Germany 1945

Views of War and Violence

Dagmar Barnouw

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780253220431
• eBook ISBN: 9780253028426
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: German History

"Packed with carefully chosen photos... this book is a moving reminder of the material and moral devastation left behind by Nazi Germany." ?Rudy Koshar, University of Wisconsin–Madison The Allied forces that entered Germany at the close of World War II were looking for remorse and open admissions of guilt from the Germans. Instead, they saw arrogance, servility, and a population thoroughly brainwashed by Nazis. But photos from the period tell a more complex story. In fact, Dagmar Barnouw argues that postwar Allied and German photography holds many possible clues for understanding the recent German past. A significant addition to the scholarship on postwar German culture and political identity, this book makes an important contribution to the current discussion of German memory. "Provocative, brilliant, and unsettling." — Washington Times "[Barnouw's] thoughtful analysis of a large assortment of photographs... allows Barnouw to look at how and not just what people saw, and to bring that perspective into conversation with the historical debates about the war's end in Germany." — Journal of Contemporary History ) "[Barnouw's] work shows that perspective plays a key role both in photography and in trying to master Germany's past. [F]ascinating." — Library Journal

1

To Make Them See
PHOTOGRAPHY, IDENTIFICATION, AND IDENTITY

HANS FRANK, the notoriously brutal Governor General of Poland, was arrested on 4 May 1945 and taken to prison in Miesbach, Bavaria. The American soldiers who arrested him had just seen pictures of the opening of concentration camps and made him walk through a double line nearly seventy feet long, beating him to a pulp. He tried to commit suicide but survived to be hanged at Nuremberg, having admitted his responsibility and his guilt. One of his sons, who visited him shortly before the arrest and was still unsure of what was to come, later told an interviewer that everything changed after the family saw photographs of the atrocities: “From this moment on, the war was lost, my father was lost. Until that time no one thought we had done anything wrong. I knew the pictures in the newspapers were real. I never thought it was Russian propaganda like a lot of other people. It was the truth and I knew it. American soldiers guarded the house after some displaced persons looted our home. After the pictures from Auschwitz, I felt it was all justified. It had not been a war. It was worse. These crimes changed everything.”¹

Most Germans who were adults during the Nazi period have been reluctant to speak about their lives during those years, especially to their children, who are the parents of the generation coming of age at the end of this troubled century. Fearing accusations of complicity with a criminal regime, they have tried to defend themselves with assertions that they did not really know its true nature, that is, did not know the truth about the scale and method of persecution. A pervasive sense of not being able to explain the objective circumstances of their lives without appearing to excuse their lack of active criticism has made them evade requests for explanation. Even though in many cases their own suffering was considerable, what they were told and shown in 1945 was so extraordinary as to seem unbelievable, beyond human endurance. “Was not that truth enough to drive you mad?”²—this question sums up their dilemma. For only full acceptance of the truth could enable the Germans to emerge from the madness of the Third Reich. Whether they were forced to go to the places of crime and look at the results of what had been done in their name, or whether they were ordered to look at its photographic documentation, they could not escape the meaning of what they saw, the evidence.

Erich Kästner, a satirical observer of literary and political Weimar culture and much loved childrens’ writer (Emil and the Detectives, e.g.) watched his books burning in 1933 but stayed in Berlin (where he was eventually bombed out) in order to be a witness. In February 1946 he went to see Die Todesmühlen (Mills of death),³ which was based on Allied documentary films of the liberation of 300 German concentration camps in April and May 1945 and which was shown all over Germany. First he recorded what he saw: the grotesquely bent and charred cadavers hanging in the electric fences, the trucks and trains filled to capacity with neatly stacked skeletal bodies, rows of corpses laid out in an orderly fashion in the meadows, tons of material for “recycling” and reuse: bones for fertilizer, hair and clothes in big sacks, piles of gold fillings and jewelry, mountains of shoes to be sold. Nothing had been wasted. Then he described the audience, noting that “fortunately, children were not permitted to see the film”:

Most of them do not speak. They go home in silence. Others come out and seem pale; turning their faces to the sky, they say “look, its snowing.” Others mumble “Propaganda! American propaganda. Propaganda before, propaganda now!” What do they mean by that? They can hardly think that these are propaganda lies. After all, what they saw had been photographed. They can’t very well assume that the American troops had shipped several trainloads of corpses across the ocean to film them in German concentration camps. So, are they saying: propaganda based on facts that are true? But if this is indeed what they mean, why do their voices sound so reproachful when they say “propaganda”? Are they implying that they should not have been shown the truth? Do they not want to know the truth? Would they rather turn away their heads as did some of the men in Nuremberg when they were shown this film?⁴

For Kästner, these images of literal reduction of human to material value—“the human being, I believe, is worth about RM [Reichsmark] 1.87, in case Shakespeare was short and not very heavy, he might have been worth RM 1.78”—raise unanswerable questions. As the feature editor of the Neue Zeitung, the official Munich-based newspaper for the American sector that began to appear in October 1945, Kästner had intended to review the film. Having seen it, he felt unable to do so. All he could do was describe some of the most striking visual evidence of human degradation, taking care to emphasize the need to see it before coming to conclusions about the issue of German responsibility. Though he distanced himself, the observer, from “them,” the audience, he was concerned not so much with their reluctance to accept the meaning of the evidence as with their unwillingness to look at it. Notwithstanding his remarkable fairness and psychological common sense, he did not grasp the audience’s anxiety about expectations that Germans as a group should feel in some large general way responsible for these horrible facts, and therefore guilty. They could not articulate their profound shock at the evidence without fearing that answers would be demanded from them to explain “how they could have let it happen.”

Kästner’s text shows very clearly the link between collective guilt and collective silence. Taking risks with his personal safety, forbidden to publish for twelve years, Kästner had been openly critical of National Socialism and thus was cleared of responsiblity for the regime’s crimes. (Kästner was troubled that some journalist colleagues who had gone into exile did not understand or approve of his staying in Germany and that some officials in the allied Military Government did not think his reasons for staying were satisfactory.)⁵ But apart from that “objective,” demonstrable distance to the Nazi regime, Kästner had developed, by virtue of temperament and journalistic style, a curiously effective if not entirely unproblematic subjective distance. It is true, it helped him to reach young people who did not see any way out of the catastrophe brought upon them by their parents’ generation. With a balance of coaxing, explanation, and encouragement, his articles about the problems of young people after the war were as thoughtful as they were timely. Yet, despite his adult realism, he confronted the physical, psychological, and moral chaos after the war with what seems to be, in retrospect, an almost childlike resilience and simplicity of perspective. He spoke from a position that tended to circumvent the obscurities and complexities of crucially important cultural issues. As he saw it, Germans simply had to believe their eyes, no matter how much it hurt; it was “good for them” because necessary for their future moral and political health. Castigating them for their attempts to deny the evidence, he underestimated the powerful mechanisms of denial that sprang from their realization that suddenly “everything was changed.” They had lost their cultural identity. Kästner, on the other hand, with more hope, spontaneity, and generosity than most Germans could muster at the time, looked at the evidence to remember it and then to move on into a different, and by definition better future. Instructively, he closed his reflections on the Holocaust film with the remark: “We Germans will certainly not forget how many people were murdered in these camps. And the rest of the world might do well to remember now and then, how many Germans perished there.” But half a century later, this relating of different groups’ painful experiences is more than ever rejected as an attempt to “relativize” or “minimize” the singularity of Judeocide and German guilt.

The general self-accusations that followed hesitant acceptance of the evidence often repressed individual memories of how Germans had lived their lives during years when the regime’s criminality had taken hold and spread to the point where criticism of a more or less “normal” kind had indeed become nearly impossible. The notorious German reluctance to mourn, as a group, the atrocities committed in their name was intimately connected with their difficulties in accepting, as their memories, events which they did not remember having known of at the time they occurred. Whether or not they “must all have known”—an assertion that will probably have to remain speculation—they were victimizers because they had no authority to deny their past knowledge of terrible acts of victimization and thereby their complicity. Collectively, they were stripped of the authority of their experience—an authority that was granted collectively to the victims. Collective guilt and responsibility is symbiotically linked with collective memory. In a recent interview, Adam Michnik expressed his respect for the social philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s “belief in the uniqueness of the German experience,” since this is how many well-intentioned Germans have dealt with the troubled German-Jewish past. Given the extreme nature of victimization, this may indeed be the best solution—for the time being, and if it does not continue to limit the historiography of the Nazi period. But Habermas’s single-minded belief in such uniqueness, though morally reassuring, does not capture the psychological and political complexities of the situation.⁶

The question of collective guilt and responsibility, as it was put to the Germans in 1945, was from the beginning shaped by a collective desire to construct that memory so that it could be used for political reconstruction. “Unmasterable,” the German past had become a divisive issue before the final collapse of the Nazi regime, with the Allies asking, “How could you have done it?” and the Germans answering, “We did not know what was being done.” Collective guilt and reeducation were central to the political schooling received by German POWs in American camps; many of them were involved in the cultural rebuilding of Germany after the war, especially in the news media. Understandably, but not very usefully, intellectual exiles in the United States confirmed the notion of an all-pervasive German psychosis. In 1943, the exile newspaper Deutsche Volkszeitung in New York published an article, “The Psychotic Third Reich,” arguing that a defeated Germany would need teachers and psychologists above all. It was an argument that, based on the Freudian equation of individual and mass psychosis, also anticipated massive denial.⁷ Confronted with the victims’ memories of extreme victimization at the hands of Germans, Germans should not be allowed see themselves as victimized by a total war and the near total destruction of their country’s culture. It was not the Germans who brought about the collapse of the Nazi regime but the Allies; if they had suffered under that regime, they had “brought it on themselves.”⁸ The endurance of a pervasive if highly generalized notion of collective guilt has been intimately connected with perceived German activity in bringing into existence a criminal regime and passivity in bringing it down. Germans were psychotic patients suffering from totalitarian criminality—hence the Allies’, that is, the Americans’ fears that though they acted guilty, Germans had not “really” acknowledged their responsibility and thus accepted their guilt.

American prescriptions for collective guilt, collective denazification, and reeducation had the useful practical goal of making sure that the newly emerging social and political elites were free of Nazis. It is true, these procedures created their own conflicts and contradictions and put into office a large number of politically unsuitable or administratively incompetent people.⁹ But in certain important ways they prevented or mitigated the sociopolitical chaos that seems to have plagued almost all the former Eastern Bloc states in the 1990s. And that despite the fact that postwar economic anarchy, driven by the corrupting forces of the black market economy, was halted only when the currency was reformed in 1948. However, these political purging procedures produced their own destructive confusion regarding guilt and responsibility. They invited and rewarded denial of the past where they professed to bring about honest confrontation. And they held up the goal of democracy as a religiopolitical commitment while using distinctly undemocratic means to achieve it.

What might be called a quintessentially American “perfectibility complex,” a utopianist belief in instantaneous transformation into a new identity, has brought about many desirable social and political changes, but not without some curious and not always gentle ironies. Denazification measures ordered Germans to undergo a democratic rebirth complete with a totally changed perspective on past experiences. Germans, who were forced to fill out the notorious Fragebögen (questionnaires) about their activities and affiliations during the Nazi period, had to accept a past constructed from the hindsight of the Holocaust—a past in which, as often as not, they could not recognize themselves. It did not seem possible to resist this self-alienation of memory, since to achieve the desired rebirth they had to shed their former selves voluntarily. Moreover, German collective memories of having participated, at least passively, in the most brutal acts of victimization were constructed to endure—for reasons that related both to the nature of the construction and these acts. These memo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Views of War and Violence
• 1 To Make Them See: Photography, Identification, and Identity
• 2 The Quality of Victory and the “German Question”: The Signal Corps Photography Album and Life Photo-Essays
• 3 What They Saw: Germany 1945 and Allied Photographers
• 4 Words and Images: German Questions
• 5 Views of the Past: Memory and Historical Evidence
• Notes
• Index