War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Robert G. Moeller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), xiii + 329 pp., $29.95.
Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany, Klaus Neumann (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), x + 333 pp., cloth $54.50, pbk. $24.95.
Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity, Siobhan Kattago (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 196 pp., $67.95.
Books on the twin topics of memory and identity in relation to Germany's attempts at dealing with (or skirting) its Nazi past are no longer limited to an internal German discourse, [End Page 170] but have proliferated on the American market as well. In Germany, debates and controversies have been fueled by a long succession of public events, leaving indelible marks on each decade: the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, and Beate Klarsfeld's slapping of German chancellor Kurt Kiesinger in the 1960s; the American television series Holocaust in the 1970s; the visit to the Bitburg cemetery by Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Ronald Reagan, the Historikerstreit, and the German television series Heimat in the 1980s; the Walser/Bubis controversy and the discussion of a national Holocaust memorial in Berlin in the 1990s. In Germany, these events have pitted against each other political representatives from the Jewish and non-Jewish communities and public intellectuals from the left and the right, and have been followed by a flurry of publications by journalists, critics, novelists, and scholars.
In America, the topic gained particular prominence after the events at Bitburg. 1 In 1988, Charles Maier published The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. It was followed by works such as Judith Miller's One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust (1990), Ian Buruma's The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (1994), Andreas Huyssen's Twilight Memories (1995), Jane Kramer's The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (1996), Jeffrey Herf's Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (1997), and Mary Fulbrook's German National Identity after the Holocaust (1999), to name but a few of the better-known books. The recent publications by Robert G. Moeller, Klaus Neumann, and Siobhan Kattago must be read within this context; their titles alone indicate a conscious positioning within this emerging field of inquiry. Moeller's War Stories, for example, echoes Maier's and Buruma's books; the perplexingly similar titles of Neumann's and Kattago's works recall the Kramer, Herf, and Fulbrook headings. What, then, do these three new publications have to offer?
Surprisingly, each of them is distinct in style, scope, and content. Moeller, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, focuses on the 1950s, examining the interrelatedness of individual and public memories in the formation of a West German discourse on the experience of the war. Moeller insists on Germans' ability to remember the past, albeit a past centered on their own suffering. He analyzes four specific contexts: Adenauer-era parliamentary debates; Theodor Schieder's federally funded project to record the plight of German refugees and expellees from the East; popular press and media coverage of German POWs' homecoming from the Soviet Union; and the film industry's version of the integration of returning soldiers, expellees, and POWs into a new German society.
Neumann's Shifting Memories has a very different focus. It examines the transformation of local memorial sites in Germany, from their inceptions to their adaptations to a changing political and cultural landscape in East, West, and later unified Germany. Neumann, who grew up in Germany and now teaches history in Australia, aims at uncovering the discursive contexts of local and regional histories of memorials "that [End Page 171] are not apparent to the passing visitor" (p. 2). Unlike Moeller, who investigates the larger social and political dynamics that led to a normative discourse in the 1950s, Neumann is not interested in an "overarching narrative" (p. 16). Rather, he explores what memorials say or do not say, what they reveal or hide about the Nazi past in specific localities. Those "instances of postwar remembrance," Neumann writes, "cannot be accommodated in a linear narrative" (p. 17).
Kattago's Ambiguous Memory is in many ways the opposite of Neumann's book. Kattago, who teaches at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, approaches the intersection of memory and national identity through "a series of cultural and sociological reflections from the outside" (p. 1). She sets out to present and analyze the "narrative structure of collective memory" for West, East, and reunified Germany, especially with respect to the 1980s and 1990s (p. 3). She does so by reviewing key events and the work of intellectuals (the latter because they are "important carriers of collective identity" [p. 3]). But Kattago's combining of an "outside" view with the ambitious attempt to offer explanatory models for the various German states adversely affects the quality of her research. The German term Fleissarbeit may best characterize her work: Unable to establish her own point of view, she diligently assembles, reviews, and summarizes other scholars' conceptual, interpretive, and analytical frameworks without adding significant new insights.
Of the three books under discussion, Moeller's is the most seasoned and original. For those who have followed his research in the past few years, the book is a welcome opportunity to read a fuller, more sustained version of his groundbreaking 1996 article in the American Historical Review. 2 Moeller questions the widely held assumption "that after the war the citizens of the Federal Republic largely avoided all memories of the years of Nazi rule" (p. 14), and he specifically takes to task Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's concept of the German "inability to mourn." When, in 1967, the Mitscherlichs put forward their psychological explanation for Germans' seeming lack of emotion when faced with the Nazi past, it resonated in the intellectual community and quickly turned into a commonplace that no longer required close scrutiny. But, Moeller argues, Germans were quite capable of remembering and mourning. They were doing so on behalf of their own families and the community of nonpersecuted Germans, but not, as one might have wished on moral grounds, on behalf of the victims of Nazi persecution. "The story of German forgetting," Moeller writes, "has had an extraordinary longevity," but a "closer, critical look at the early history of the Federal Republic" shows that West Germans "were neither disabled by their inability to mourn ... nor intentionally silent about National Socialism in order to get on with postwar reconstruction and democratic reeducation" (p. 16). Rather than forgetting, West Germans remembered selectively. Stories of returning soldiers, of German refugees and expellees from the East, and of POWs in Soviet camps helped to facilitate the perception that Germans themselves were victims. Moeller seeks to answer the question of how these stories were integrated into the official history of the Federal [End Page 172] Republic—and with such success that a majority of Germans eventually identified with them. He does so carefully and convincingly, without oversimplification.
Studying the Bundestag debates that addressed German culpability and, at the same time, aimed to rehabilitate the nation within the context of the Western Alliance (whose occupation policy demanded "demilitarization, denazification, and democratization" [p. 24]), Moeller demonstrates that Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's admission that "unspeakable crimes have been committed" (carefully worded in a passive construction) served a dual function. Internationally, it established the grounds for an acceptable foreign policy. Domestically, by admitting some national guilt, Germans felt legitimized to claim victim status for themselves. Only a few were Nazi perpetrators, so the argument went, while ordinary Germans had suffered at the hands of two totalitarian regimes: National Socialism and Soviet communism. In parliamentary debates, the term "victim" signified not only victims of Nazi persecution (especially Jews) but German victims (e.g., expellees) as well. But with respect to the political and emotional presence of Jews and other victims of National Socialism, in the postwar mentality these victims "remained ghosts lacking faces, families, names," while "German victims, in contrast, lived, breathed, organized, demanded recognition, and delivered speeches from the floor of the parliament" (p. 34).
The ways in which Germans breathed, organized, and demanded recognition are spelled out in the subsequent chapters of War Stories. Chapter three examines themultivolume Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa(published in the 1950s), a massive collection of eyewitness testimony on the expulsion of Germans from the East. This federally funded project was supervised by the conservative historian Theodor Schieder, a former Nazi Party member who, according to Moeller, had endorsed the Nazi expansion to the East. Other historians involved included Hans Rothfels (a Jewish convert to Protestantism who was forced to leave Germany after 1938 but returned from the United States in 1951) and the assistants Martin Broszat and Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Story after story, whether from Silesia, the former Sudetenland, or Yugoslavia, centered on the suffering of Germans and, implicitly, their innocence. Collecting the accounts served the needs of individual and public mourning while simultaneously offering an integrative myth that assisted in the formation of a collective postwar identity.
In chapter four, Moeller shows how Adenauer, after his successful 1955 foreign policy outreach to the Soviet Union, was portrayed by the media as the nation's "father," who would unite the German family by bringing home the "fathers and sons await[ing] release in Soviet POW camps" (p. 92). Gendered images and narrative structures praised German women who had faithfully waited for their men to return, and extolled the virtues of men who had been steadfast in their loyalty to the nation by not betraying their comrades or bending to the will of their Soviet captors. Thus, the POWs' homecoming reaffirmed both heterosexual normativity (which had been destabilized through the effects of war) and the myth of German innocence. "The West [End Page 173] German press," Moeller observes, "devoted far more attention to those charged with betraying the fatherland than those charged with crimes against humanity" (p. 113).
In chapter five, Moeller analyzes how themes of innocence and integration were played out in movies of the 1950s. Following the short period of the more critical Trümmerfilme ("rubble films") in the immediate postwar years, the film industry featured the Heimat, expellees, children lost in the chaos of war, and German POWs. Moeller looks at popular films such as Grün ist die Heide (Hans Deppe, 1951), Waldwinter (Wolfgang Liebeneiner, 1956), Ännchen von Tharau (Wolfgang Schleif, 1954), Der Arzt von Stalingrad (Géza von Radványi, 1958), Taiga (Liebeneiner, 1958), and Der Teufel spielte Balaleika (Leopold Lahola, 1961). With great ingenuity, he interprets them as expressions of suffering that had to be overcome in the face of adversity (families torn apart in the war, expulsion from one's home, detention in Soviet camps) and in order to permit integration into the new Heimat in the West. Moeller concludes War Stories by moving briefly beyond the 1950s, arguing that these constructed expressions of suffering are "never quite completely repressed" (p. 180), even today. While after the 1960s a cultural shift occurred in which Jews and other victims of National Socialism moved into the foreground, stories of victimized Germans nevertheless continued to circulate and resurface in various forms—most recently (though not discussed in War Stories) in the Walser/Bubis debate and in the publicity surrounding Günter Grass's 2002 novella Im Krebsgang. 3
Moeller's thesis about distinguishing different kinds of remembering and mourning is an important step forward in our understanding of German national identity. But sometimes his reading of testimony is problematic, for he interprets it mostly through a comparative lens (especially in chapter three). Jewish victims, Moeller states, whether present in their absence or explicitly mentioned in German testimonies, "provide the language with which Germans could describe their own experiences" (p. 80). Most stories he chooses to discuss establish parallels—linguistically, structurally, and suggestively—between "German experience at the hands of Communists and Jewish experience at the hands of Germans" (p. 79). Many of the parallels are eerie, disgraceful, despicable. But we also need to ask whether Moeller's comparative analysis implicitly invalidates individual experience. By focusing on similarities, does he imply that Germans made up these stories? It is true that Moeller never suggests that stories of forced expulsion, rape, beatings, and starvation were simply invented. But neither does he address the question of how else these stories could have been told (unless one assumes they should not have been told at all). Is it possible that postwar Germans could articulate their experiences only by making reference to other victim groups? Language always reaches its limits when putting into words intense experiences of pain, loss, and terror, and the storyteller, unless of unusual literary talent, needs to take recourse in the templates provided by a given historical moment. This is no less true of the individual German expellee than of the individual Jewish Holocaust survivor testifying in an American context today. 4 But Moeller reproaches the editors of the Dokumentation [End Page 174] for "respect[ing] silence and selective memories" and for not asking "difficult questions" (p. 82) of oral and written testimonies. This is Moeller's subtle way of passing moral judgment. He does not, however, further probe the methodological problems underlying oral-history collections, especially if they are as ambitious as Schieder's Dokumentation project or, to take another example, Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation in the context of contemporary America. Is the main function of these testimonial collections historical accuracy or social integration? The unique human dimension in recording each individual story of loss and trauma cannot be underestimated, with regard to the speaker as well as to the listener, despite the fact that these stories, cumulatively, come to represent national identities and public forms of memory.
Compared to Moeller's book, Neumann's Shifting Memories takes a grassroots approach to the question of public remembrance of the Nazi past. Neumann investigates the discursive contexts surrounding local memorials and other forms of recorded memory. Wisely the author chooses very different localities, ranging from a memorial for slave laborers at the Salzgitter steelworks to the ambiguous and dominant narratives ofWeimar and Buchenwald, from the remembered life of a communist prisoner in Buchenwald (who was reviled in the West but revered in the East) to the often conflicting memories of the Celle Hasenjagd ("hare hunt")—that is, the recapturing and killing of camp inmates who had escaped from a freight train. Other local sites of contested memory include Wiesbaden, Hildesheim, Ravensbrück, and Hamburg (the memorial to children of Bullenhuser Damm). Each chapter is filled with historical and biographical details gleaned from archives, and from the author's firsthand experiences. The numerous photographs provide helpful visual clues to understanding the events discussed.
Many of Neumann's examples confirm Moeller's thesis about nonpersecuted Germans' self-pitying narratives, which lacked empathy for the victims of National Socialism. This is especially jarring in the case of local Germans recalling the Celle Hasenjagd. "None of the narrators," Neumann writes, "accepted any responsibility for what happened to POWs, Jews, Polish forced laborers, and others who were held captive in the district before April 1945" (p. 44). Rather, communities across Germany seem to perform a constant ritual dance around issues of culpability and responsibility. They set out to memorialize the victims, but the memory of bystanders and perpetrators continuously surfaces in the cracks and gaps opened by the countless efforts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) and Erinnerungsarbeit (memory work).
Shifting Memories provides a sharpened sense of the complexity of memory work in the land of (former) perpetrators. Inadvertently, the book also demonstrates the considerable German engagement with and commitment to questions of commemorating the past. Local efforts may have been shortsighted, ill advised, or twisted, but complaints about Germans not remembering the past would simply be incorrect. To make such claims might actually constitute a "second-degree" amnesia, signifying a [End Page 175] refusal by a new generation to acknowledge the extent of the memory work of earlier decades.
Regrettably, Neumann does not extract any broader theoretical or conceptual implications from his detailed study, and this is a deliberate decision. At the end, he writes: "To demonstrate the diversity, lack of organic linearity, and local and historical specificity of German attempts to talk—or not to talk ... is in fact one of the aims of the book" (p. 258). His resistance to drawing larger conclusions, combined with the occasionally too-casual structure and loose ends, gives the book a choppy feel. But the reader is rewarded with a lively presentation of localized memorial cultures as they adapt to generational and social changes.
In Ambiguous Memory, Kattago aims to pay special attention "to the narrative structure of collective memory as a particular representation of the past in the construction of national identity" (p. 3). This long-winded articulation already indicates the book's larger problem: the thesis is obscured by terminology borrowed from different sources, the rehashing of familiar ideas, and an unnecessarily repetitive style. We encounter most of the key players and themes in past and present debates on West Germany, among them Karl Jaspers (and the question of German guilt), the Mitscherlichs (and the inability to mourn), Theodor Adorno (and coming to terms with the past), Edgar Reitz (and the series Heimat), Kohl and Reagan (and their Bitburg visit), Andreas Hillgruber (and the Historikerstreit), and Dan Diner and Saul Friedländer (and their critique of the normalization of the Nazi past). Unlike Moeller, who challenges the assumptions underlying previous discourse (i.e., the popularized version of the Mitscherlichs' thesis), Kattago simply reviews the ideas put forth by other intellectuals. In the East German case, she presents not individual figures but ideological forces, and thus follows a familiar pattern of talking about the German Democratic Republic "from the outside." Using the example of Buchenwald, Kattago draws our attention to the strong foundational mythology of antifascism that guided the Socialist Unity Party talks and the GDR's memorial culture, which privileged the heroism of antifascist resistance fighters over the fate of other victims. Not until 1984 did Erich Honecker officially discuss German historic guilt, and in 1988 the GDR acknowledged its special responsibility toward Jews by commemorating Kristallnacht for the first time.
After a short introduction, Ambiguous Memory opens with a theoretical chapter on the interconnectedness of memory and identity. Kattago extensively rehearses the ideas of Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Benedict Anderson, Etienne Balibar, and Eric Hobsbawm, concluding that "in the end, memory is more of a process about how to represent and integrate the past in the present than a tangible product or memorial" (p. 30). In subsequent chapters, she argues that West Germans "internalized" the past, whereas East Germans "universalized" it. With reunification, the new Germany is faced with the task of merging "the divided memories into a double past that is simultaneously divergent and unified" (p. 118). This task is not without controversies, as is apparent in the debates about Buchenwald's Speziallager 2 (the Soviet internment [End Page 176] camp from 1945 to 1950), the restoration of Berlin's Neue Wache as Germany's new memorial to all victims, and Berlin's yet-to-be-built Holocaust memorial. Chapter five ends with a review of the Goldhagen and Walser/Bubis controversies, and concludes with the true, albeit not very original, statement that "recent attempts to codify Germany's memory landscape emphasize two trends—one seeking a normal, usable past ... the other seeking a critical engagement with the past" (p. 161).
As part of a larger trend, the three publications under review make
clear that questions of Germany's Vergangenheitsbewältigung
occupy an increasingly important place in historical and cultural studies
outside Germany. But they also show (this is particularly true for War
Stories and Ambiguous Memory) that "Germans" have entered the
American scholarly and popular imagination: they are evaluated, assessed,
and dissected in their ever-changing relations to the Shoah and to the
Nazi past. Soon it may become necessary to inquire about the American
fascination with the "German question." Leslie Morris recently wrote that
it is not only "the imaginary within Germany that constructs Jews" but
also "the American imaginary that is replete with the imaginary German."
5
Keeping this in mind may sometimes be a good antidote to researching
and constructing Germans merely as chiffres, or lifeless
figures of discursive contexts. Recent discussions of the concept of
"postmemory," particularly in literary studies, may enrich historical
approaches. "Postmemory," writes Morris, "circulates between America and
Germany ... [and] has created a chain of signification that moves beyond
the borders—metaphorical and geographic—of Auschwitz."
6
Björn Krondorfer
St. Mary's College of Maryland
Notes
1. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
2. "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany," American Historical Review 101 (1996), pp.1008-48.
3. Im Krebsgang tells the story of the sinking of the WilhelmGustoff in 1945 by a Soviet submarine. Several thousand German refugees drowned in the Baltic Sea. Regarding the novella's publicity, see for example the extensive coverage in Der Spiegel 6 (2002), pp.184-202.
4. Lawrence Langer, among many others, has pointed out the limitations of language in Holocaust testimonies; see his Admitting the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Peter Novick has raised critical questions about Holocaust discourse in the American context in The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
5. Leslie Morris, "Postmemory, Postmemoir," in Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945-2000, eds. Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p.303.
6. Ibid., p.292.
