The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans (review)

Dagmar Barnouw contends that the experiences of German civilians in World War II have been systematically censored by the Allies' imposition of collective guilt for Nazi crimes. Over the years, the Allies have supposedly seen only innocent victims and monstrous perpetrators, with only a small number of "good Germans" to counterbalance the mostly "bad" Germans. Germans have been forced to "remember their past selectively as pure Nazi Evil" (p. xi). Even the Holocaust memorial in Berlin is "meant" to "keep all other memories out" (p. 59). In this tendentious work, Barnouw appeals to historians to challenge "the still accumulating power of Jewish memory discourses" (p. 64).

At the heart of the book is the air war, which the author experienced as a child in Dresden. Barnouw argues that bombing criminalized "the whole civilian population," a judgment which in turn preempted any postwar discussion of the morality of the campaign (p. 25). The Allies gained precious moral capital for having fought the good war, while the Germans were permitted to present themselves only as remorseful shadows. However, Barnouw's assumptions about criminalization are dramatized. She gives no evidence for the claim that in the aftermath of the war Germans were considered equivalent to Nazis. Nor does she engage the huge historiography regarding German memory. As a result, Barnouw undermines what could have been a useful inquiry into the nature of the difficulty of talking about German suffering from 1939 to 1945.

To begin with "victims" and "perpetrators," Barnouw is wrong to indicate that Germans have silenced themselves out of an imposed feeling of guilt. On the contrary, after the war Germans styled themselves victims who had been misled by a small number of fanatic Nazis, bombed out of their homes in Allied air-raids, and expelled from ancient communities in Eastern Europe. Moreover, the Allies hardly treated Germany as a nation of criminals. The very serialization of World War I and World War II indicated the continuity of "the world at war," while the pairing of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in the 1950s and 1960s inhibited observers from assembling unique German monsters. "Never Again!" is an indictment of the United States and its refugee policies as well as of Nazi Germany. Indeed, Christopher Browning wrote his book Ordinary Men in such a way as to make American readers imagine themselves as middle-aged German shooters. Even the once authoritative thesis of totalitarianism ended up decriminalizing the German population. For their part, scholars have generally emphasized the latter's moral indifference rather than criminal complicity.

In an extraordinary reference, Barnouw casts "both the Allied air war and the Nazi regime's 'final solution'" as part of "the terrifying radical changes in modern warfare made during World War II" (pp. 138–39). What this suggests is that escalation on both sides led to Auschwitz and Dresden. This is only true in the sense that the Nazis felt Germany to be a victim of world history, which, in their eyes, justified fighting a race war. But "radical changes in modern warfare" themselves had nothing to do with why Nazi Germany set out to destroy the Jews. Here Barnouw shows a complete lack of understanding of the Nazis' genocidal project. The "Final Solution" was not a military measure, nor was it a "tactic," as she delicately puts it (p. x); rather it was a "utopian" endeavor to create a racial empire. Both Germans and Jews suffered, but the Germans had something to do with the murder of the Jews while the Jews had nothing to do with the death of Germans. Barnouw repeatedly labels Jews as the "official victims" of the Nazi regime, as if the difference between the experience of Jews and non-Jews in Germany is that the former received a special designation first by the Nazis, then by the Allies.

Germans walk onto Barnouw's stage around 1943, mostly as women and children. They are depicted without history, just as the war...