Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War

Conclusion: Mobilizing Youth for the Cold War

Conclusion Mobilizing Youth for the Cold War The Postwar University as Cold War Front The star vehicle films And the Heavens Above, Ways into Twilight, and The Last Illusion echo the kind of discourse about youth that I elaborated in the introduction. In my introduction to youth and reeducation in the early postwar public sphere in chapter 2, I argued that in postwar newspapers, in the Niemöller episode, and in policy debates, both Germans and the Allies displaced central challenges of the past—including former and persisting Nazism, anti-Semitism, and guilt—onto reeducation and other conflicts between the generations. In this wide range of media and in diverse contexts, a parental and especially pedagogical subjectivity becomes normative for this environment in which the operable subject positions available to Germans were radically curtailed by the war and the occupation. In addressing questions begged so obviously by the recent past, both authors and filmmakers turned to discourse about youth and education to represent and negotiate issues that had become nearly unworkable. Already by 1948, however, reeducation in general and the universities in particular were becoming sites contested not so much between Allied occupiers and German occupied as between the Soviets and the Western forces. The year 1948 was a watershed in which “Trizonia,” as 259 CONCLUSION 260 the loose alliance among the U.S., British, and French zones was informally called, congealed around the June 1948 currency reform; the subsequent blockade of Berlin hardened polarized positions and provoked open aggressions between “East” and “West.” Given the prominent role reeducation and the university in particular had played in early postwar discourse, it is not surprising that the university became, in this context as well, a political, social, and cultural flashpoint for these variegated tensions . If the Niemöller sermon and a film like The Last Illusion, as well as writers as diverse as Mann, Meinecke, Jünger, and others, underscore the centrality of discourse about youth before the 1950s, then the 1948 controversy about Berlin universities and a film like Gustav von Wangenheim ’s controversial 48 All Over Again confirm how important the university and the young would continue to be within wider German culture as they became important fronts in the coalescing cold war. Wandering Students and the Vagaries of German History As Gustav von Wangenheim’s first film after the war, 48 All Over Again was, like Kortner’s The Last Illusion, taken to be a major statement by an important cultural figure bringing all his exile experience and insight to bear on Germany’s postwar plight. 1 Like The Last Illusion, 48 All Over Again foregrounds the relationship between students and history, a relationship that provides the film with its overarching conceit. 48 All Over Again comes to terms with a more distant past to overcome the burdens of recent history: it follows a group of students that has been hired—at a time of radical unemployment and underemployment—to serve as extras on a film about the 1848 revolution. The film opens with the shooting of this film within a film, which treats the events of the famously aborted revolution as comic absurdity. 48 All Over Again subsequently proceeds on dual temporal tracks, cutting (occasionally panning ) between 1848 sets and those of the postwar ruins of Germany in a fashion that was heralded as “dialectical” by Soviet-zone critics. 2 During the shooting of the 1848/1948 comedy, one of the student extras, Else Weber (played by von Wangenheim’s wife, Inge von Wangenheim), disagrees vociferously about the nature of the 1848 events, taking to task both the film’s director and the apathetic students who are blithely happy to supplement their incomes by appearing in the film. One medical student, Heinz (played by Ernst Borchert of Mertens MOBILIZING YOUTH FOR THE COLD WAR 261 fame in The Murderers Are among Us), resists Else’s “progressive” interpretation of the 1848 events, agreeing with the director that they were politically absurd. 48 All Over Again thereafter not only traces the students ’ performance in the film within a film, it also stages a historical debate between those students dismissive of Germany’s history (and by implication politics) and those engaged with and committed to the nation ’s progressive traditions. The film thus offers a more politicized and polarized kind of Vergangenheitsbewältigung that comes to terms with the past by debating longer-term historical trends. In this...