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

4. Modernity’s Better Others: Youth in Jaspers’s Postwar University and Wiechert’s Reconstructive Agenda

4 In an essay on Ernst Wiechert that appeared in the Deutsche Rundschau in April 1948, Herbert Stegemann begins with what is, for the postwar period, the best-known aspect of the author’s career: Wiechert’s celebrated resistance to the Nazi regime. This resistance, Stegemann suggests , included first and foremost his “various ‘Speeches to the German Young,’” which doubtlessly belong to the “history of the German Abwehrkampfes [struggle for defense].” 1 Much as Jünger regarded his The Peace as his act of resistance, Stegemann confirms that the young were, at least from the perspective of the postwar period, one of the most important fronts on which “good” Germans fought the Nazis. Although Wiechert’s postwar reputation and the kind of optimistic Vergangenheitsbew ältigung it suggests also pivot on the young, Wiechert’s addresses to the “German young” construct a different kind of discourse about youth than either Friedrich Meinecke or Ernst Jünger. Wiechert, along with another important author from the early postwar period, Karl Jaspers, takes a very different, though likewise emphatic, approach to the German young. As I suggest in chapter 3, Meinecke and Jünger, after depicting National Socialism as a kind of deviation from the German nation, map onto Germany’s troubled modernity a particular discourse about youth, telescoping age onto historical processes in a way that anticipates their postwar projects of disciplining reconstruction. 129 Modernity‘s Better Others Youth in Jaspers‘s Postwar University and Wiechert‘s Reconstructive Agenda CHAPTER 4 130 The kind of discourse about youth Jaspers and Wiechert deploy, however , varies significantly from that of Mann, Meinecke, or Jünger in both conception and effect. Instead of mapping Germany’s problematic past onto the young, Karl Jaspers observes the tendency of others to blame the young for the national descent into National Socialism and replies directly to it in his many postwar publicist writings, lectures, and radio addresses on the university, work generally neglected in the considerable scholarship on the famous philosopher. Similarly avoiding the widespread upbraiding of the young, Ernst Wiechert celebrates youth’s outsider status as a means to resist the corrupting influence of modern society. In my overview of youth in postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung, I have shown how youth and Germany’s particular understanding of it served centrally in the nation ’s unusual modernity, especially in the fin de siècle and 1920s–30s periods, which then serve as indispensable background for the postwar period. But rather than playing the central villains of Germany’s deviant modernity, as they do for Meinecke and Jünger, the young in Jaspers and Wiechert have the positive potential to hold themselves aloof from the venal vagaries of German modernity. Neither Jaspers nor Wiechert telescopes youth onto Germany’s recent history and its nefarious descent into Nazism; rather, the young constitute the best aspects of the German nation, those elements that can counteract modernity’s destructive forces and will be able to provide the building blocks, even a cornerstone, for its reconstruction. Instead of blaming the young for Germany’s recent history, these authors suggest that the young can remedy it. Although the approach is revealingly different, the young are still a central aspect of these intellectuals’ coming to terms with the past: this somewhat different form of alterity nonetheless confirms youth’s particular role in German cultural history. The parallel between Jaspers and Wiechert is politically revealing as well. They were both celebrated in the postwar period as important intellectuals who had been apolitical but who, after the war, decided to become public leaders in Germany’s “hour of need.” For these apolitical intellectuals turned heroes, discourse about youth—rather than other axes of social/political difference—served most usefully to negotiate the complex questions of postwar Germany. Like Meinecke and Jünger, both Jaspers and Wiechert deploy discourse about the young to reconstitute the postwar community, but this community is not so much based on strict generational difference, disciplining, and hierarchy: MODERNITY’S BETTER OTHERS 131 rather, in a kind of progressive pedagogy, they redraw this postwar community around the young’s best attributes, in which they locate the future of German nation. Karl Jaspers’s Turn to the Public and the Postwar University The German people should not be annihilated, the German people should be educated. Karl Jaspers, “Renewal of the University” A giant among German intellectuals of any time, Karl Jaspers also counts as a...