Divided Memory

The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys

Jeffrey Herf

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780674213043, 9780674213036
• eBook ISBN: 9780674416628
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

What has Germany made of its Nazi past?

A significant new look at the legacy of the Nazi regime, this book exposes the workings of past beliefs and political interests on how—and how differently—the two Germanys have recalled the crimes of Nazism, from the anti-Nazi emigration of the 1930s through the establishment of a day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in 1996.

Why, Jeffrey Herf asks, would German politicians raise the specter of the Holocaust at all, in view of the considerable depth and breadth of support its authors and their agenda had found in Nazi Germany? Why did the public memory of Nazi anti-Jewish persecution and the Holocaust emerge, if selectively, in West Germany, yet was repressed and marginalized in "anti-fascist" East Germany? And how do the politics of left and right come into play in this divided memory? The answers reveal the surprising relationship between how the crimes of Nazism were publicly recalled and how East and West Germany separately evolved a Communist dictatorship and a liberal democracy. This book, for the first time, points to the impact of the Cold War confrontation in both West and East Germany on the public memory of anti-Jewish persecution and the Holocaust.

Konrad Adenauer, Theodor Heuss, Kurt Schumacher, Willy Brandt, Richard von Weizsacker, and Helmut Kohl in the West and Walter Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck, Otto Grotewohl, Paul Merker, and Erich Honnecker in the East are among the many national figures whose private and public papers and statements Herf examines. His work makes the German memory of Nazism—suppressed on the one hand and selective on the other, from Nuremberg to Bitburg—comprehensible within the historical context of the ideologies and experiences of pre-1945 German and European history as well as within the international context of shifting alliances from World War II to the Cold War. Drawing on West German and recently opened East German archives, this book is a significant contribution to the history of belief that shaped public memory of Germany's recent past.

1

Multiple Restorations and Divided Memory

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This is a study of how anti-Nazi German political leaders interpreted the Nazi past during the Nazi era, and then remembered it as they emerged as national political leaders in the postwar occupation, in the two successor German states, and in unified Germany. It focuses on the mixture of belief and interest, ideology and the drive for power which shaped the political memory and public narratives of the Nazi era and the lessons they drew for postwar Germany. Of particular concern are the weight and place of “the Jewish question” and the Holocaust in postwar German political memory, and the multiplicity of German interpretations which contended for preeminence.¹

The temporal core of this work lies in the formative years of the anti-Nazi emigration, postwar occupation, and founding of the two German states in the 1940s and 1950s. It was during the anti-Hitler coalition of World War II, the postwar Nuremberg interregnum, and then the Cold War that the fault lines of divided memory were established. It was then that the paradoxical and, to many contemporaries, bitterly disappointing repression of the Jewish question in East Germany and its emergence in West Germany took place. One argument of this work is that understanding how and why postwar political memory divided as it did requires placing it in the historical context of the ideologies and experiences of pre-1945 German and European history and the international context of shifting and reversing alliances from World War II to the Cold War. For years the historical examination of democracy and dictatorship has been separated from that of political memory. One purpose of this work is to demonstrate the significance of political memories for the construction of democracy and dictatorship in post-1945 German history.²

I am interested in how past beliefs and contemporaneous political interests in domestic and international politics shaped the narratives of the Nazi past told by postwar German political leaders. Specifically, I address four questions. First, given the depth and breadth of support for Nazism among the Germans, why did German politicians after 1945 raise the issue of the Holocaust and other crimes of the Nazi era at all? Second, why did the memory of the Nazi past emerge as divided along political lines? That is, why did public memory of the Holocaust, and a sympathetic hearing for the concerns of Jewish survivors, emerge and find a home in West Germany? And why, after the early contentious months and years of the occupation era, were such views and their advocates suppressed in “antifascist” East Germany? Third, what was the relationship between memory of the crimes of the Nazi era and liberal democracy in the West and a Communist dictatorship in the East? That is, within West Germany, how did the democratic left and the democratic right approach the issues of memory and justice? Fourth, how did the Cold War affect discussion of the Jewish catastrophe in both Germanys?

From the temporal and political perspective of World War II and the early postwar years, the future of Eastern repression and Western emergence of sympathetic discussion of Jewish matters was not an obvious or foregone conclusion. On the contrary, for many contemporaries imbued with the solidarities of the war against Nazism, this subsequent history constituted an unexpected paradox. Part of the historian’s task is to reconstruct the openness and contingency of past moments. In this instance that means reconstructing the hopes for a more inclusive and generous memory which emerged in emigration, in Nazi concentration camps, and in the brief Nuremberg interregnum between the end of World War II and the crystallization of the Cold War.

During the cataclysm of the German assault on “Jewish bolshevism” on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945, and in the first several years of the Nuremberg interregnum, there were some political leaders who thought that the natural home for public discussion of Jewish matters should be and would be in the Soviet rather than the Western occupation zones. Yet it was in the Western zones and then in the Federal Republic (West Germany), the land of restored capitalism and liberal democracy, rather than in the Soviet zone and the antifascist German Democratic Republic (East Germany), that the issues of anti-Semitism and the Jewish catastrophe assumed a central place in the public discourse of national political leaders. Furthermore, it was the West, not the East, German government that offered financial restitution to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, established close relations with the state of Israel, gave the Holocaust a place—in time a rather prominent place—in the national political memory, and, after disastrous delay, even conducted more trials of suspected perpetrators of crimes committed during the Nazi era. Conversely, East German leaders kept the Jewish question on the margin of narratives of the Nazi era, refused to pay restitution to Jewish survivors or to Israel, purged those Communist leaders who sought to give it greater prominence, and even gave tangible support to Israel’s armed adversaries.

To explain what appears so paradoxical from the standpoint of the cataclysm of 1941–1945, to account for both the existence and themes of public memory of the crimes of the Nazis, we need to pay attention to what I call multiple restorations.³ The term refers to continuities that link German political traditions of the Weimar era and the anti-Nazi emigration to the period after 1945. In both Germanys, postwar narratives of the Nazi era rested on multiple restorations of the non- and anti-Nazi German political traditions suppressed in 1933. They were inaugurated by a founding generation of leaders who reentered political life in 1945. Because political opponents of the Nazi regime had either found political asylum abroad or survived through political withdrawal in “inner emigration” at home, the leaders of Weimar’s non- and anti-Nazi parties were still alive in 1945. All of the leading political figures of early postwar political life in West and East Germany came of political age between 1900 and 1930. They experienced Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust in their mature rather than their young and formative years. Among the West Germans, Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967), the leader of postwar Christian democracy and chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1963, had been mayor of Cologne from 1917 to 1933. Kurt Schumacher (1895–1952), the leader of postwar social democracy, served as a member of the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic. Theodor Heuss (1884–1963), the first president of the Federal Republic, had worked as a journalist and a professor of politics, and was active in liberal politics in the Weimar years as well. Ernst Reuter (1889–1953), the mayor of West Berlin during the crucial early years of the Cold War, had been a Social Democratic politician in Weimar; after being held prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, he went into political exile in Ankara. On the East German side, Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973), the effective head of the East German government; Otto Grotewohl (1894–1964), co-chair of the Socialist Unity Party; Wilhelm Pieck (1876–1960), first president of the German Democratic Republic; and Paul Merker (1894–1969), the key figure in the anticosmopolitan purges of 1950–1956, also represented restoration of an old German political tradition.

In the face of the apocalypse of the war and the Holocaust, the inherited traditions and ideologies these leaders carried in their hearts and minds became ever more precious sources of meaning with which to interpret the present and to shape the memory of the recent past. While the Communists and Socialists emerged more confident about their legacies than did chastened liberals and conservatives, all the founding figures interpreted Nazism through long-established interpretive frameworks. The victors’ enormous impact in the occupation years did not lie only or even primarily in the importation of previously foreign ideas about liberal democracy and communism. Rather, their most important contribution to postwar German politics was to ensure that the military defeat of the Nazi regime would be followed by the end of Nazism as an organized political force after 1945, and by the reemergence of German non- and anti-Nazi traditions which had been crushed in 1933.⁴ Allied military power defeated the Nazi regime. After 1945, Allied military power and occupation policy made it possible for the “other Germanys” to assume center stage. Postwar memories rested on interpretations of Nazism which its German opponents had begun to develop in the Weimar Republic. As we will see, in this longer-term perspective, the repression of Jewish matters in East Berlin and their emergence in Bonn was less surprising.

At the time, it seemed reasonable enough to argue both that Communists and Jews would find common ground and that restoration of capitalism would make the Western zones and the Federal Republic the home of unrepentent amnesia. Both capitalists and conservative politicians emerged from the German catastrophe with their reputations for political and moral judgment in tatters. Socialists and Communists, despite their differences, had fought the Nazis, and the Nazis had attacked them along with the number one enemy, the Jews. The Nazis had launched a race war against the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Would not the involuntary community of victims created by Nazi barbarism continue into the postwar period, especially given that one of those victims, the Soviet Union, justly claimed the lion’s share of credit for the military defeat of the Nazi regime? For every quotation from Marx or Stalin that nourished anti-Semitic sentiments, there were many wartime declarations by Communists affirming solidarity with persecuted Jewry. After 1945, reasonable people might think that the natural home for those most mercilessly targeted by “Hitler fascism” would be the “antifascist” Communist regime in East Berlin. Doing so required turning a blind eye to Soviet totalitarianism, but Russia’s story of suffering and redemptive victory as well as memories of Auschwitz made that easier for many to do. The Soviet Union’s early support for the new state of Israel seemed to suggest that the cataclysm of World War II and the Holocaust had indeed brought about a transformation of Communist thinking about anti-Semitism and Jewish matters.⁵ For those with fresh memories of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the Communists’ dictatorial rule in postwar Germany hardly seemed the worst of all possible worlds. Indeed, given the popular support in Germany for Nazism, it might almost seem the prudent thing to do. In the West as well, there were fresh memories of the breadth and depth of support for Nazism among many Germans up to the bitter end. Was not a democracy of, by, and for the Germans so soon after Auschwitz and Operation Barbarossa the height of folly? As we will see, in East Berlin, memory of the crimes of the Nazi era reinforced Marxist-Leninist inclinations to aid in legitimating the imposition of a second German dictatorship to rule over this dangerous people.

There were German Communists, especially those returning from Western emigration, who hoped that a revised and more sympathetic hearing for Jewish concerns would be the logical culmination of Communist antifascism. The rise and then bitter disappointment of these hopes occupies a central role in this volume. Because of the opening of the archives of the Communist Party and government, including the Stasi (secret police) files, it is now possible to document the remarkable story of the suppression of these wartime and early postwar hopes and their bearers in the anticosmopolitan purges throughout East Germany. The East German Communist suppression of the Jewish question, at whose center stands the case of the non-Jewish German Communist Paul Merker, constitutes one of the most significant chapters of German communism, postwar German history, Jewish history, and the history of the Cold War. It is as important for understanding these histories as the Slansky trial in Prague or the Dreyfus affair for understanding Czech or French history.⁶ Owing to its intrinsic significance, the relative lack of knowledge about it, and the growth of knowledge made possible by the opening of long-inaccessible East German archives, the Communist and East German story occupies a much larger part of this history than has been customary in histories of the two Germanys or that would follow primarily from the size and political significance of the two states.

While the story of Western Germany is certainly more familiar, the relationship between memory, justice, and democracy is also complex. In 1983 the German philosopher Herman Lübbe argued that “partial silence” about the Nazi past had been a “social-psychological and political necessity for the transformation of our postwar population into the citizenry of the Federal Republic.”⁷ As we will see, Lübbe made explicit what was implicit in Adenauer’s practice, namely, that the price for postwar integration of those Germans compromised by their beliefs and actions in the Third Reich was silence about the crimes of that period. Memory and justice might produce a right-wing revolt that would undermine a still fragile democracy. So democracy had to be built on a shaky foundation of justice delayed—hence denied—and weakened memory. If this analysis was correct, the West Germans could foster either memory and justice or democracy but not both. This inherent tension between memory and justice on the one hand and democracy on the other would appear to have been one of the central themes of postwar West German history. In the 1949 election Kurt Schumacher offered the West Germans the option of democratization with a clear commitment to memory and justice. Adenauer’s victory made plain that reticence about public memory of the Nazi past was crucial, if not for the preservation of democracy in West Germany, then certainly for the electoral victories of the Christian Democratic Party. The emergence of a national electoral majority in favor of the argument that daring more democracy required more memory and more justice did not take place until the 1960s.⁸

Confronted with the combination of Adenauer’s agreement to pay financial restitution to Jewish survivors and his refusal to seek justice energetically in German courts for past crimes, both the East German Communists and Adenauer’s West German leftist critics sought a cynical explanation for the salience of Jewish issues in West German memory and policy. The prominence of the Jewish question in West Germany, far from representing a genuine confrontation with the past Holocaust, was seen as a clever conservative ploy to place a memory of and manipulative sympathy for Jews—“philo-Semitism”—in the service of power of the worst sort, namely, the moral rehabilitation of their former tormentors.⁹ What could be more effective than to “use the Holocaust” to restore the respectability of the very establishment elites which had been compromised by their actions during the Nazi era? There are two problems with such explanations. First, they neglect the lack of enthusiasm even for restitution payments which Adenauer confronted within his own party and his own conservative electoral constituencies. Compromised elites were not rushing to pay restitution to Jewish survivors. The second, more important and all too rarely noted aspect of the emergence of Jewish matters in West Germany was the absolutely central role played by Kurt Schumacher and his successors in leadership positions in the Social Democratic Party. Adenauer has rightly received credit for supporting restitution and initiating support for Israel. One purpose of this volume is to draw attention to the democratic left in bringing Jewish matters to the fore in West Germany.

The negative impact of the rapid shift from denaz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Multiple Restorations and Divided Memory
• 2 German Communism’s Master Narratives of Antifascism: Berlin-Moscow-East Berlin, 1928–1945
• 3 From Periphery to Center: German Communists and the Jewish Question, Mexico City, 1942–1945
• 4 The Nuremberg Interregnum: Struggles for Recognition in East Berlin, 1945–1949
• 5 Purging “Cosmopolitanism”: The Jewish Question in East Germany, 1949–1956
• 6 Memory and Policy in East Germany from Ulbricht to Honecker
• 7 The Nuremberg Interregnum: Divided Memory in the Western Zones, 1945–1949
• 8 Atonement, Restitution, and Justice Delayed: West Germany, 1949–1963
• 9 Politics and Memory since the 1960s
• 10 Conclusion
• Notes
• Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Index