Coping with the Nazi Past

West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955-1975

Philipp Gassert, Alan E. Steinweis, Philipp Gassert, Alan E. Steinweis

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781845455057, 9781845450861
• eBook ISBN: 9780857457066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

Based on careful, intensive research in primary sources, many of these essays break new ground in our understanding of a crucial and tumultuous period. The contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, offer an in-depth analysis of how the collective memory of Nazism and the Holocaust influenced, and was influenced by, politics and culture in West Germany in the 1960s. The contributions address a wide variety of issues, including prosecution for war crimes, restitution, immigration policy, health policy, reform of the police, German relations with Israel and the United States, nuclear non-proliferation, and, of course, student politics and the New Left protest movement.

Chapter 1

CRITICAL MEMORY AND CIVIL SOCIETY

The Impact of the 1960s on German Debates about the Past

Konrad H. Jarausch

The intensifying insistence on the need to remember is beginning to produce a backlash that suggests it might be more constructive to forget. During the Viennese congress, “The Memory of the Century,” the British commentator Timothy Garton Ash and the French scholar Pierre Nora criticized the “flourishing global memory industry” as counterproductive to historical understanding and counseled merciful oblivion instead. One point of dispute was the asymmetry between the media's attention to Nazi crimes and the general amnesia about Stalinist excesses, while another area of contention concerned the doubtful consequences of opening communist secret service files.¹ Along somewhat similar lines, Peter Novick's scholarly examination of the Americanization of the Holocaust and Norman Finkelstein's scurrilous attack on the “Holocaust industry” reveal a growing impatience with the intellectual rituals of contrition.² These increasingly emotional disputes about the current compulsion to remember raise the more general question: how much memory is essential for political democracy?

The politics of the past are particularly complicated in the case of Germany due to the troubled legacy of its two dictatorships. For decades, the “hot memories” of Nazi crimes were the “central reference point” for discussions about the past, as illustrated by the surprisingly positive reception of the German translation of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the storm over the Wehrmachtausstellung documenting the complicity of the armed forces, and the pressure to compensate slave laborers.³ During the 1990s, the “cold memories” of communist repression, articulated in the public hearings of the Bundestag and the growing nostalgia of many East Germans for the imagined security of the SED regime, began to complicate these debates by introducing the debris of a second dictatorship.⁴ More recently, the attacks of Christian Democratic politicians in the media against the youthful radicalism of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Minister of the Environment Jürgen Trittin, and even SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder have added the history of the old Federal Republic as a third (lukewarm?) contentious area, thereby calling the self-evident success story of capitalist democracy into question. The result of this tripling of the burden of history has been an even greater ambivalence about confronting the past.

As a side effect, the assault on the so-called 68ers (most of whom first became politically active in the 1970s) has also raised the collateral issue of the role of the 1960s in dealing with the Third Reich. Were the sixties a long overdue step toward social democratization that broke up the authoritarian patterns of the Adenauer era? Or was the youth revolt the beginning of later disorientation, cultural decadence, and terrorist violence? Did the rebellious students initiate a freer discussion of the Nazi past by accusing prominent elders like Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger of complicity or did they introduce new kinds of myths based on a shallow combination of neo-Marxism and pop psychology, as evident in the writings of Herbert Marcuse? The media has had a field day with charges and counter-charges that reflect the distance between former activists like Daniel Cohn-Bendit who were involved in the melee and CDU careerists like Friedrich Merz who stayed at home. Though former President Johannes Rau tried to calm the waves by praising the liberating impulse of 1968 and bemoaning some of its nefarious consequences, the argument is likely to go on, since it is about personal identity, political partisanship, and control of public memory.⁵

The scholarly literature on the politics of memory is unfortunately only moderately helpful because it is topically segmented and overly emotional. One central problem is the conflation of memory and the Holocaust trauma, which has displaced all other recollections as culturally less significant no matter how strongly they are felt.⁶ Another issue is the ideological effort to prove communist crimes to be of the same magnitude as the Nazi genocide, which is making it difficult to discuss the peculiar character of Marxist repression.⁷ Moreover, the negative fixation on the effort to cope with the terrible legacies of dictatorships has largely prevented a critical look at the creation, character, and role of memory culture in maintaining democratic societies.⁸ In spite of some laudable efforts to capture the elusive phenomenon of 1968 on its thirtieth anniversary, there is no comprehensive account of the generational revolt in the German context.⁹ While the issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung during that turbulent decade tends to come up in surveys of the Federal Republic as well as in overviews of memory politics, few authors have focused specifically on it so far.¹⁰

To distinguish the particular role of that decade in German memory debates more clearly, several key questions have to be answered. First, what was the general character of the controversial 1960s? That decade still evokes contradictory images, ranging from the building of the Berlin Wall or the purchase of the first television set to Willy Brandt's call for “daring more democracy” or the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke. Second, what was remembered and what was forgotten in the aftermath of the war and the prosperous fifties? While leftist authors like Ralph Giordano raise the accusation of a willful forgetting of Nazi crimes, conservative commentators tend to point out the degree to which public leaders distanced themselves from the Hitler regime.¹¹ Third, which impulses eventually overcame the reluctance of large parts of the public to confront their own prior complicity and initiated a lengthy process of developing more self-critical views? In comparative perspective, the replacement of living memories of a domestic majority by synthetic recollections of an externalized minority was an astounding development that still begs a fuller explanation.¹²

The Dynamic Decade

Long after the event, the 1960s still serve as an irritant that can stop party conversation and produce fierce arguments at the very mention of that decade. Even normally detached commentators grow agitated, feeling compelled to add their own experiences and begin their sentences with “As a 68er, I can tell you that.…” Conservatives like the neonationalist journalist Rainer Zitelmann have long blamed 1968 for “the fall from grace which expelled the Germans from the Adenauer paradise and brought them foreigners, feminism and other horrors.” In contrast, leftists like the Green Bundestag deputy Antje Vollmer have praised the spirit of rebellion for “civilizing the Germans,” and considered the late 1960s “a social refoundation of the republic” that turned an authoritarian postfascist state into a Western democracy. The current polemics, joined by some renegades like Thomas Schmidt and Götz Aly, are breaking with the latter consensus, holding “the new barbarians” responsible for leftist terrorism.¹³ As is typical of such debates, this controversy is not so much about an accurate reading of the past as about an ideological positioning in the present.

Part of the reason for the public confusion is the slowness of contemporary history, or Zeitgeschichte, to engage the problems of the 1960s in a systematic fashion. After this subdiscipline was created in the late 1940s as an effort to confront the horrors of World War II and the crimes of the Nazi era, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte spent most of its energies on explaining the failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich.¹⁴ Only during the 1960s did contemporary historians breach the 1945 barrier and begin to examine the nature of Allied occupation policies and the reasons for the establishment of two competing German states. It took until the 1980s for historical research to move into the Adenauer and Ulbricht period of the 1950s and to contrast the “conservative modernization” of the West with the more radical communist restructuring of the East.¹⁵ Once social scientists abandoned their analysis of the youth revolt, ¹⁶the 1960s remained at the mercy of contending memories, serving as an autobiographical marker for individual life-stories and as a reference point for literary debates in the feuilletons.

The resulting mythologization of 1968 has only recently begun to give way to serious historical research on the sixties as a decade. The anniversary syndrome that produced newspaper articles, radio talk shows, and TV documentaries inspired more serious efforts in 1998 to put the youth revolt into international perspective.¹⁷ Since the actual events of the generational rebellion were minor in comparison with other confrontations, it took until the advent of the new cultural history for scholars to be able to address what seemed to be an opaque and elusive subject. Gradually, the inexorable march of the 30-year rule started to open up access to government documents covering the 1960s while the neoconservative backlash against some of its cultural consequences renewed intellectual interest in the problem. To break out of the ritual of condemnation and apology for the changes symbolized by 1968, it is necessary to broaden the focus to the somewhat perplexing character of the entire period. In many ways, this was “a hinge decade” in which the hostilities of the Cold War abated, the spread of prosperity fundamentally changed lifestyles, and democracy became more deeply rooted.¹⁸

Among the many issues to be resolved about the sixties is the question of their precise beginning and endpoint. Since a decade is merely a calendrical artifact without inherent significance, more meaningful markers need to be established. Did the sixties already begin with the Sputnik shock and Adenauer's third term in 1957, the SPD's adoption of the Godesberg Program in 1959, or only with the building of the Wall in 1961, with the Spiegel affair a year later, or with Adenauer's fall in 1963? Did the decade end with the culmination of the generational revolt in 1968, the ascendancy of the first social-liberal (SPD-FDP) government in 1969, or the Ostpolitik of the early seventies—not to mention the impact of the oil price shocks and Brandt's resignation in 1973–74?¹⁹ Some studies of “the miracle years” operate with the construct of “the long fifties” by emphasizing developments such as the power and policies of the CDU, the effects of which reached well into the mid-sixties. Taking an early starting date to emphasize the continuity from antirearmament protests to the youth revolt and picking a late conclusion of the upheaval would ironically reverse that conceptualization and suggest a concept of the “long sixties” instead.²⁰

A related problem, evident in the conflicting labels suggested by historians, is the significance of 1968 as a kind of “soft caesura” in the longer narrative of West and (due to the invasion of Czechoslovakia) also East German postwar history. Only one such designation, namely, the “inner refounding of the Republic,” deals with the change of governments and ideological directions.²¹ Some descriptions like “the decisive decade of Americanization” or the broader tag “westernization” try to combine the political and the cultural realms.²² Other attempts to catch the essence of the sixties, such as the notions of a “postmaterial shift” or a “cultural revolution,” relate to individual values and collective behaviors.²³ While Axel Schildt argues that “with enormous speed, the Federal Republic left the postwar period completely behind and assumed features of cultural modernity,” Hanna Schissler claims precisely the contrary: “1968 marks the transition from ‘modernity’ to ‘postmodernity’ with all its benefits, but also with all its liabilities.”²⁴ The difficulty with the modernization perspective is the vagueness of the central concept and its normative connotation in the German context, which ignores the negative consequences of the process. In the East, the debate revolves around the popular disillusionment with Marxist ideology as a consequence of Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring.²⁵

Connected with the problem of labeling is the question of which developments are to be considered typical of the sixties. While there is agreement that this was a period of “fermentation” in which many changes were coming to a head, identifying them is much more difficult, since they did not begin or end there, but only received a new intensity.²⁶ Although the building of the Wall, the fall of Adenauer, the grand coalition, the change of government, the initiation of reforms, and the reconciliation with the East were important political developments, none equals the significance of 1918, 1933, 1945, or 1989.²⁷ It is, rather, the social changes that made possible an unprecedented level of mass consumption—such as the spread of prosperity to the lower classes, the arrival of the foreign “guest workers,” and the shortening of the workweek—that mark a new quality of life. The sixties are the decade of motorization (the number of cars multiplied from four to twelve million) and the proliferation of consumer durables (record players, washing machines, televisions), which made possible new forms of mass tourism and leisure. The result was a novel popular culture of Hollywood films, rock music, and television sitcoms that shifted emphasis from work to entertainment; with some delay, it even reached the GDR.²⁸

In spite of some attendant excesses, this catch-up modernization contributed to what may be called the breakthrough of “civil society” in West Germany. Because many of these trends first appeared in the United States or Western Europe, they are often mistaken as Americanization or westernization, and little distinction ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Critical Memory and Civil Society: The Impact of the 1960s on German Debates about the Past
• 2. The Return of the Images: Photographs of Nazi Crimes and the West German Public in the “Long 1960s”
• 3. Explanation, Dissociation, Apologia: The Debate over the Criminal Prosecution of Nazi Crimes in the 1960s
• 4. The “Comprehensive Investigative Proceedings—France”: West German Judicial Inquiries into Nazi Crimes
• 5. West Germany and Compensation for National Socialist Expropriation: The Restitution of Jewish Property, 1947–1964
• 6. The Modernization of West German Police: Between the Nazi Past and Weimar Tradition
• 7. West German Society and Foreigners in the 1960s
• 8. The West German Public Health System and the Legacy of Nazism
• 9. Don't Look Back in Anger: Youth, Pop Culture, and the Nazi Past
• 10. The Sexual Revolution and the Legacies of the Nazi Past
• 11. The German New Left and National Socialism
• 12. Public Demonstrations of the 1960s: Participatory Democracy or Leftist Fascism?
• 13. New Leftists and West Germany: Fascism, Violence, and the Public Sphere, 1967–1974
• 14. Conservative Intellectuals and the Debate over National Socialism and the Holocaust in the 1960s
• 15. Catholic Student Fraternities, the National Socialist Past, and the Student Movement
• 16. Turning Away from the Past: West Germany and Israel, 1965–1967
• 17. Germany's PR Man: Julius Klein and the Making of Transatlantic Memory
• 18. Auschwitz and the Nuclear Sonderweg: Nuclear Weapons and the Shadow of the Nazi Past
• Notes on Contributors
• Select Bibliography
• Index