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  • Guilt, Suffering, and Memory: Germany Remembers Its Dead of World War II by Gilad Margalit
  • Mary Nolan
Guilt, Suffering, and Memory: Germany Remembers Its Dead of World War II, Gilad Margalit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 404 pp., paperback, $30.00.

The politics of memory in post-World War II Germany—West, East, and reunified—has received intensive scholarly and popular media attention in the past three decades. Yet interpretative debates about the Holocaust, the suffering of Germans, and their responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity continue. Gilad Margalit's comprehensive exploration of how Germany viewed its own wartime dead provides new evidence about German attitudes and stresses Germans' primary focus on their own suffering and their repeated failure to come to terms with the past appropriately.

The Allies' encouragement of Germans to acknowledge guilt and responsibility was officially (if reluctantly) accepted. By the late 1940s, however, a new master narrative, or "reconciliation narrative" as Margalit calls it, stressed the heroism of German soldiers and the suffering of German civilians and expellees. Both World War II and the genocide perpetrated against the Jews were depicted "as a kind of divine fat" (p. 77) for which most Germans were not responsible. In the East German version, anti-fascist "fighters" were accorded higher status than Jewish "victims," while in the West German one, German suffering and the persecution of the Jews were given a false equivalence. In the collective memory soldiers and civilians alike had been motivated by patriotism, not Nazi ideology, even as aspects of the Nazi portrayal of World War II were incorporated. Christian imagery and discourse eased the memorialization of the dead. Both German regimes blurred distinctions among those killed by the Nazis, those killed in wartime bombings, and those who died waging war and committing genocide; this lessened guilt, distanced the new regimes from National Socialism, and enhanced their legitimacy at home and abroad. And the reconciliation narrative survived beyond 1989; indeed, Margalit argues, it enjoyed rejuvenated popularity in the new Berlin Republic.

While most studies of memory in postwar Germany have focused on the West (Jeffrey Herf's work is a major exception), Margalit pays equal attention to shifting memory and memorialization in East Germany. And where the narratives were not comparable, as for the expellees from Eastern Europe—whom the Communists could not acknowledge as victims—Margalit lays out convincing explanations. His chapter on the increasingly nationalist ways in which the firebombing of Dresden has been discussed (sometimes in terms similar to those Goebbels used) lays out both the subtle differences and the underlying similarities between West and East.

While outstanding individual studies have analyzed how Germans have narrated the Holocaust, the German expellees from Eastern Europe, and the wartime bombings of civilians, Margalit's work brings all three together. This resulting comparison of language, imagery, and purported equivalences underlies his argument that from the late 1940s Germans have seen themselves as innocent victims. There was no [End Page 162] period of private discussion coupled with public silence, as W.G. Sebald and others posited. The equation of German and Jewish suffering was evident early on, in the speeches of clergy and politicians, in the 1952 establishment of the People's Day of Mourning, and in abundant war memorials and commemorative art. Margalit supports his case with abundant citations from the speeches and writings of political and cultural leaders, from opinion polls and newspapers, from novels and films; the book presents abundant illustrations.

Margalit counteracts any simplistic view that West Germany was a model for how societies that commit crimes against humanity can come to terms with the past. Unlike many historians, he does not see the Federal Republic as substantially better than or even different from East Germany. Yet, perhaps he goes too far in his emphasis on Germans' commitment throughout the postwar decades to the equivalency, if not primacy, of their own suffering. Three issues weaken his rich study. First, it often remains unclear who shared the "reconciliation narrative." Was it politicians? Religious and cultural elites? Expellees? A much more amorphous "public"? Or some combination of groups? And how did this shift over time? Margalit implies that pronouncements about German...

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