Returning Memories: Former Prisoners of War in Divided and Reunited Germany by Christiane Wienand (review)

Historian Christiane Wienand’s Returning Memories documents how the memory of returnees was shaped and developed in both divided and reunited Germany, thus expanding on scholarship which has primarily focused on the first postwar decade. Her research contributes to the growing number of works which address the lack of public discourse on non-Jewish Germans as victims of the war, and provides insights in the construction of memory narratives. Wienand argues that returnees constitute an ongoing and recurring issue, and aims to demonstrate that individual and collective memory intersect at multiple points and are influenced by concurrent interpretations of the past. She thereby indirectly responds to Alon Confino’s appeal to view the shaping and the reception of collective memory as a commingling, instead of separate processes (see Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History, Chapel Hill 2006). Although Wienand’s argument could be more specific, and the restatements of her thesis throughout the book less frequent and formulaic, her work deserves praise for providing extensive empirical evidence to support her argument.

First, she asks how the press and movies have portrayed the returnees, in particular the POWs released en masse from the Soviet Union in 1955/1956. While the media in the GDR initially considered them war criminals, they subsequently portrayed them as victims of “Hitler’s clique” who then successfully underwent reeducation programs during their captivity in the Soviet Union. This rhetorical shift not only supported the State’s antifascist founding myth, but also justified the returnees’ reintegration. In the FRG prior to 1989, the media presented most former POWs as victims of war captivity and of social changes in postwar Germany. They depicted only a minority of returnees as perpetrators, in the sense that they treated their comrades unfairly during imprisonment. The interest in returnees lulled in the 1960s and 1970s, for the Vergangenheitsbewältigung opened up a space for the narratives of the victims of National Socialism. Wienand found that returnees continue to be depicted as victims or heroes in documentary and cinema films after Reunification.

Second, Wienand investigates how the largest association for returnees (representing 30 to 35% of veterans in the 1950s), the Verband der Heimkehrer, Kriegsgefangenen und Vermisstenangehörigen (VdH), negotiated the victim status of former POWs during political debates on financial compensation in the FRG. Because the mass media no longer supported the idea that returnees were victims in the 1960s, the VdH legitimated the returnees’ status by likening them to victims who were more visible at the time. They thus drew a parallel with the political prisoners who escaped from the GDR to the FRG, for both groups experienced imprisonment. After Reunification, the returnees and their descendants took advantage of the discussions on the compensation for forced laborers, claiming that returnees, too, performed forced labor during captivity. In the 2000s, members of the Bundestag—six of them being members of the VdH—also presented returnees from the former GDR as victims not only of war captivity, but also of the SED.

In the two remaining chapters, Wienand focuses on memories at the individual and local level. Because of this level of analysis, the results are more fragmented. She studies how individuals interpreted their war captivity to justify their personal transition from being a soldier to a civilian in ego documents. In the GDR, the published accounts, which had undergone censorship, described captivity as a moment when POWs realized they had antifascist convictions. Following Reunification, these authors adapted their narratives to the new audience by stressing the impossibility to criticize Stalinism in the GDR. In the West, returnees described war captivity as a time when a religious conversion or a political transformation took place. Wienand notes that these accounts are mostly descriptive and do not mention the crimes committed in the Third Reich. For this reason, the VdH adopted this conversion narrative...