1.1 An historiography of postwar memory scholarship
Over the last twenty years, analyzing Germany's postwar recovery from the perspective of cultural memory studies has become increasingly widespread.1 A brief historiography of the discipline of memory studies is provided here as a context to highlight the findings that led to Rothberg's theory of implicated beneficiaries. The field has grown in its scope of defining memory, remembrance, commemoration, and other ways in which recollections are passed on. Intertwined in this process are factors that address political responsibility as it pertains to guilt and victimhood, the aspects of Germany's postwar issues that are central to this dissertation.
Dorothee Wierling has noted that the original draw of memory studies was not immune to a great deal of critique for some researchers. First and foremost, terms like collective memory, the nationally accepted view of history, and cultural memory, the daily remembrance based on the objects and personal artifacts, were not uniform concepts among scholars.2 This early hurdle in interpretation has long been resolved among scholars in the field. As a response, the discipline has developed subdivisions that presently include the coupling of the word memory with trauma, migration, populism, the arts, and gender, among others. The way in which memories are formed, passed on to others, and commemorated publicly, led many historians to see the value of this branch of scholarship in interpreting the past and in explaining the controversies that accompany public remembrance.
A benchmark in memory studies was Jan Assmann's work from the 1990s calling for the separation of the concept of memory into communicative and cultural categories. The distinction he made between face-to-face interactions (communicative memory) and the transmissions of group memory through actual artifacts and personal belongings (cultural memory) clarified subsequent work in the field. Aleida Assmann and other practitioners then stated that the twentieth century and current media forms are powerful transmitters of cultural memory.3 Aleida Assmann further developed these categories in her work. She has credited past intellectuals such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Maurice Halbwachs as early pioneers who concerned themselves with the repression and even the forgetting of memories, the very topics Buchheim addressed as obstacles in German reflections on the war.
A. Assmann views the 1980s as a significant point in time that formed a memory turn in German society.4 She has explained this era as important in that it indicated a switch in public attitudes toward learning more about Germany's haunting Nazi past. This was first and foremost due to the rise in Holocaust studies internationally, which went from an avoided topic to becoming a trope used in exploring other historical tragedies worldwide. This is also the decade in which Buchheim saw the transformation of his 1973 bestseller Das Boot (The Boat) into a critically acclaimed studio film in 1981. During this same time, his Expressionist art collection, arguably one of the most famous privately-owned exhibitions known, went on a four-year international tour.5 The works were on display in Israel, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the USA, where Buchheim and the paintings were met with open arms and received rave reviews.6 Assmann has stated that remembering historical events on individual levels inside of familial circles and then following the transfer of these memories by personal or media-based communicative vehicles allow personal histories the chance to become part of larger narratives.7
The manner in which eyewitness accounts are relayed from one generation to the next after tragedies like the Holocaust is what Irene Kacandes and Marianne Hirsch have deemed postmemory.8 For them, this concept provides yet another angle from which the role of the past in our present-time can be explored. In their work on communities remembering the Holocaust, both scholars treat the idea of postmemory as the way in which memories of an occurrence are transmitted within a given culture (through pictures and images), especially when the memories carry an ethical axiom for the younger generation, such as “never forget.” This observation about memory can be seen as a way to scrutinize the transfer of memories pertaining to other tragedies across the globe as those born after the fact continue to face a variety of input about the past. Hirsch has posed several questions relevant to potential studies about other historical events:
Why insist on the term memory to describe this structure of transmission? Is postmemory limited to the intimate embodied space of the family, or can it extend to more distant, adoptive witnesses? Is postmemory limited to victims, or does it include bystanders and perpetrators, or could one argue that it complicates the delineations of these positions which, in Holocaust studies, have come to be taken for granted? What aesthetic and institutional structures, what tropes, best mediate the psychology of postmemory, the connections and discontinuities between generations, the gaps in knowledge that define the aftermath of trauma? And how has photography in particular come to play such an important role in this process of mediation?9
To Wulf Kansteiner, memories belong to a hierarchy; those that qualify as the “most collective” are the memories that are most shared among people. These memories seem to transcend the temporal and spatial boundaries of the original event or occurrence.10 In their collection of essays, Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller remind us that there are difficulties in assessing the level of truth in personal narratives, especially when there is an abundance of public commemoration that can influence them.11 The balance that Kansteiner and Biess provide in this regard call for the same care needed for this type of historical interpretation as with other approaches. The added benefit of memory studies as a methodology is the humanization of otherwise cold, historical facts. This is how Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have described their work as historians.12
Erll has noted that cultural memory is in essence traveling memory and that the physical mobilization of humans is just one way that memories move about. The term for her is a way for scholars to refer to cultural memory in general. Inherent in remembering the past, she has posited, are always moments of transfer and intersection with other cultures and societies.13 In this vein, memory is inescapably always constructed, and most importantly, it is also always contested during its phases of mobility. The insight from research into global perspectives on the same dramatic event is how the field of history continues to grow. This is especially important in an era when it seems that so much has already been said and discovered.
Kansteiner has written that the relationship between higher culture (the academic and intellectual interpretations of the past) and public memory (the reflections of the past in our immediate surroundings) is not necessarily the same as the relationship between popular culture and public memory.14 In this view, the importance of investigating a personal artifact that became widely known like Das Boot is maintained and its relatability to readers, overall accessibility, and the general public's consumption of it are justified. Kansteiner has also emphasized that the impact of twentieth-century media on the public must be acknowledged during historical inquiries since it affects how collective memory evolves as a given population moves away in time and location from the events in question. Unlike individual memory, collective narratives exist under a different set of pressures and influences, hence collective memory changes and adapts in unique ways compared to those of an individual.15 A look into Buchheim's life and his creative works, and the debates that surrounded them, can further illustrate how his projects affected German society during his life and also posthumously.
Twentieth-century technology allowed Buchheim to utilize several communicative platforms to disseminate his message of German political responsibility after World War II. As a guiding principle methodologically, the fiction and documentary films that Buchheim created during his career are treated here as ego documents (from the German Egodokument) as Rudolph M. Dekker and others exploring this facet of the field utilize the term as initiated by Freud.16 These artifacts include his artwork as a teenager during the 1930s, his monographs from the 1950s on modern artists, his bestseller novels, and self-produced documentaries broadcast on German television in the 1980s and 1990s. Das Boot, seen as an example of a printed medium in the form of an autobiographical novelization, was read beyond Germany's borders and inspired an internationally lauded film several years later, which created a new, international dialog about the war. The transmission of the book across cultural planes and the spreading of its content even further as a movie sparked discussions about memories not generally shared by those who lived through the war. Exploring this topic, though, was welcomed by those born later, including Petersen, the director of Das Boot.
Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider have made distinctions between the nuances that public memories embody in today's globalized society. In their view, cosmopolitan memory, their term for memories that have not been nationally adopted, reflects narratives recognized worldwide. They maintain that this applies to shared memories, which have been acted upon in any number of internationally distributed media representations.17 Levy and Sznaider's concept of public memory also illustrates how lesser-known narratives of Germany's Nazi past, such as that of U-boat crews, transitioned out of the national public sphere of the Federal Republic of Germany's (FRG) and across its borders to be validated or contested by others before the narratives returned home again and took a spot in the overall memory of the war. The interest in a “German” narrative about World War II as it was presented by Buchheim was demonstrated by record book sales at home in Germany in 1973 and then abroad in translation shortly thereafter.
1.2 An overview of West German public memory
A survey of West German postwar memory yields shifts. The notion of an “open narrative” as Alon Confino has advocated, is not deterministic or linear, but reflective of historical contingency. Personal narratives illuminate the experiences that form individual memory, which in turn inform collective memory: “Whatever Germans became after 1945 must lie in some measure in their experiences and memories before that period.”18 After the war ended, many Germans saw themselves as victims of National Socialism. This included the victimization they experienced as Soviet troops battled to stop Hitler. For a great deal of Germans violence, expulsion from the East, and mass rapes were horrors traced back to the war Nazi waged on Europe. Channeling their national sense of victimization was not possible like it had been after World War I. The speedy economic recovery in the 1950s led to a renewed sense of prosperity and lessened West Germans’ feelings of victimization. By the late 1960s, a growing sense of self-criticism and the acknowledgement of popular culpability in the crimes of the Nazis coexisted with the worldwide cultural rebellion of 1968 rebellion, Holocaust education in the schools, commemorations for the victims of Nazi genocide, and the rise in the reflections offered by popular culture, especially American-made television programming. This turn away from self-pity also had to do with youthful rebellion of the children of the wartime generation against their parents.19
After German reunification in 1989, some intellectuals advocated a normalization of German nationalism with previously marginalized experiences creating empathy as was the case for the German victims of wartime bombing. Since reunification, the interest in German-Jewish and Jewish culture has skyrocketed. Germany's capital Berlin has attracted many Jews over the last three decades. The rediscovery of old sites and the unveiling of new memorials and museums helped normalize German-Jewish relations and contributed to the German's interest in their involvement in the Holocaust in a manner whereby the public is not paralyzed by guilt, but rather encouraged to engage in global discussions about genocide.
These developments mean that the interest has shifted from a focus on the origins of National Socialism to the consequences of Nazi rule for Germany and other societies.20 The idea of an open narrative in this context differs slightly from the research that pinpointed the beginnings of National Socialism and detailed how it spread. This movement in interest reflects the challenges of historical study in answering certain questions. Researching remembrance and microhistories allow the complex or even unresolved issues in history to be somewhat embraced as long as these sub-histories provide a level of historical coherence.
Since the end of the war, West Germany led the debate as to whether or not Wehrmacht soldiers and German submarine crews were victims of the Third Reich since the war ended. In recent scholarship, the psychology of German soldiers has been analyzed regarding the emotional impact of battle. Steven G. Fritz has concluded that individual soldier accounts documented a history of an everyday experience that adds to our understanding as to what some soldiers believed as they fought, such as the promise of a utopian (German) society after battle.21 Others historians like Omer Bartov have theorized that German soldiers’ motivation was a front-line solidarity that yielded a sense of victimhood and alienation after the war as the search for the real “evil” behind the conflict began.22
