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Introduction: Healing Postwar Germany
- University of Michigan Press
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Introduction: Healing Postwar Germany he: . . . Think of an illness. A person has had typhoid fever, for eight weeks. He’s survived. Now he is just lying there. The typhoid is gone. But he has neuritis, cold abscesses, he feels sick as a dog. He feels weaker than before. He can’t eat, he can’t sit up, he has bedsores, and he hurts all over. He cries. He’s unrecognizable. But—he no longer has typhoid. she: When I had typhoid, my hair fell out, and even some of my teeth. he: You see. You call that the post-illness phase, and a state of weakness . But it’s just the same with the war. It began with ›ags and parades . It ended with gunshots and cannons, with drums and trumpets . The fever sank. And now comes the worst of it. It lingers on afterward. —Alfred Döblin, “Sie hätten Chancen gehabt” When the European theater of World War II came to a close on 8 May 1945, Germany faced the central question of how to recover from twelve years of physical, moral, and spiritual devastation. If the occupied nation had effectively ceased to exist as a political entity, its population was nevertheless almost immediately engaged in the process of rebuilding the country—reestablishing some semblance of a normalized, peacetime existence , restoring its bombed-out cities, and renewing cultural and intellectual life. Inevitably, artists and thinkers played a prominent role in these efforts . Seizing opportunities unavailable under the repressive censorship of National Socialist rule, German authors, journalists, ‹lmmakers, and other intellectuals took up the challenge to produce a postwar art that could contribute to the process of collective rejuvenation. The result was a ›ourishing cultural life amid the ruins, with myriad newspapers, theater productions, public lectures, art exhibitions, and ‹lm screenings. These postwar writers and artists were responding to an overwhelming sense of crisis, brought on by the ruin of German cities, the death of millions of civilians and soldiers, and the collapse of the Nazi state, as well as the horri‹c revelations of German atrocities—the blame for which the Allies squarely directed at the nation’s citizens, with posters declaring “This is your fault.” Historians, trying to trace the roots of the nation’s current condition, referred to the National Socialist period as a “disaster” (Unheil) that had led to “catastrophe.”1 And as one cultural critic warned, if Germany did not ‹nd a way out of its present state of “spiritual agony” then “the cleverest attempts at saving and reviving” the country would come to naught: “[Germany] will be dead, will remain dead.”2 The discourse of crisis was so prevalent as to become fodder for satire: as one writer noted with some sarcasm, Germany’s constant confrontation with death in recent years had given rise to an atmosphere of “general delight in crisis” (allgemeine Krisenfreudigkeit).3 Postwar Germans shared a sense that the nation’s very existence hung in the balance, and the texts that emerged from this period were marked by an intense preoccupation with the well-being of the nation and the possibilities for spiritual and physical renewal. As this book explores, one of the key discourses circulating in post1945 cultural production was that of the nation as a critically wounded body, a German Patient. Looking to address and ameliorate the country’s condition after the fall of Hitler’s regime, German thinkers claimed that the nation was suffering from the extended effects of fascism. Postwar writers and artists characterized Germany as ill and Nazism as a disease, formulating a diagnosis of the recent past and its roots, and prescribing various methods to achieve collective recuperation. In so doing, they drew upon a substantial national tradition of biopolitical metaphor. While the use of illness imagery has a long history within the broader Western tradition , from classical Greek ruminations on the “body politic” to Hobbes’s Leviathan, post-1945 writers worked within a narrower ‹eld of reference. They took recourse to a long history of German confrontation with questions of national well-being—from ‹n de siècle accounts of Modernity as a contagious malaise to Weimar confrontations with the devastating psychological and physical, as well as economic, costs of world war. More important still, they were informed by National Socialist notions of a healthy Volk and its perceived enemies. Thus although the discourse of national health was not always fascist, after fascism it would forever bear the imprint of National Socialism’s...