Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History

CHAPTER SIX: Ghosts of Christmas Past

239 6 GhostsofChristmasPast The birth of the Savior—throughout all the centuries for us Germans it is the most beloved celebration, the celebration that moves everyone deeply: young and old, men and women. No matter where in the world a German finds himself on Holy Eve—his thoughts make their way back to the homeland, to childhood, to his perhaps long-lost parents and brothers and sisters. This celebration awakens sensations, touches on values, on feelings, which have been shaken by the bustle and haste of our day and appear to have died out. But they are not dead, they are only masked by the pressure to work for ourselves and for those close to us. They are masked as well by the restlessness and the pleasure seeking of our time. When Christmas approaches, when Holy Eve is upon us, then these feelings, these values come back to life in us all. Annual Christmas address, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, 1955 “But it’s Christmas, Peace Christmas!” cries war criminal Ferdinand Brückner at the end of Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are Among Us, the first feature film released in Germany after the Second World War. Produced in 1946 by the East German studio DEFA, this exemplary rubble film tells the story of Dr. Hans Mertens, a traumatized veteran who at the start of the film believes that “mankind is no longer worth saving.” As he moves through the ruins of postwar Berlin, Mertens slowly recovers his sense of self-worth. He proposes marriage to his companion Susannah and begins to lead a normal life. First, however, he has to overcome the mental anguish caused by memories of the atrocities he witnessed in a small village in occupied Poland on Christmas Eve 1942. It was no coincidence that director/ writer Wolfgang Staudte used Christmas to frame his protagonist’s confrontation with the Nazi past. As Chancellor Adenauer asserted repeatedly in his annual holiday addresses, celebrations of “Holy Eve” awakened emotionally Figure 6.1 Christmas miracle on the Ku’damm: gift-wrapped Opel Kadett. (Der Spiegel, 22 December 1965) Ghosts of Christmas Past 241 loaded memories of lost loved ones and fragile spiritual values. The holiday encompassed a vision of wholeness for Germans coming to grips with their shattered past and present, determined to remake their history in whatever way they could. Murderers offered postwar audiences a prescient, almost uncanny reading of the main themes that would circulate through German Christmas in the postwar decades. Like Mertens, Susannah, and Brückner, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain used the holiday to regain a sense of stability in the crisis of the immediate postwar years, to manage memories of National Socialism, and to rebuild family lives after the brutalities of war. Politicians, leading clergymen, and ordinary citizens alike remade Christmas to deal with the exigencies of a Cold War world.1 The climax of Murderers uses War Christmas as a freighted backdrop for the requisite confrontation with the Nazi past. As Susannah and Mertens prepare a modest celebration on Christmas Eve 1945, a flashback reveals the cause of Mertens’s distress. Three years earlier, his army unit had massacred over 120 Polish civilians on Christmas Eve, including women and children. Commanding officer Brückner had ordered the massacre, and, despite his best efforts, Mertens was unable to prevent the slaughter. In a scene clearly meant to shock contemporary viewers, the film shows Captain Brückner and his uniformed staff officers singing “O How Joyfully” around the candlelit tree—an image all too familiar from Nazi holiday newsreels—and then cuts to the bodies of the innocent victims felled by the firing squad. Christmas is the setting for atrocity, but also atonement. By chance, Mertens has met Brückner in Berlin after the war. The former captain is now a prosperous factory owner, an opportunistic “murderer among us” who has successfully hidden his criminal past. Now, overcome by a need to remake his own history , Mertens decides to take revenge in the “name of humanity.” He abruptly leaves Susannah over Christmas dinner, takes his revolver, and walks through the Berlin rubble to Brückner’s factory. Mertens observes Brückner presiding over his company Christmas party and draws his pistol to take revenge, but he hesitates as a frightened Brückner professes his innocence and invokes the spirit of Peace Christmas. Before Mertens can shoot, his fiancée, who followed...