Antigone's Ghosts

The Long Legacy of War and Genocide in Five Countries

Mark A. Wolfgram

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781684480050, 9781684480067
• eBook ISBN: 9781684480074
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Sophocles' play Antigone is a starting point for understanding the perpetual problems of human societies, families, and individuals, who are caught up in the terrible aftermath of mass violence. What is one to do after the killing has stopped? What can be done to prevent a round of new violence? The tragic and dramatic tension in the play is put in motion by setting an unyielding Antigone against King Creon. As we see through the investigation of how Germany, Japan, Spain, Yugoslavia and Turkey have dealt with their histories of mass violence and genocide in the 20th century, the forces represented by Antigone and Creon remain very much part of our world today. Through a comparison of the five countries, their political institutions, and cultural traditions, we begin to appreciate the different pathways that societies have taken when confronting their violent histories.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

1
Germany

The shores of Salamis and nearby lands

are heaped with bodies of the ill-fated dead.

—Messenger in Persians1

Introduction

Germany under the leadership of Hitler and the National Socialists took the country into a disastrous war of mass atrocities and the genocide of six million of Europe’s Jews, in which they were frequently aided by local collaborators. They were also opposed by anti-fascist forces throughout Europe, including Yugoslavia. The outcome of the war was the occupation of the country by the Western allies of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, which took over collectively three zones of occupation that were to become West Germany. The Soviet Union’s eastern zone of occupation became East Germany. The Federal Republic of Germany, also known as West Germany, was established in 1949, as was the German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East Germany. The country was reunified in October 1990 as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Europe. In the context of this study, the two German cases most closely resemble that of Japan in that the country had carried out primarily a war of external, imperialistic expansion, although there was no shortage of domestic victims, which stretched beyond the genocide against the Jews. Still, the conflict never took on the characteristics of a civil war, along the lines of what was experienced in Spain, Yugoslavia, or Turkey. Most of the regime’s victims lived outside the country, and at the conclusion of the war, most of the survivors lived outside the country as well.

Unlike in Japan, there was a significant German prewar and wartime resistance against the Nazi regime. The resistance involved lone wolf individuals, small groups of social democrats and communists, and conservative elites. The communist resistance was celebrated in the Soviet zone of occupation and then in East Germany as a source of legitimacy for the new regime. In the West, the different forms of resistance against the Nazi regime were initially viewed with a great deal of skepticism by the general public. Willy Brandt, who would go on to become the mayor of Berlin and later the chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1973, had been active in the social democratic resistance to the National Socialist regime, first inside Germany and then from exile. This led some to view him as a traitor to the nation, a theme that his conservative Christian Democratic rivals never failed to use against him in political campaigns.

Nevertheless, the prewar and wartime resistance to the National Socialists and Hitler became an important legacy for both East and West Germany and a positive model for resistance against the illegitimate exercise of power. Although the legitimacy of the resistance and its different forms remained debated for many decades, the fact that Germans were willing to formulate arguments about what forms of resistance could be justified against the exercise of illegitimate power became an important legacy for the democratization of West Germany and reunified Germany after 1990. As I have identified above in the introduction, the absence of these debates in postwar Japan remains a lingering problem that the Japanese have in debating the legitimate excise of authority and how one might be justified in opposing the illegitimate exercise of power.

Psychological and Social-Psychological Processes

As with the other cases in this research, the externalization of blame has played a significant role in the development of postwar culture in both East and West Germany, although this has changed significantly in the most recent decades. In the earliest postwar decades, the roots of war and genocide tended to find their explanations in abstractions and external forces. The domestic roots of National Socialism tended to be ignored, and there was a great sense of Germans having been the primary victims of the regime that had arisen in their own society, while ignoring the popularity of the regime and the widespread social participation in supporting the regime and its goals. Both the East and West German regimes were anxious to shift as much of the blame for what had happened on to the Nazi elites, while sparing the broader society a more honest investigation of the role that many others had played in the rise of the regime as well as the crimes that it committed. This became part of the mixed legacy of the Nuremberg trials, which were widely viewed in Germany as an example of victor’s justice.2

The ethnocentrism of death also played a critical role in both East and West Germany. Contrary to more recent claims by some in Germany that Germans have been denied the right to mourn their own losses and suffering, the early postwar decades were almost entirely focused on German victims. This meant that Jewish victimhood, to the extent that it was acknowledged at all, tended to be subsumed under a broader label of the entire population having been a victim of the fascist violence. It was only over the course of the 1970s and especially the 1980s that Jewish victims in the Holocaust gained a separate status from that of the Germans in general.

This was true primarily in West German and almost wholly absent in East Germany. When East and West Germans were asked if there was something that made German history different from that of other countries, in an open-ended survey, West Germans were far more likely to mention the Nazi persecution of the Jews than East Germans. When asked this question in 1989–1990, 13 percent of West Germans mentioned the Nazi persecution of the Jews compared to only 1 percent of East Germans. When the same question was asked again in 1996, 20 percent of West Germans mentioned the Nazi persecution of the Jews, while only 4 percent of East Germans did the same.3 Clearly, the division of the country for forty years had created two very different memory communities when it came to reflecting on the legacy of the war and genocide.

One of the most important developments in West Germany, which was largely absent from East Germany, was the creation of the broad social narrative of the Holocaust in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Despite the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963–1965), and the Majdanek trial (1975–1981), the Nazi genocide against Europe’s Jews, remained a poorly defined event in general public discussions about the war. This lack of clarity about the nature and extent of the genocide helped to maintain a residual legitimacy for National Socialism and Hitler. Although a plurality of Germans continued to reject the proposition that Hitler would have been one of Germany’s greatest leaders if not for the war (but not the Holocaust), a growing percentage of Germans were willing to grant him this status between 1965 and 1975, ranging between 30–40 percent. Roughly 30 percent of Germans also continued to defend the National Socialist regime, claiming that one could not say that the regime itself had been “fundamentally unjust.” It was only the arrival of widespread public discussion of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust in the mid-1970s and throughout the 1980s that finally smashed most of the residual legitimacy that Hitler and the National Socialists continued to hold.4 In terms of reshaping widespread attitudes toward National Socialism, popular culture played a far greater role than debates among intellectuals, known as the Historikerstreit or “historian argument,” which only really took off in 1986 and was largely confined to those born before 1945.5

What can account for this change in West German attitudes toward their history that is largely absent in East Germans at the point of reunification? Here, we can see the significant impact that the processes of social contagion and reinforcement can have on broad social attitudes and memories of the past. While discussion of the Nazi persecution of the Jews was never absent from East Germany, it never took on the dimensions that it did in West Germany, especially in the context of the 1970s and 1980s. What we can see in West Germany from the mid-1970s and through the entire decade of the 1980s is a sharp rise in the amount of material that the society was generating about the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust. This is true across all major media outlets, public and private. For the commercial cinema, there were more films made dealing with Jewish persecution in Germany in the 1980s than in all previous decades combined. The same can be seen in radio programs and the coverage and discussion of the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) memorial dates in the 1970s and 1980s compared to previous decades.6 We can see significant social contagion and reinforcement effects in all these data.7

In East Germany, the production of television programs dealing with the Nazi persecution of the Jews actually reached a peak in the 1960s and then declined in the following decades.8 In terms of domestically produced films, there was never more than a single film produced in any single year, and there were five films made in the 1960s compared to a total of three during the next two decades.9 And these are only the numbers. When we compare the actual content of many of these programs, the East German productions contain a great deal of material that may include some historical analysis. However, they are primarily focused on how anti-Semitism has been overcome in East Germany, whereas it remains a problem in the “capitalist-fascist” West Germany. Not only was there significantly less material about the history of anti-Semitism in Germany and the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but East Germans were encouraged to view this as a problem that had been overcome through the socialist development of the East German state.

Politics

East Germany: 1949–1989

In contrast to Yugoslavia, East Germany was a far more repressive and closed society. After the uprisings of June 17, 1953, the East German government accelerated the development of an extensive police state apparatus, which turned the entire society into a system of informers and surveillance, the extent of which only became known gradually after the collapse of the regime in 1989. The East German regime developed far more in the direction of a totalitarian regime than was the case in Spain or Yugoslavia.

Travel outside the country was extremely restricted and the consumption of foreign goods far more limited. The interchange across borders was tightly controlled. Although there was more or less free movement across the East-West border within the city of Berlin prior to the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, all other movement within East German and across its borders was tightly controlled. With the closing of the border in Berlin, which the regime carried out in a desperate attempt to prevent further loss of its younger population, all movement outside the country and interaction with the West was closed off. Whereas Turks and Yugoslavs began to move to Western countries in the 1960s to deal with labor shortages in the West and the lack of employment opportunities at home, East Germans remained, by and large, enclosed within their state borders.

Furthermore, the movement of other people into East Germany through a tourism industry was never encouraged by the regime, except for visits to East Berlin from the West, which helped to bring in some much-needed foreign currency. By setting an artificially high exchange rate and setting compulsory exchange requirements, the regime sought to maximize what little tourism traffic flowed from West to East in Berlin. Tourism was effectively limited to East Berlin. Whereas tourism played a positive role in the democratization process in Spain and helped Yugoslavia to remain in contact with Western ideas and values, these external forces were extremely restricted in the case of East Germany. What did remain was the contact between family members on both sides of the border thanks to Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which accepted the division of the country as a practical matter that needed to be dealt with for the foreseeable future. But compared to Spain and Yugoslavia, the external pressure for change or the flow of ideas and people across the state border was very minimal.

The flow of information across the German-German border was far more difficult to control, as almost the entire East German population lived in areas where they could receive West German television and radio broadcasts. East Germans had ample opportunity to learn about life in the West, although there were frequent propaganda efforts by the government to frame the negative aspects of life in the West in terms of criminality, prostitution, and drug addiction, as well as unemployment and other forms of social insecurity. Although the consumption of West German broadcasts was a criminal offense for the first several decades, and there were even teams of East German security officials that would storm the rooftops to check the positioning of aerial antennas, there was a shift in the early 1970s under Erich Honecker’s government to accept the fact that East Germans were going to listen to and watch West German broadcasts. The regime even came to see this as a positive development, as it helped to keep the population entertained and content. And the East German television service did a good job of generating its own popular broadcast programs such as Polizeiruf 110 (Police Call 110) and Der Staatsanwalt hat das Wort (The Prosecuting Attorney Takes the Floor), both of which sometimes captured 50 percent of the viewing audience in prime time. These police procedural programs gave the state a positive way to portray East German life and the security that the state was able to provide for its citizens, while also providing a source of entertainment.10 And sporting events were always very popular. Through competition with West Germany and other Western countries in athletics, the state was able to generate a certain level of East German patriotism and pride.

The level of state control, censorship, and surveillance increased dramatically after the events of June 17, 1953, after which state officials always viewed their population with far greater suspicion. This high level of surveillance lasted until the very end of the regime in 1989. It was a closed regime that limited one’s freedom of thought and movement and blunted the potential impact of information coming from West Germany. East German narratives about the past developed very much in line with state doctrine. When we look at the memory-market dictum, state ideology set the terms of the debate from the beginning to the end with very little variation.

West Germany: 1949–1989

West Germany was quickly set on the path toward democracy and capitalism after the end of World War II. The basic democratic institutions were laid out in the 1949 Basic Law or constitution, and they remain in place today. Social-democratic market–based capitalism was also embraced from the beginning, with a general agreement between the more conservative Christian Democrats and the more left-of-center Social Democrats about the general outlines of a welfare state.

In terms of the memory-market dictum, the production and consumption of narratives related to the past occurred largely without interference from political forces. As a democratic country, West Germany never developed a system of censorship, although this did not mean that political forces did not exercise some influence over the types of programs generated for public television or the films that were shown in the cinemas. Public television dominated all the way into the 1980s, with private broadcasters having a significant role beginning only in the 1990s. The print media was always owned by private investors. West Germany was a federal state, and cultural policy was considered an area for the Länder, with each Land or provincial government setting its own policies, as long as they respected the Basic Law.

Public radio and television broadcasters played a very important role in the West German process of dealing with the war and the Holocaust. The public broadcasters in each Land are governed by councils made up of “socially significant groups.” This has meant that it was the responsibility of each Land government to appoint appropriate members to the councils to oversee the production and purchasing of programming for public radio and television, which obviously gave regional governments an opportunity to exercise some political control. And indeed, the public broadcasters in Länder controlled by the Social Democrats had a different tilt to their programming compared to those that were controlled by the Christian Democrats. One could see this in some programming around the war and the persecution of the Jews.

From 1949 until 1966, the federal government...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Note on Translations
• Introduction
• 1. Germany
• 2. Japan
• 3. Spain
• 4. Yugoslavia
• 5. Turkey
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• About the Author