa, Europa, 405 European civil war argument, 24, 162, 204, 256, 283, 362, 385, 449 European Defense Community, 168, 169, 171, 173 European integration, 167–­69, 171–­72 Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), 93–­94 Evening Standard, 85 exculpation, 73; grammar of, 128, 143, 182, 216; strategies of, 224–­26, 227. See also German suffering exiles, 91 expiation, 72–­73 expulsions of Germans: expellee organizations, 132, 278, 363–­64, 373; homeland is­ sues and, 131–­32, 258; integration of ex­ pellees, 132, 161–­62, 327, 364; law against denial of, 120n8; Ministry for Expellees, 132, 278; praise for expellees, 333–­34; re­ vanch­ism, 333–­34, 363, 364–­65, 367, 373;

Index  503 statistics for, 93; Stuttgart Charter of the Association of Expellees, 333–­34; suffering of expellees, 93, 96–­97, 120, 122, 129, 131–­ 32, 242–­43, 251, 256, 333, 359, 363 extremism, 160, 169–­70, 206, 207, 208, 253, 262 Farewell to European History (Weber), 150 fascism theory, 24, 281–­83, 284, 360, 401 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, City, Trash, and Death, 375, 375n1 Faulkner, William, 109 FDP. See Free Democratic Party (FDP) federalism, 125, 332 Federal Republic of Germany: definitions of, 7n9; European integration of, 167–­69, 171–­72, 204, 205, 264, 334; flag of, 165–­66; history of, 318, 328, 365; importance of geographic location of, 320, 334; as legitimate successor to German Reich, 138–­39; as a model, 20, 20n23; national anthem of, 165; policy towards the East, 240, 241–­44, 253, 254, 255, 256–­58, 266–­67, 268, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 284, 300, 334, 389; relations with Arab nations, 143, 146, 147, 218, 219, 230, 231, 243, 269–­70, 306–­10, 390, 403; relations with Austria, 404; relations with Czechoslovakia, 242–­43, 254, 278; re­ lations with East Germany, 201, 334–­35; relations with Egypt, 218, 230, 231, 307; relations with France, 130, 161–­63, 168n4, 215, 243, 340, 348, 385–­86; relations with Israel, 146, 147, 172, 192, 218, 230–­33, 243– ­44, 268–­73, 276, 285, 305–­10, 334, 337–­42, 390, 403, 456, 460; relations with Poland, 201, 202, 242, 257–­58, 266–­68, 274, 284, 340–­41, 383; relations with Romania, 407n1; relations with Saudi Arabia, 307, 308–­9, 310, 337; relations with Soviet Union, 274, 284, 371; relations with United States, 334, 348. See also founding of Federal Republic of Germany; reputation of Germany Federal Service Medals, 302

Fest, Joachim, 368 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 408 field theory, 54–­58 Figaro, Le, 319, 320 films about concentration camps, 87 final line, 24n30, 144, 257, 264, 331, 362. See also caesura; zero hour First World War, 10n13, 17, 83, 228, 327, 348. See also Treaty of Versailles Fischer, Fritz, 10n13, 228–­29, 229n2, 327, 416 Fischer, Joshka, 411n3 five-­percent rule, 116 flags, 165–­66, 303 foreign aid, 92 foreign debt, 140, 143 foreshadowing, 431–­32 Foucault, Michel, 49n15, 56 founding of Federal Republic of Germany: Adenauer’s carpet politics at, 63–­64,  fig. 3; commemorations of, 163–­67, 175–­77, 244, 245–­46, 293–­95; differences between new and past governments, 124–­26; first Bundestag, 118–­19; principal founders of, 118–­ 31; principles of, 113–­18; public opinion on, 118. See also Basic Law framing, 62n31 France: ceremony at First World War cem­ etery, 348, fig. 10; New Right in, 405; re­la­ tions with Federal Republic of Germany, 130, 161–­63, 168n4, 215, 243, 340, 348, 385–­ 86; role in founding of Federal Republic, 113–­14 François-­Poncet, André, 64 Fränkel, Heinrich, Vansittart’s Gift for Goebbels, 85 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, 192, 199, 219, 281, 448, 468 Frankfurt Documents, 114 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 368, 415 Frankfurt School, 84, 464–­65 Free Democratic Party (FDP), 4n3; coalition with Social Democratic Party, 252, 275; delegates in Parliamentary Council, 114n2;

504  Index Free Democratic Party (FDP) (cont.) dissent with Brandt, 278; Kohl on, 326–­27; in the 1949 elections, 118; in the 1957 elec­ tions, 175, 184; in the 1961 elections, 191; in the 1968 elections, 247; in the 1969 elections, 251, 252; in the 1972 elections, 276; in the 1980 elections, 316, 323, 325; in the 1983 elections, 331; in the 1987 elections, 371; relation to the past of, 456 freedom in peace, 327, 328 Frei, Norbert, 29n38 Friedländer, Saul, 17 Friedländer-­Broszat debate, 369 Friedrich, Jörg, 421 Friedrich the Great, reburial of, 403 Frings, Josef, 126 Fritzsche, Hans, 88 functionalists, 53n23 Galinksi, Heinz, 4,  fig. 14 Garfinkel, Harold, 427 Gaus, Günter, 339 Gebirtig, Mordechai, Kracow Ghetto Notebook, 5 Gedi, Noa, 40n3 Geertz, Clifford, 47, 52n22, 56, 67 Geibel, Emanuel, 152 Geisel, Eike, 406 generations, 417–­18, 458–­59. See also younger generation genocide, use of the term, 351. See also Holocaust genres, 59, 60, 67–­74, 75, 351, 433–­34, 439–­ 40, 446–­53. See also administration; German suffering; German traditions; guilt Genscher, Hans-­Dietrich, 300, 307, 371 German Association for War Graves Conservation, 443 German Autumn, 291 German Democratic Party (DDP), 123 German Democratic Republic. See East Germany German Historical Museum, 335

German history: admiration for German Reich, 296; continuities in, 443; education about, 182, 188, 195, 318; effect on national identity, 369; German-­Jewish history, 341–­42; good and bad in, 176, 215, 318, 328–­29, 331, 373, 388, 393, 445–­46, 449; Historians’ Dis­ pute, 18n20, 25n34, 367–­70, 375, 377, 392, 414, 416, 458; historical consciousness, 39, 40, 176, 293, 303–­4, 318, 328–­29, 331, 335–­ 37, 445; history of everyday life, 373; Nazi past as small part of, 73, 351–­52, 392, 449; as part of European history, 336; praise for German cultural inheritance, 336–­37, 346; role of Holocaust in, 8–­11. See also German traditions; Weimar Republic German identity. See national identity German landscape, 318–­19 German Party (DP), 4n3, 114n2, 118 German problem, 10, 79, 83–­85, 88, 182, 227, 229, 250, 459–­60. See also reputation of Germany Germans, The (Craig), 115n4 German soldiers: innocence of, 135–­37, 236– ­37, 310, 349–­50; Memorial Day for, 443–­46, 447; praise for Bundeswehr, 301, 324; reputation of, 319–­20; role of during National Socialism, 204, 236–­37, 319–­20; suffering of, 93, 330, 358, 360. See also Waffen-­SS German suffering: alleviation of, 140, 241, 333; as atonement for past misdeeds, 126, 132, 235–­36, 256; bombing of Dresden, 25, 236, 404, 422; broad references to, 262; Catholic martyrdom, 328; as cause of  National Socialism, 190; changes in themes towards, 449–­50; of common soldiers, 93, 330, 358, 360; comparisons with Jewish experience, 91–­92, 94–­97, 108, 151–­52, 183, 197, 237–­38, 249, 349, 422, 449; continuity of, 251; during denazification, 126; of expellees, 93, 96–­97, 120, 122, 129, 131–­32, 242–­43, 251, 256, 333, 359, 363; First World War and, 83; foreign aid to relieve, 92; genre of, 71, 73; Germans as victims of National

Index  505 Socialism, 98–­99, 305; German traditions and, 131–­37; historical treatment of, 384; Memorial Day, 443–­46; as negation of Ger­man responsibility, 242; Neue Wache, 403–­4; during occupation of Germany, 92, 93–­97, 102; priority of, 166, 351; as punishment, 121; repressed memory of, 419–­22; rich descriptions of, 128–­29; vs. Polish suffering, 385 German traditions: changes in, 450; commemorations and, 71, 73–­74, 215, 452; con­ nection to Federal Republic, 294; of de­ mocracy, 294; German identity and, 209; international attitudes to, 403; neoconser­ va­tism and, 452; new traditions, 73, 298; normalization of, 302–­4; place of dictatorship in, 330; reburial of Friedrich the Great, 403; relegitimation of, 73, 446–­47; restoration of, 244; role of National Socialism in, 173–­74; shared Western values of, 324; ubi­q­ uity of discussion about, 452; victimhood and, 73–­74, 131–­37. See also German history German Treaty, 173 Gerstenmeier, Eugen: on causes of Second World War, 224–­26; on the Eichmann trial, 194–­95; on extremism, 160; rejection of col­lective guilt by, 147–­48, 225–­26; relation to the past of, 456, 457; on rise of National Socialism, 221–­22, 227–­29; speeches and statements by, 194–­95, 221–­22, 223, 224–­26, 227–­29; trip to Israel, 231 Giordano, Ralph, 333 globalization of the Holocaust, 269 Globke, Hans, 134, 159, 457 Goebbels, Joseph, 82, 220, 445 Goering, Hermann, 421 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 10, 121, 122n9, 151, 162, 445 Goffman, Erving, 7n10 Goldhagen, Daniel, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 9n11, 415–­16 Goldman, Lucien, 39 Goldmann, Nahum, 141, 143

Gollancz, Victor, 93 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 371 grammar of exculpation, 128, 143, 182, 216 grand coalition, 239–­41 Grass, Günter, 24n32, 282, 325, 421, 422–­23; The Tin Drum, 422–­23; “What Must Be Said,” 423–­24 Great Britain: arrest of Nazi agitators, 158–­59; Bomber Harris monument, 404; postwar plans for Germany, 80, 81; role in founding of Federal Republic, 113–­14; views on the German problem, 84–­85 great time, 60, 60n29 Green Party, 4, 4n3, 316, 332, 353, 371, 456 Greiffenhagen, Martin, 401 Greiffenhagen, Sylvia, 401 Greiner, Bernd, 82 Gress, David R., 217, 247 Grillparzer, Franz, 154 Grosser, Alfred, 240, 366; Das Deutschland im Westen, 173n10 Gruppe 47, 420 Guillaume, Günter, 279 guilt: about Kristallnacht, 312, 313; accep­ tance of, 258; autonomy of genre, 451–­52; burden of, 216, 308–­9; changes in guilt genre, 447–­49; commemorations and, 71, 452; and expiation, 71, 72–­73; German suffering as alleviation of, 235–­36; identity and, 32; policy towards the East and, 452; of younger generation, 299, 315. See also collective guilt; individual guilt; second-­ guilt argument Gulf War, 401–­2, 407 Gypsies, 283, 360, 385, 407n1 gyroscope, memory as a, 438 Habe, Hans, 91, 92 Habermas, Jürgen, 46n10, 368–­69, 416 Haffner, Sebastian, 442n8 Hague agreements, 143 Halbwachs, Maurice, 41–­44, 417n5, 430n2, 459

506  Index Hallstein, Walter, 233 Hallstein Doctrine, 201, 218–­19, 230, 231, 460 Hambach, 354 Hamm-­Brücher, Hildegard, 325 handicapped people, 283 Harris, Arthur, 404 Hase, Karl-­Günther von, 232–­33 Havel, Vaclav, 242–­43 Hegel, G. W. F., 408 Heidegger, Martin, 209, 456 Heidenheimer, Arnold, 123 Heimat, 373. See also homeland issues Heimat (tv series), 373 Heimattag, 132 Heinemann, Gustav: on brotherhood, 264–­65; career of, 248; on centrality of  Judeocide to Hitler, 250; election of, 247, 248, 252; on end of the war as liberation, 249, 261–­62, 295; generation of, 418; on German suffering, 251, 262; Kohl’s criticism of, 326; legacy of, 291–­92, 317; moralism of, 168, 247–­50, 251; on policy towards the East, 223; profile of, 461; on remilitarization, 168, 170, 170n6; speeches and statements by, 223, 248–­51, 261–­62, 264–­65, 293–­94, 295 Heitmann, Stefan, 400, 408, 408n2 Herf, Jeffrey, 123 heritage, 40 Herzog, Roman, 409 Hess, Rudolf, 171n7 Heuss, Theodor: on anti-­Semitism, 107, 153–­ 58; on Basic Law, 114; on collective guilt, 154–­55; on commemoration of founding of Federal Republic, 163; on democracy, 120–­21; early career of, 105, 123; elbow power of, 119, 119n7; election to president, 118, 119, 122–­23; on end of the war as de­ feat and liberation, 107, 174, 249, 259, 260, 295; generation of, 417; on German soldiers, 444; on German suffering, 120, 121, 122, 151; on German traditions, 167, 173–­74; on heroization, 443; lack of specificity by, 121–­ 22; legacy of, 317; on memory, 105–­7, 121;

on opposition, 441; proposal of Germany’s new name, 115; relation to the past of, 456, 457; rhetorical skill of, 186; on role of the state, 215; speeches and statements by, 105–­7, 119–­22, 148–­53, 153–­58, 167, 173–­75, 233, 238, 259, 260, 295,  fig. 4; speech writing by, 57; on tolerance, 158, 160; visit to Bergen-­Belsen, 148–­53,   fig. 4 Hillgruber, Andreas, Two Kinds of Destruction, 368 Himmler, Heinrich, 6n6, 381, 445 Hindenburg, Paul von, 329 Historians’ Dispute, 18n20, 25n34, 367–­70, 375, 377, 392, 414, 416, 458 historical consciousness, 39, 40, 176, 293, 303–­4, 318, 328–­29, 331, 335–­37, 445 historical narratives, 13–­16, 13n17, 17–­18. See also storytelling Historical Sociology (Abrams), 428, 429–­30 historiography, 430, 433 history: of commemorations, 37; memory and, 36–­38, 417n5, 426, 427; of mentalities, 39, 40; politics of, 39; vs. sociology, 427–­30, 454. See also German history Hitler, Adolf: attempted assassination of, 124, 213, 214, 309–­10, 346–­47, 439–­43, 442n8, 446; centrality of  Judeocide for, 250; Hitler-­Stalin pact, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 250, 362, 383, 386, 449; loss of, 419, 421; myths about, 204; as part of German history, 445; responsibility for the war of, 226, 296–­97, 362–­63, 386; secret rocket program of, 404; seizure of power by, 161, 163, 219–­ 22, 245, 252, 260–­61, 296, 329–­30; as sole embodiment of National Socialism, 227, 358, 453; successes of, 377–­79, 453; time of Hitler, 121. See also National Socialism Hitler-­Germany, 223 Hitler-­Stalin pact, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 250, 362, 383, 386, 449 Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen), 9n11, 415–­16 Hobsbawm, Eric, 16

Index  507 Hochhuth, Rolf, 423; The Deputy, 270 Hofstätter, Peter, 465, 466, 468 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 106, 167 Holocaust: centrality of, 190, 250, 282–­83, 351; comparisons to, 10–­11, 18n21; connection to the war in the East, 379–­80; denial of, 367; direct references to, 145–­46, 249; education about, 182, 468; in fascism theory, 282–­83; globalization of the, 269; and the Historians’ Dispute, 367–­70; knowl­edge of, 151, 196, 234, 360–­61, 380–­81; law against denial of, 120n8; links to Second World War, 271, 283–­84; meaning of the term, 8; memory of, 362; relativism approach to, 24–­25; re­ sponsibility for, 352, 360–­61; role of in German history, 8–­11; role of  Wehrmacht in, 136; silence about, 9, 9n11, 127; specificity of, 186, 283, 350, 352, 392; storytelling and, 17–­18; uniqueness of, 11, 150, 155, 352, 360, 368, 369; vague references to, 128, 208. See also anti-­Semitism; concentration camps; Jews; Kristallnacht Holocaust (tv mini-­series), 74, 375, 416 Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, 405 Homeland Day, 132 homeland issues, 131–­32, 258 homosexuals, 283, 360 Hoover, Herbert, 104 Hull, Cordell, 81, 82 human rights, 117, 119, 142, 204, 208 Hussein, Saddam, 402 identity: guilt and, 32; meanings and, 48; na­ tionalism and, 162–­63; past, 38; regional, 120, 372–­73; symbols and, 48. See also national identity immigration, 406–­7 Inability to Mourn, The (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich), 418–­21 indemnities, 145. See also reparations individual guilt vs. col­lective guilt, 30, 221–­ 22, 285, 297, 361, 414, 415; as non-­political, 297

individual responsibility, 149, 248 individual rights, 117, 125, 142 inner security, 291, 324 Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, 84, 464–­65 intentionalists, 53n23 international integration, 125 Investigation, The (Weiss), 199n8 Is Germany Incurable? (Brickner), 83 Israel: Brandt’s visit to, 231, 270–­74; Eichmann trial, 192, 193–­99; German supply of arms to, 231, 231n4; Gerstenmeier’s visit to, 231; Günter Grass and, 423–­24; invasion of Leb­ anon, 337; Kohl’s trip to, 337–­42, 375, 391, 393; Merkel’s visit to, 413; Palestinian cause, 269–­70, 281, 307, 309, 316, 364; Rau’s visit to, 412; relations with Federal Republic of Germany, 146, 147, 172, 192, 218, 230–­33, 243–­44, 268–­73, 276, 285, 305–­10, 334, 337–­ 42, 390, 403, 456, 460; reparations to, 22, 63, 138–­48, 180, 187, 191–­92, 206, 232, 271, 290, 311, 401, 431, 447; Six Day War, 268, 271, 281; Yom Kippur War, 305–­6, 403 Italy, 405 Jackson, Robert, 87 Jäger, Wolfgang, 291–­92 Jahn, Gerhard, 274 Jamieson, Kathleen, 68, 69 Jarausch, Konrad, 398 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 223, 383 Jaspers, Karl, 29, 29n39, 96, 100, 166, 198, 269, 285, 325, 418, 467 Jeismann, Michael, 466–­68 Jenninger, Philipp: speech at 1985 Kristallnacht commemoration, 375–­76; speech at 1988 Kristallnacht commemoration, 4–­6, 6n6, 74, 153, 188, 225, 315, 340, 374–­75, 377–­81, 394, 453, 462,  fig. 13 Jerusalem Post, 307 Jews: collective identity of, 152; comparisons of German suffering with Jewish experience, 91–­92, 94–­97, 108, 183, 197, 237–­38,

508  Index Jews (cont.) 249, 349, 422, 449; comparisons with the Germans, 89; democracy and, 315; exclusion of, 6n6, 139, 187–­88, 270, 304, 306, 309; German help for during Third Reich, 187, 197, 237; inclusion of, 332; Jewish Ger­ manness, 139; Jewish history, 188, 341–­42; Jewishness and revenge, 82–­83; large cap­ ital and, 104; modernity and, 379; objec­ tions to unification treaty by Jewish groups, 401; in postwar Germany, 311–­12, 347, 382; relationship with Christianity, 187–­88, 189, 264–­65; specific debt to, 208, 274; speci­ ficity of victimhood, 186, 350, 352; in the United States, 81–­83. See also anti-­Semitism; concentration camps; Ho­lo­caust; Kris­ tallnacht; philo-­Semitism; Weeks of Brotherhood Jodl, Alfred, 88, 91, 349 Joskowicz, Menachem, fig. 14 Jung, Carl, 91–­92, 229 Jünger, Ernst, 209, 456 Jürgs, Michael, 423 justice vs. legitimacy, 78 Kaiser, Jakob, 205 Kant, Immanuel, 151, 162 Kästner, Erich, 91–­92, 124, 229 Katzenstein, Peter, 335 Kaufman, Jason, 68n36, 454 Kennedy, John F., 191 Khrushchev, Nikita, 168, 190 Kierkegaard, Søren, 426 Kiesinger, Kurt-­Georg, 240–­44, 245, 246, 278, 417, 451 Kittel, Manfred, 27 knowledge: of concentration camps, 151, 196, 234; of dangers of  National Socialism, 296, 297; of the Holocaust, 360–­61, 380–­81; of Kristallnacht, 313; of Nazi atrocities, 151, 196 Kogon, Eugen, 95–­96, 119n7, 166 Kohl, Helmut: on anti-­Semitism, 381–­83; attitude to the New Right, 406; and the

Bitburg affair, 6, 31, 65–­67, 348–­49, 350, 353–­58, 423, 449; career path of, 300, 325; on communism, 400; cultural policies of, 372–­74, 375, 391; defeat of, 409–­10; on division of Germany, 386; election of, 254, 325, 332, 391; on expellees, 333–­34, 363, 373; family of, 356; at First World War cemetery in France, 348,  fig. 10; on foreign policy, 334–­35; generation of, 417; on German history, 335–­37, 445–­46; on German suffering, 351, 360, 384–­85, 450; on German traditions, 330, 450, 451; on Gorbachev, 371; Green Party attacks on, 456; on Hitler’s seizure of power, 329–­30; on the Jews, 350–­52, 384–­85; meeting with Kurt Waldheim, 404; meeting with Vaclav Havel, 243; on national identity, 335, 336, 344, 372–­74, 445–­46; normalization under, 393; not invited to D-­Day commemoration, 347–­48, 353; on patriotism, 387; praise for churches by, 332; profile of, 279, 461; and the reburial of Friedrich the Great, 403; relationship with Strauß, 316, 323; on return to basic values, 326–­27, 371–­74, 387–­88, 391; at Silesian Convention,  fig. 12; speeches and statements by, 220, 223, 224, 326–­30, 332–­42, 350–­52, 353–­56, 357, 358, 366, 371–­ 74, 376, 381–­83, 384–­88, 445–­46; trip to Israel, 337–­42, 375, 391, 393; and unification, 398; visit to Auschwitz,  fig. 14; visit to Bergen-­Belsen, 350–­52, 356–­57, 366, 378; visit to United States, 348; on the younger generation, 387, 458 Kolbe, Maximillian, 328 Kollwitz, Käthe, 404 Korean Conflict, 167 Kracow Ghetto Notebook (Gebirtig), 5 Kristallnacht: as a collective crime, 314; commemorations of, 3–­6, 74, 219, 310–­16, 331–­ 32, 374–­83, 399–­400, 414, 453; connected to Germany’s defeat in 1945, 311, 312–­13; guilt about, 312, 313; knowledge of, 313; opposition to, 376, 377; responsibility for, 312, 376

Index  509 Kurds, 402 Kushner, Tony, 8, 145 labor unions, 290 Lafontaine, Oskar, 410 landscape, German. See German landscape large capital, 104 leadership changes, 451n10, 461–­62 Lebanon, 337 Leber, Georg, 247n2 legal reforms, 191 legitimacy, 46n10, 73, 78, 163–­67 legitimation, 46, 46n10, 125, 446–­47 legitimation profiles, 60, 61–­67, 75, 227, 280, 434–­35, 455, 460. See also moral nation; normal nation; reliable nation Lemkin, Raphael, 351 Lenz, Otto, 166 Lenz, Siegfried, 369 Leonhard, Wolfgang, 237 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 151, 445 Levy, Daniel, 269 Lithuania, 200 London Debt Conference, 143 Lübbe, Hermann, 131 Lübeck, anti-­Semitic vandalism in, 409 Lübke, Heinrich: on anti-­Semitism, 186–­90; election of, 184–­86; on failings of  Weimar Republic, 185–­86; on German soldiers, 236–­37, 349, 444; legacy of, 317; on new African states, 186; retirement of, 247; rhetorical skill of, 186; speeches of, 185–­ 90, 197–­98, 233–­38, 444; visit to Bergen-­ Belsen, 233–­38; on war crimes, 197–­98, 233–­35; war record of, 185 Ludwigsberger Zentralstelle, 200, 201, 202, 448, 460 Luther, Martin, 328, 329 Luxembourg Treaties, 143–­44 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 13 Maier, Charles, 351, 366, 417, 458 Maier, Reinhold, 119n7

Mannheim, Karl, 459 Marcuse, Herbert, 418 Marshall Plan, 118 Marx, Karl, 52, 52n21, 79, 426 Marx, Karl (newspaper editor), 139, 270, 312 massification, 125, 283, 373 mastering of the past, 331, 400–­401 Mauriac, François, 33 Max Planck Institutes, 282 McCloy, John J., 64, 82 Mead, Margaret, 83 meaning-­making, 52, 62 meanings: context and, 61, 62, 67; identities and, 48; political, 46–­48, 50–­52 media: for collective memory, 55n25; discussions of collective guilt during the occupation, 90–­93 Meinecke, Friedrich, 98, 122n9 memory: balance in, 121; culture of remembrance, 413; as dialogical, 433; divisiveness and, 121; as a gyroscope, 438; history and, 36–­38, 417n5, 426, 427; of the Holocaust, 362; nation-­state and, 14–­16; private, 413– ­14; temporality and, 427; and the younger generation, 365. See also collective mem­ ory; official memory memory of memory, 74–­75, 148, 180, 271, 297, 317, 320, 327, 362, 380, 413, 424, 452 memory studies, 19n22 mentalities, history of, 39, 40 mentally ill people, 283, 360 Merkel, Angela, 413, 417, 417n5 metaphysical guilt, 285, 467 Metzenbaum, Howard, 349 militant democracy, 115, 115n5, 127, 158, 165, 207, 291, 324, 367 military strength, 226. See also nuclear weapons; rearmament Ministry for Expellees, 132, 278 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 418; The Inability to Mourn, 418–­21 Mitscherlich, Margarete, The Inability to Mourn, 418–­21

510  Index Mitterand, François, 348,  fig. 10 mnemohistory, 33n44, 39–­40, 58, 75, 209, 430, 432 mnemonic products and practices, 43–­44, 46, 56–­58 model Germany, 20n23 moderation, 119, 123 modernity, 379 Mommer, Karl, 194 Mommsen, Hans, 442n8 moral nation, 63, 64, 66, 75, 186, 244–­50, 256, 280–­85, 300, 346, 434, 436–­37, 461 Morgenthau, Henry,  Jr., 32, 81–­83, 86, 92 Morgenthau, Henry, Sr., 81 Moses, Dirk, 458 Munich Accords, 242, 278 narrative analysis, 431–­32, 434–­35 national anthem, 165 National Democratic Party (NPD), 251–­52, 253, 448 national identity: change of tendency and, 323; commemoration of opposition and, 441; consciousness of, 335, 336; definitions of, 277; effect of German history on, 15–­16, 369; vs. European identity, 246; German traditions and, 209, 215; vs. nationalism, 345; neoconservatism and, 344–­46; per­sis­ tence of, 263–­64; regional identities, 120, 372–­73; remembrance as part of, 412; as replacement for religion, 15, 16; research on, 255, 263; responsibilities of, 269; unification and, 408 nationalism: deployment of nuclear weapons and, 322–­23; expellee groups and, 278; German-­French belligerence and, 162–­63, 172; vs. national identity, 345; vs. patriotism, 293; reunification and, 164, 244 National Socialism: association of German people with, 180–­81, 198; causes of, 9, 97–­ 98, 103–­4, 190; centrality of anti-­Semitism in, 282–­83, 377, 381; civil service during, 132n19; compared to the Soviet Union, 224;

foreign infiltration and, 221; foundations of in Weimar Republic, 206, 220–­21; as a German catastrophe, 97–­99, 108, 117, 128, 174, 205–­6, 243, 251, 315, 328, 329; German liberation from, 249, 259, 260, 261–­62, 263, 295–­96, 299, 380; as a Ger­man pathology, 83–­85; knowledge of dan­gers of, 296, 297; linked with Weimar Republic, 124–­25; links with capitalism, 282; links with communism, 282; misuse of German name by, 187, 188, 189, 216, 236, 243, 248, 272, 340, 346, 453; Nazis’ seizure of power, 161, 163, 219–­22, 245, 252, 260–­61, 296, 329–­30; opposition to, 97, 106, 237, 262, 314, 331, 346–­47, 379, 382, 450; perpetrators portrayed as a narrow clique, 127, 144, 146, 166, 187, 189–­90, 204, 223, 254, 311, 340, 360, 453; popular support for, 379, 382; racist ideology of, 150–­51; record-­keeping during, 301; role in German tra­ditions, 173–­74; seductive qualities of, 190, 220–­21, 225, 262, 296, 381; silence of German people during, 236; standardization under, 120; survey showing support for, 158, 159; theories for occurrence in Germany, 85, 227–­29; vague references to, 293; victimhood and, 98–­99. See also Hitler, Adolf; Nazi war criminals national unity, 42 nation-­state, 14–­16, 17–­18, 28 NATO, 173, 226, 227, 321, 345; two-­track decision, 322–­24, 332, 348, 391 naturalizing analogies, 12, 16 Naumann, Friedrich, 105, 119 Nazi war criminals: Eichmann trial, 192, 193– ­99, 231, 281, 448, 456; Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, 192, 199, 219, 281, 448, 468; portrayed as a narrow clique, 144, 146, 166, 187, 189–­90, 204, 223, 254, 311, 453; statute of limitations for, 192, 199–­203, 448; trials and prosecutions of, 87–­88, 171, 178, 192, 193–­99, 200, 218, 219, 231, 233–­35, 281, 448 neoconservatism, 278, 279, 291, 292, 325–­26, 332, 335, 344–­46, 389–­90, 452, 467

Index  511 neo-­Nazism. See New Right Netanyahu, Benjamin, 424 Neue Wache, 403–­4 Neue Zeitung, 90–­91 Neumann, Franz, 84 New Right, 405–­7 Niemöller, Martin, 94, 168, 248 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 19, 466 Night of Broken Glass. See Kristallnacht no confidence votes, 116, 275, 325, 332 Nolte, Ernst, 414; “The Past That Will Not Pass Away,” 368, 369 normalization: of German traditions, 302–­4; of history of Federal Republic, 318; of relations with Israel, 232, 270, 271, 273, 337, 339, 340, 341; as relativization, 392–­94; as ritualization, 393, 394 normal nation, 63, 65–­67, 66, 241, 289, 300, 389–­94, 390–­91, 424–­25, 435, 437 November 9 events, 3–­4, 411–­12. See also Berlin Wall; Kristallnacht NPD. See National Democratic Party (NPD) nuclear weapons, 322–­24, 327, 332, 348, 390–­ 91, 445, 459 Nuremberg Racial Laws, 134, 159, 377, 380 Nuremberg Tribunal, 19, 87–­88, 194, 199, 343–­44

37; in the normal nation, 437; organization of, 20–­29; relationship with other forms of memory, 57; in the reliable nation, 436; role of the state in, 58; scripted, 417; suc­ cesses of, 465–­66. See also collective memory oil crisis, 305–­6, 390, 390n1, 460 Olympics in Munich, 295 On the Natural History of Destruction (Sebald), 418 opposition: to Kristallnacht, 376, 377; to National Socialism, 97, 106, 147, 237, 262, 314, 331, 346–­47, 379, 382, 450; to nuclear weapons, 332; respect for, 125; Twentieth of  July assassination plot, 124, 213, 214, 309–­10, 346–­47, 439–­43, 442n8, 446 Orwell, George, 18n20 Ostpolitik. See policy towards the East Owen, Frank, 85

Pächter, Henry, 442n8 pacifism, 402 Palestinian cause, 269–­70, 281, 307, 309, 316, 364 Parliamentary Council, 114, 114n2, 185, 245, 294 Parsons, Talcott, 83–­84 Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), 4n3 occasions, 68–­74. See also commemorations; passive tense, 128, 453 “Past That Will Not Pass Away, The” (Nolte), context 368, 369 occupation of Germany: criticisms of, 100–­ path-­dependence, 17n19, 60, 76, 454 101, 104; early days of, 86–­87; end of, 173, 174–­75, 259; German suffering during, 92, patriotism, 165–­66, 293, 296, 303, 387. See also nationalism 93–­97, 102; media discussions of collective Pauls, Rolf, 233 guilt during, 90–­93; Occupation Stat­ute, 63–­64; plans for, 79–­83, 86; role of churches peace movement, 322, 374, 402 peace research projects, 251, 282 during, 93–­97. See also denazification; People and Politics (Brandt), 247, 248 reeducation People’s Memorial Day, 439–­40, 443–­46, 447 Oder-­Neisse line, 172, 398 Office for the Protection of the Constitution, 207 perpetrators. See Nazi war criminals personalities, 461 official memory, 44–­45, 50, 209; and collecphilo-­Semitism, 123, 152, 156, 183, 188–­89, tive memory, 463; context and, 45, 68; 190, 206, 208, 281, 283, 340, 347, 448, 456 genres and, 68; in the moral nation, 436–­

512  Index photographs: of Adenauer at founding ceremony, 63–­64, 75,  fig. 3; of Brandt kneeling at Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, 64–­65, 75, 267,  fig. 7; of concentration camps, 87; of involvement of Wehrmacht in Holocaust, 136; of Kohl and Reagan at Bitburg cem­ etery, 65–­67; legitimation profiles and, 62–­67 Pikart, Eberhard, 246 placard actions, 87, 92 Planck, Max, 336 Poland: borders of, 172, 257–­58, 398; Brandt’s visit to, 266–­68, 341; invasion of, 223, 224, 225, 251, 256, 257, 266; Polish suffering, 223–­24, 284, 304, 305, 383–­84, 385; relations with Federal Republic of Germany, 201, 202, 242, 257–­58, 266–­68, 274, 284, 340–­41, 383; Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, 267–­68, 273, 305, 310,  fig. 7 policy towards the East, 240, 241–­44, 253, 254, 255, 256–­58, 266–­67, 268, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 284, 300, 334, 389, 445, 449, 451, 452, 456. See also Czechoslovakia; Poland; Soviet Union political culture, 46–­53, 62, 74, 227, 246, 435–­37 political meanings, 46–­48, 50–­52 political myth, 40 political parties, 4n3, 455–­57. See also names of individual parties political psychology, 49 political symbols, 46–­48, 50–­52 “Politics as a Vocation” (Weber), 304 politics of history, 39 politics of peace, 262, 263, 264, 276, 299, 300 politics of regret, 18–­20, 34, 466–­68 popular cultures, 49–­50 Portelli, Alejandro, 433 Potsdam Agreement, 86, 93, 131–­32, 257, 398 practice theories, 52n22, 58 presidency, role of, 116–­17, 121, 185, 246, 409 primary sources, 54n24

Prior,  J. Alan, 101 private memory, 413–­14, 414n4. See also individual guilt; individual responsibility profiles. See legitimation profiles propaganda model, 47–­48, 48n13 proportional representation, 116 prosaic analysis, 59, 60, 60n29 Protestantism, 457, 458. See also Christianity; churches Prussian militarism, 80, 124 public history, 40 public opinion, 49n16, 118, 145, 158, 159 Quebec Conference, 81 Rabinbach, Anson, 29n39, 148, 401 racism, 150–­51, 265–­66. See also anti-­ Semitism; Nuremberg Racial Laws Ranke, Leopold von, 16 Rapoport, Nathan, 267 Rathenau, Walther, 89 Rau,  Johannes, 412 Raynor,  Jay, The Apologist, 467 Reagan, Ronald: and the Bitburg affair, 5n4, 6, 6n7, 31, 65–­67, 348–­49, 353, 355, 356–­ 58, 423; at Hambach, 354; visit to Bergen-­ Belsen, 356–­57 rearmament, 134–­35, 137, 140, 165, 168, 170, 248 Red Army Faction, 291 redress, 18–­19. See also reparations reeducation, 82, 84, 95, 101, 169, 175, 204, 222, 261 regional identities, 120, 372–­73 regret, official vs. individual, 57. See also politics of regret Reich Broadcasting Corporation, 240 Reichel, Peter, 259, 309 Reich-­Ranicki, Marcel, 414 Reitz, Edgar, 373 relativism argument, 24–­25, 63, 97–­98, 225, 250, 434 relativization, 392–­94, 405, 408, 413, 414, 467

Index  513 reliable nation, 63–­64, 66, 180, 183, 203–­9, 252, 256, 280, 282, 283, 284, 321, 328, 434–­35, 436 religion, 15, 16, 345–­46, 457–­58. See also Christianity remilitarization. See rearmament Renan, Ernest, 14n18 renewal, spirit of, 203 Renger, Annemarie, 294, 303, 445 reparations, 22, 56, 63, 138–­48, 180, 187, 191–­ 92, 206, 232, 271, 290, 311, 401, 431, 447 repentance pride, 467 repressed memory, 26–­27, 418–­22 reputation of Germany: destroyed by war, 319; effect of war crimes trials on, 195, 197–­98, 234–­35; of the Federal Republic of Germany, 144–­45; foreign suspicion of Germany, 33, 180, 298, 299–­300; misuse of German name by National Socialists, 187, 188, 189, 216, 236, 243, 248, 272, 340, 346, 453; New Right and, 406; rehabilitation of during Cold War, 205; Second World War linked with the name of Germany, 362–­63. See also German problem responsibility: acceptance of, 256–­57, 272–­73; for First World War, 10n13, 327; of Hitler, 296–­97, 362–­63, 386; for the Holocaust, 352, 360–­61; for Kristallnacht, 312, 376; of national identity, 269; for Nazis’ seizure of power, 329–­30; non-­German, 329–­30; for the past, 392; responsibility before history trope, 366; for Second World War, 10n13, 107, 226, 262–­63, 296–­97, 327, 449; to the whole world, 284, 285; of  younger generation, 269, 271, 273, 281, 338–­39, 387, 411. See also collective responsibility reunification. See unification Reuter, Ernst, 311 revanchism, 333–­34, 363, 364–­65, 367, 373 revolution of 1848, 119, 123, 282, 318, 441, 450 revolution of 1918, 3 Ribbentrop,  Joachim von, 240, 343 Richter, Hans Werner, 420

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Shirer), 85 risk, 289–­90, 290n1, 326 ritualization, 393, 394, 408, 413, 414, 467 Robertson, Brian, 64 rocket program, 404 Romania, 407n1 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 85 Roosevelt, Franklin, 32, 79–­81, 81, 85, 104 Röpke, Wilhelm, 98–­99, 155n6, 221, 227; The Solution to the German Problem, 155 Rothberg, Michael, 28 Rothfels, Hans, 97–­98 Ruf, Der, 420 rule-­of-­law argument, 22–­23, 63, 206, 434 Sadat, Anwar, 307 Salomon, Ernst von, 88–­89, 90 Santayana, George, 18 Saudi Arabia, 307, 308–­9, 310, 337 Schäffer, Fritz, 194, 201 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 410 Scheel, Walter: election of, 291; generation of, 417; on German traditions, 293, 298, 451; on Germany’s defeat, 295–­96; legacy of, 317; on patriotism, 293; on responsibility, 296–­97; speeches and statements by, 67, 292–­93, 295–­99, 302–­4, 312–­13, 359, 366; support for Heinemann, 247; on the welfare state, 292 Schiller, Friedrich, 10, 151, 162, 445 Schindler’s List, 405 Schirrmacher, Frank, 415 Schleyer, Hanns Martin, 291 Schlußstrich. See final line Schmid, Carlo, 147, 148, 181–­82, 198, 209, 245–­46, 456 Schmidt, Helmut: on Basic Law, 293, 294; at Cologne synagogue, 313–­16,  fig. 9; on the economy, 289–­91; election of, 279, 389; generation of, 417; on German soldiers, 301, 445; on German suffering, 449; on German traditions, 451; on the grand coalition, 252n4; on guilt, 361; hostage to

514  Index Schmidt, Helmut (cont.) history rhetoric, 25n33, 72n37, 384, 394, 403; Jewish heritage of, 305n3; Kohl’s criticism of, 326; meeting with Sadat, 307; and NATO, 322–­24; and the normal state, 65, 289, 302, 390–­91, 393, 461; and politics of peace, 299–­300; relations with Israel, 305–­10, 339, 449; reputation of, 289, 300, 304, 390; on security, 289, 291; speeches and statements by, 223, 289–­91, 293, 294, 299–­300, 301–­2, 304–­5, 310, 312, 313–­16, 319, 320, 323–­24; visit to Auschwitz, 304–­5, 306; visit to Saudi Arabia, 308; war record of, 309–­10, 325 Schmitt, Carl, 108n3, 157, 209, 456 Schröder, Gerhard (chancellor): election of, 410; on generational shift, 410–­11; on National Socialism, 412; on normalcy, 410; on November 9 events, 411–­12; speeches and statements of, 410–­13, 422 Schröder, Gerhard (foreign and interior minister), 175–­76, 179, 247n2, 444 Schumacher, Kurt: death of, 184; in Frankfurt,  fig. 1; on German traditions, 244; on guilt, 99–­100; on memory, 106; and the 1949 election, 118; on the occupation, 100–­ 101; reestablishment of SDP by, 99, 103, 253; speeches of, 99–­101; war record of, 101, 455; on Western integration, 322–­23 Schütz, Klaus, 445 Schwartz, Barry, 45n9 Schwarz, Hans-­Peter, 178n1, 401 Scott, W. R., 46n10 Sebald, W. G., 424; “Air War and Literature,” 418–­22; On the Natural History of Destruction, 418 second-­guilt argument, 23–­24, 27, 63, 64, 166, 283, 333, 434 Second World War: commemorations for beginning of, 161, 163, 219, 220, 222–­29, 250–­51, 319–­20, 383–­88; commemorations for end of, 4–­5, 67, 107, 161, 163, 174–­75, 219, 220, 259–­64, 295–­300, 359–­67, 409;

end of as defeat and/or liberation, 107, 174, 249, 259, 260, 261–­62, 263, 295–­96, 299, 350, 359, 380, 409; responsibility for, 10n13, 107, 226, 262–­63, 296–­97, 327, 386, 449; role of Hitler-­Stalin pact, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228 secularization, 97, 98 security issues, 289, 291, 294–­95, 322–­24 Seifert,  Jürgen, 115 self-­confidence, 370 self-­examination, 266, 268, 296, 361 self-­righteousness, 104, 108, 108n4, 222, 298, 422 Semper Opera House, 346 Senfft, Heinrich, 344 Servatius, Robert, 194 Sewell, William, Jr., 50n17 shame, collective. See collective shame Shamir, Yitzhak, 231n4 Shazar, Zalman, 233 Shirer, William, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 85 sideshadowing, 432 silence: about anti-­Semitism, 9, 9n11; of German people during National Socialism, 236; about the Holocaust, 9, 9n11, 127; on Kristallnacht, 382; about the past, 96, 131, 431–­32 Six Day War, 268, 271, 281 Sixty-­Eighters. See younger generation Smith, Anthony, 15 sobriety, 106, 167, 176, 207 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 4n3; Bad Godesberg Program for, 184; coalition with Free Democratic Party, 252, 275; and commemoration of Kristallnacht, 4; delegates in Parliamentary Council, 114n2; in the grand coalition, 239–­41; Kohl’s crit­ icisms of, 326; in the 1949 election, 118, 167, 436; in the 1953 elections, 167; in the 1968 elections, 247; in the 1969 elections, 251; in the 1972 elections, 275–­76; in the 1976 elections, 300; in the 1980 elections,

Index  515 323, 324–­25; in the 1983 elections, 331; in the 1987 elections, 371; and nuclear weapons, 391; postwar reestablishment of, 99–­101; and relations to the past, 455–­56; and reparations, 143, 147, 148; and statute of limitations, 201, 202; successes of, 389; support for German Treaty, 173 social market economy, 155n6, 214 social memory. See collective memory social memory studies, 21n25 Societies for Christian-­Jewish Cooperation, 153, 187, 375 sociology: of collective memory, 34, 35, 36–­ 76; vs. history, 427–­30, 454; of retrospection, 208–­9 soldiers, German. See German soldiers Solution to the German Problem, The (Röpke), 155 Somalia, 401, 403, 407 Sombart, Werner, 154 Sontheimer, Kurt, 185n3 sovereignty, 173, 245–­46, 259, 260. See also occupation of Germany Soviet Union: Berlin Blockade, 113; German military strength needed to deter, 226; invasion of, 256; links with anti-­Semitic vandalism in Cologne, 178, 178n1; and National Socialism, 224; NATO’s two-­ track decision for, 322–­24; relations with Arab nations, 231; relations with Federal Republic of Germany, 175, 274, 284, 371; Soviet suffering, 284. See also Cold War; Hitler-­Stalin pact space flight, 404 Spandau prison, 171, 171n7 SPD. See Social Democratic Party (SPD) specificity: of the Holocaust, 283, 350, 352, 392; of  Jews as victims, 186, 350, 352; lack of, 121–­22, 128, 176–­77, 208, 216; specific debt to Jews, 208, 274 speeches: context and, 69; genres of, 68–­74; writing of, 57. See also commemorations; dialogue

Spiegel Affair, 213, 245, 252, 316 Spielberg, Steven, 405 spoiled identity, 7, 7n10 SS, 30–­31, 135, 137. See also Waffen-­SS Stalin, Joseph: Hitler-­Stalin pact, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 250, 362, 383, 386, 449; responsibility of, 363; Stalin Note, 168n3 Stalin Note, 168n3 standardization, 120 state, role of, 58, 214–­15, 277. See also nation-­ state state pomp, 164, 302–­3, 408 statute of limitations, 192, 199–­203, 218, 316, 316n8, 448, 451, 460 Stern, Frank, 9n11 Stimson, Henry, 80, 81–­82 Stockholm Holocaust conference, 466–­67 storytelling, 11–­14, 17–­18 Strauß, Franz-­Josef: candidacy of, 316; challenge to Ostpolitik, 389; on Heinemann’s election, 252; on military strength, 226; on Polish borders, 258; retreat of, 325; speeches of, 223, 226; and the Spiegel Affair, 213, 252; split with Kohl, 323; and supply of  weapons to Israel, 231n4 Streicher, Julius, 88 structuralism, 51–­52, 51n19 structured society, 217 structuring, 433–­35 Stürmer, Michael, 18n20, 368, 414 Stuttgart Charter of the Association of Expellees, 333–­34 Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, 94, 95, 100, 457 suffering, German. See German suffering Sühnestolz, 467 survey showing support for National Socialism, 158, 159 Süssmuth, Rita, 400 symbolism, 37, 408, 450 symbols: condensation symbols, 62; context and, 61; identities and, 48; political, 46–­48, 50–­52 Sznaider, Natan, 269

516  Index taxation, 239, 290–­91 Taylor, A. J. P., 228; The Course of German History, 85 technology, 301 Teheran Conference, 80 temporality, 427 Tendenzwende. See change of tendency terrorism, 291, 295, 302, 303, 374 Thatcher, Margaret, 33, 398 Thiele, Willi, 445 Third Reich. See National Socialism third way, 124, 242 Thomas, W. I., 86, 464 Thompson, E. P., 428–­29 Time magazine, 85 time of Hitler, 121 Tin Drum, The (Grass), 422–­23 “Todesfuge” (Celan), 5 tolerance, limits of, 158–­60 totalitarianism theory, 281, 282 Toynbee, Arnold, 39 traditions, 16, 40. See also German traditions transitional justice, 19, 77–­78 Treaty of  Versailles, 83, 220, 221, 224, 227, 228, 237, 314, 329, 378, 386, 449 Trepte, Walter, 444–­46 Tresckow, Henning von, 314 Truman, Harry, 168 Two Kinds of Destruction (Hillgruber), 368 Ulbricht, Walter, 218, 231 Ulm trial, 200 unconditional surrender, 80, 104 unemployment, 289, 290, 410 unification: in Basic Law, 114, 124; capital city debates, 399; dealing with the Communist past, 400–­401; economics of, 401, 402, 410; fall of Berlin Wall, 3–­4, 397, 398, 399; for­ eign apprehension about, 398; freedom in peace, 328; identity issues and, 408; mastering of the past, 400–­401; nationalism and, 164, 244; Neue Wache, 403–­4; objections to unification treaty by Jewish

groups, 401; responsibility before history trope, 366; vs. reunification, 399 United Nations, 192 United States: air bases in West Germany, 306; attitudes to reparations to Israel, 141; denazification policies of, 157; Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, 405; Jews in, 81–­83; postwar plans for Germany, 79–­83; relations with Federal Republic of Germany, 334, 348; role in founding of  Federal Republic, 113–­14; sponsorship of German membership in NATO, 173; views on German pathologies, 83–­85 Vansittart, Robert, 32, 85, 93, 229 Vansittart’s Gift for Goebbels (Fränkel), 85 V-­E Day commemorations, 348 Vergangenheitsbewältigung. See mastering of the past victimhood. See German suffering Vogel, Hans-­Jochen, 445–­46 Vögtle, Anton, 444 von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrick, 343 von Weizsäcker, Ernst, 134, 343–­44 von Weizsäcker, Richard: of achievements of Federal Republic, 365; on Berlin, 346–­47; election of, 343; on expellees, 363–­64; fam­ ily of, 343–­44; on German suffering, 359–­ 60, 384; on guilt, 361; and the Historians’ Dispute, 369–­70, 416; on the Jews, 347, 360–­61, 362, 369–­70, 384; on national iden­ tity, 344–­46; on Polish suffering, 383–­84; record album, fig. 11; on religion, 345–­46; on res­ponsibility for the war, 362–­63; speeches and statements by, 4–­5, 5n4, 67, 223, 295, 299, 344–­47, 359–­67, 369–­70, 383–­84 Wacquant, Loïc J. D., 55 Waffen-­SS, 31, 33, 65, 135, 137, 168, 349, 354–­ 55, 423 Waldheim, Kurt, 404 Walesa, Lech, 409 Wallace, Henry, 84

Index  517 Walser, Martin, 25n33, 413–­17, 414n4, 467; Death of a Critic, 414–­15 Walser-­Bubis debate, 413–­17, 424, 467 Wannsee villa, 405 Warburg, Aby, 430n2 war criminals. See Nazi war criminals Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, 65, 75, 267–­68, 273, 305, 310,  fig. 7 Weber, Alfred: Farewell to European History, 150 Weber, Max, 46n10, 96, 390, 434n3; “Politics as a Vocation,” 304 Wedeen, Lisa, 53n22 Weeks of Brotherhood, 153, 156, 179, 188, 264–­70, 448 Wehner, Herbert, 252n4 Wehrmacht. See German soldiers Weimar Republic: admiration for, 165, 318, 329; democracy during, 314, 378; failings of, 114–­17, 185–­86, 206, 314; influence on Basic Law, 245; linked with National So­ cialism, 124–­25, 206, 220–­21 Weiss, Peter, 418; The Investigation, 199n8 Weizmann, Chaim, 368 welfare state, 241, 292, 294, 333 Wende of 1982. See change of tendency “What Must Be Said” (Grass), 423–­24 White, Harry Dexter, 81

whitewash certificates, 137 Windelen, Heinrich, 443 Wolffsohn, Michael, 141, 306, 307, 339 World Cup, 408 World Jewish Congress, 141 World War I. See First World War World War II. See Second World War Wurm, Theophil, 94–­95, 96–­97 Wuthnow, Robert, 51n19 Yerushalmi, Yosef, 37, 426 Yom Kippur War, 305–­6, 403 younger generation: attitude to expellees, 364; attitude to older generation, 280–­81; criticisms of, 304; distance from the past of, 216; guilt of, 299, 315, 338–­39, 361, 415; historical consciousness of, 293; Jewish relations for, 264, 338–­39; and memory, 365; normalization and, 410–­11; relation to Kristallnacht, 331; responsibility of, 196, 269, 271, 273, 281, 315–­16, 338–­39, 387, 411; second guilt arguments, 283; self-­ righteousness of, 422; unburdened by the past, 253–­54; value shift among, 244; views on Wehrmacht, 319 Yugoslavia, collapse of, 402 zero hour, 24, 24n30, 115n4, 203, 257, 365. See also caesura; final line