Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955–1975 (review)

Coming to terms with the Nazi past is an ever-popular theme in German politics and society. This collection of essays tackles anew an old leitmotif of German historiography and focuses on the debate of West Germany’s politics of the past in the “long 1960s.” The book consists of revised papers presented at a German Historical Institute conference at the University of Nebraska in 2001, offering a synopsis of several projects under work at the time. Given the long span of time between the conference in 2001 and the published version of 2006, the once “forthcoming” dissertations and monographs of several young historians were completed before the volume appeared, thus devaluing it slightly and counteracting the idea of a “sneak preview” of inspiring works to come.

How did West Germans in the 1960s perceive their Nazi past, and how did they deal with this burden? For many years, the “long 1960s” were considered a crucial turning point for the society’s critical look at the Nazi past. The late 1940s and 1950s were portrayed as a time of self-pity and self-stylization of Germans as victims, whereas a dashing new generation in the 1960s bravely confronted the crimes of their forefathers. The rebellious youth seemed to be exposing the atrocities that everybody else in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had tried to forget. However, historians nowadays argue that that the debate on the repressed Nazi past actually came to light in the late 1950s and that the students’ revolt of 1967 and 1968 merely joined rather than initiated an ongoing discourse. It is also a fact that the judicial prosecution of Nazi crimes peaked before the 1960s.

The authors of the eighteen essays in this volume examine a plethora of political, social, and cultural aspects of German politics of the past. After a lucid introduction by Konrad Jarausch discussing the main currents of the 1960s and their historiographical challenges, a group of four essays deals with the confrontation of West Germans and the Nazi crimes. Habbo Knoch analyzes the return of photographs of the Holocaust to the public sphere after a decade of absence that began in 1945. Bernhard Brunner and Marc von Miquel explore the prosecution of Nazi crimes in the FRG, and Jürgen Lillteicher focuses on the restitution of Jewish property. Three essays deal with occupational groups and how they coped with the legacy of the Third Reich: Klaus Weinhauer’s chapter on the West German police recounts the problems of integrating a heavily incriminated police force into a democratic state; Karen Schönwälder examines West German policies toward foreigners, using these as a litmus test for how the FRG dissociated itself from the Nazi past while still nurturing racist thinking; and Sigrid Stöckel investigates the West German Public Health System and its various traditions.

Youth culture and generational conflict are the theme of a further group of essays. Dagmar Herzog’s essay delves into the sexual mores of the 1960s against the backdrop of the Third Reich and the 1950s. Detlef Siegfried brings youth and pop culture to the fore by analyzing the magazines Twen and Konkret and Radio Bremen’s “Beat Club” and their portrayal of the Nazi period. Michael Schmidtke, Elizabeth Peifer, and Belinda Davis probe discourses and expressions of opinion among the FRG’s New Left and consider whether the 68ers’ protest movement did indeed instill a new discussion of the Nazi past or whether its schematic views of National Socialism in the vein of “fascism theory” instead stifled debate and furthered an “instrumentalization” of the past. Joachim Scholtyseck and Michael Hochgeschwender scrutinize the reactions of their conservative counterparts (i.e., conservative intellectuals and Catholic student fraternities). Three final essays present the perspective from abroad, with examples of Israeli-FRG relations (Carole Fink); transatlantic contacts with their intertwining economic interests and West German lobbying...