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  • In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949
  • Victoria Johnson
In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949 By Jeffrey K. Olick University of Chicago Press, 2005. 380 pages. $29 (cloth)

How does a nation make sense of war crimes committed in its name? In what ways do the victors' assessment of guilt shape policies for post-war reconstruction? Jeffrey Olick addresses these questions through an intriguing historical analysis of post-war Germany from 1943 to1949. In this study of collective memory and political culture, Olick acknowledges parallels that have been drawn between German reconstruction debates and recent debates concerning "state-building" in post-war Iraq. Although these two cases exhibit many differences, the value of Olick's work lies in his concern with issues of collective responsibility and transitional justice, which speak to the human condition today as loudly as they did 60 years ago.

Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, some written in German, Olick details the debates that constituted the "official memory" of American and allied military and political officials and the German public about the "Nazi past and German future." A dialogic sociology of memory guides the reader through this contested terrain as changes in collective memory are identified over time in dialogues with earlier images of the past. Chapter 1 poses the central question running throughout the book: Was the "stain of guilt" for the atrocities of World War II on the German people and culture, or limited to the Nazi Party?

The first half of the book, Chapters 2 through 6, consists of debates about allied occupation policies during and after the war, which Olick argues created a "powerful reference point" that shaped much subsequent German reaction. The reader reviews competing narratives of "unconditional surrender" and polemics regarding whether Germany was "liberated" or "defeated," as well as the myths that emerged to explain occupation policies, especially the vilification of the Jewish-American Secretary Treasurer Morgenthau. Olick also examines competing proposals of American state actors for a "soft peace" or a "hard peace," with President Roosevelt supporting the latter due to his refusal to separate regime from volk and his disdain for "Prussian militarism." Olick looks at theories built upon the presumptions of collective guilt and social pathology along with related policies for the re-education and de-Nazification of the German people. Allied officials proposed reorganizing the universities and changing school curriculum as solutions, and the Nuremberg trials were designed to educate Germany in moral lessons of responsibility. An examination of how allied occupiers were to deal with lower-level Nazis, mediated by questions of blame and responsibility, concludes the first section. [End Page 596]

The second half of the book, Chapters 7 through 13, considers the polemics that constituted the historical memory of the German people, examining carefully the construction of German history and national identity by historians, social scientists and philosophers, including Thomas Mann, Carl Jung and Theodore Adorno. The Protestant and Catholic churches' relationship to the Nazis, and their views on responsibility for war atrocities are reviewed as are discourses produced by post-war political parties, foremost the re-emergent SPD and the newly organized Christian Democratic Union.

Olick employ's Ruth Benedict's framework of guilt and shame to analyze the German public's discourses and silences in response to war atrocities. Guilt requires that individuals' account to themselves for their actions and to transform. The writings of Carl Jaspers among others were representative of the "public discourse" of guilt. Shame sees confession as the betrayal of self; Martin Heidegger's philosophy was representative of this cultural trend and the "private silences" among post-war Germans. Olick concludes by pointing out that it is not his intention to answer questions about collective guilt but to ask them, although he does identify consistencies in answers presented by the German writers. One consistency in public discourse was the projection of Germans into the status of the Jews, as the occupiers had turned them into a "a pariah people." Other continuities were a commitment to German national identity and a preoccupation with refuting accusations of collective guilt.

This book illustrates...

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