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

2. The Jugendproblem (Youth Problem): Youth and Reeducation in the Early Postwar Public Sphere

2 On 22 January 1946 Pastor Martin Niemöller, a former inmate of Sachsenhausen and Dachau, gave a guest sermon in the Neustädter church in Erlangen, entitled harmlessly, perhaps deceptively so, “Lecture without a Topic” (“Vortrag ohne Thema”). In retrospect, the title seems either modest or misleading because Niemöller used his time in front of the students to deliver what was considered one of the most important postwar addresses on the question of German guilt (which was known at the time and thereafter simply as the die Schuldfrage [the guilt question]). In his encyclopedic cultural history of the period, for instance , Hermann Glaser called Niemöller’s lecture a “moral and cultural climax in the efforts of the anti-fascist circles to undergo a mourning period and to bring about an inner change in people.” 1 At the time, however , there was a different reason the address became famous besides Niemöller’s controversial calls for acknowledging the guilt of all Germans —to include, contentiously, an open admission of guilt to the victims of Germany between 1933 and 1945. In the early postwar period, it was in regard to Niemöller’s audience—students—that the sermon was passionately described, discussed, and debated. Newspaper reports underscored how virulently those students rejected Niemöller’s sermon and the strategy he proposed for confronting postwar German guilt. According to the press, as Niemöller argued that 59 CHAPTER 2 60 all Germans must acknowledge their guilt, he was interrupted multiple times by angry protests from the students; he was able to continue his address only because hosting officials appealed to the sanctity of the venue. When the Neue Zeitung published the sermon, it was careful to demark the passages that occasioned the student interruptions. 2 During and after the sermon, students allegedly arose and left the room, provocatively shuffling their feet and slamming the doors. Newspapers reported later that an anti-Niemöller pamphlet espousing Nazi beliefs was found pinned to the bulletin board of the university—though the newspapers were (most likely due to preemptive self-censoring) elusive about the details of its contents, U.S. intelligence reported that it labeled Niemöller a “tool of the Allies.” Indeed, Niemöller’s argument, like that of the famous Stuttgarter Erklärung, that all Germans must acknowledge their guilt—an argument eliding juridical and moral guilt that others were careful to distinguish—did seem very close to the Allies ’ insistence on broadly defined (if not entirely collective) guilt. Notwithstanding the sermon’s controversial negotiation of the labyrinthine questions of German guilt, the focus of the ubiquitous press reports revealingly remained on the behavior of the students. One report in the Mittelbayerische Zeitung segued quickly from a report about the address and its “Schuldbekenntnis” (admission of guilt) to a lengthy castigation of the students. 3 It berated the students for violating one of the basic tenets of democracy (the article recited piously), the “right to be heard.” After upbraiding the students for failing Germany’s nascent democracy and thereby Germany’s future, the report made the obvious connection to Germany’s problematic past: the students’ protest and rejection of Niemöller was not a surprise, given how many ex-Nazi officers had infiltrated the ranks of the “Studierenden.” Other articles, likewise circumventing the murky waters of Niemöller’s sermon for the clarity of more sensationalist material, made the same connection to Germany’s students and “the German young” (die deutsche Jugend) in general. A report entitled “Militaristische Studentenschaft” in the Frankenpost, more specific than that in the Mittelbayerische, criticized the militarism of the students, “at least 50 percent” of whom, but “more likely 90 percent,” were war veterans. 4 The shocked and concerned response was not limited to Bavaria: the Frankfurter Rundschau published a letter to Niemöller from the director of the Educational and Cultural Department of the Jewish community in Marburg that linked the “events in Erlangen” to Marburg, THE JUGENDPROBLEM 61 where Niemöller was also scheduled to speak but had to cancel due to the “nonconducive atmosphere” of the student audience awaiting him. The author of the letter, Israel Blumenfeld, said Niemöller’s reception among students was not so surprising given the young’s unrepentant attitude and invited Niemöller, a “fellow sufferer” of the camps, as Blumenfeld put it, to speak instead to the local Jewish community. 5 Thus, in a remarkable...