Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History

CHAPTER THREE: Christmas in Enemy Territory

93 3 ChristmasinEnemyTerritory “Jesus needs us now, we feel it, so he can fulfill his world purpose with our swords.” Christmas sermon of Chaplain D. G. Goens, delivered at Kaiser Wilhelm II’s General Headquarters in occupied Belgium, 24 December 1914 On the clear, starlit night of 24 December 1914, British rifleman Graham Williams looked over the top of his trench on the front in Flanders and saw that “lights began to appear along the German parapet.” Startled, he looked more closely and determined that these “were evidently make-shift Christmas trees, adorned with lighted candles, which burnt steadily in the still frosty air!” During the night, no shots were fired; instead, German and British soldiers in opposing trenches traded carols, and Williams heard the strains of “Silent Night, Holy Night” for the first time. On the following Christmas Day, several hundred or perhaps a thousand soldiers fraternized in small, individual groups in no-man’s-land along a fifteen-mile stretch of the Flanders front. They shook hands, buried their dead, played soccer, and exchanged token gifts of tobacco, chocolate, schnapps, and unit badges.1 The military authorities on both sides quickly forbade such acts of fraternization as high treason. Yet for one brief moment, in the words of the official historian of the German 133rd Saxons, the war took “the tranquil form of a singing match.”2 The ironies of the famous “Christmas truce” continue to exert a hold on the popular and historical imagination. The History Channel’s DVD The ChristmasTruce(2007)includesvoluminousfirsthandaccountsof“aremarkable story of the Christmas spirit . . . that symbolized the change from [the] Nineteenth to the Twentieth century.”3 German journalist Michael Jürgs’s sentimental book Der kleine Frieden im großen Krieg (The Little Peace in the Great War), again based primarily on eyewitness reports, has been through Figure 3.1 The Christmas tree as “Golden Bridge” between front and Heimat. (Der Schützengraben [The Trench], December 1915) Christmas in Enemy Territory 95 five editions since its initial publication in 2003. The New York Times reports that in 2006 an Irish pop star paid $27,000 for an original, handwritten fivepage letter describing the events, and the cloying French feature film Merry Christmas (2005) turns the truce into a saccharine melodrama of opera, love, and fraternization.4 Stanley Weintraub’s Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2002) is only the latest English-language attempt to provide a detailed account of events.5 Historian George Mosse concluded that the fellow feeling shown in the trenches captured the “real” Christmas spirit. According to Paul Fussell, the truce signaled “the last twitch of the nineteenth century” and the opening of the modern era.6 German historians , for their part, have suggested that the truce shows that ordinary soldiers readily challenged their officers and disobeyed orders from above, calling into question the myth of the trench community propagated by nationalists during and after the war.7 This almost obsessive focus on the Christmas truce obscures the history of a much more typical and ordinary wartime Christmas. Indeed the observance of what Germans called War Christmas (Kriegsweihnachten) would become all too familiar in the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1950, Germans celebrated one out of every five Christmases while the nation was at war. War Christmas forced soldiers and civilians to endure experiences that were hardly Christmaslike. As Catholic chaplain Fridolin Mayer, stationed on the West Front, wrote in his diary on 24 December 1914: “In the field hospital lie wounded from the 111th, the company had formed up in Souchez in order to receive Christmas packages. Bang, a shell, a few men dead, a number of wounded. For a Christmas present, a burial with music.”8 Violence, death, and separation from home during what was supposed to be a celebration of Christian peace and family love led to the emergence of paradoxical forms of ritual practice. War Christmas reshaped long-standing customs in tenuous attempts to resolve the tensions between war and peace, home and front, public duties and private observances. However fragile the results, the contradictions apparently made soldiers’ celebrations uniquely moving: whether in 1870, 1914, or 1940, they commented repeatedly on the “unforgettable” nature of their wartime holiday. War Christmas was a hybrid holiday, an unstable amalgam of official and vernacular practices. The dominant institutions of German society drew on memories of the chauvinist...