German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, and: After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (review)

A. Dirk Moses provides an excellent analysis and review of the sometimes esoteric and often bitter disputes between different schools of thought in Germany about the Holocaust and German guilt.

Moses begins by noting the widespread positive perception of the way Germans have handled their past by owning up to the criminal behavior and acts of the Nazis, who acted in the name of Germany. After the war Germans created a new, democratic political system that compares favorably with the older Western democracies. Unfortunately, this perception ignores the lack of internal consensus in German intellectual life since 1945 about how to relate to the Holocaust, a lack reflected recently by the controversy over the Holocaust Memorial near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

While none of the intellectuals treated in this study ever denied that horrible crimes had been committed by their country, strong disagreements developed. On the one hand were those who claimed that Germans were guilty collectively; that German historical developments from at least Martin Luther created an atmosphere that permitted the Holocaust; that many Germans were not capable of redemption; that the Allies as well as postwar Germans quickly became more interested in fighting communism than in rooting out former Nazis; and that the Federal Republic had little credibility as a set of institutions and practices sufficiently different from the past. Together, these and other charges constituted an assault on the very identity of a German nation that did not deserve to be reunited. On the other hand others argued against collective guilt and maintained that German history did not inevitably lead to Nazism, that Germans had made numerous efforts to compensate in a variety of ways for the Holocaust, that few former Nazis who had held offices of any importance were permitted to hold office after 1945, that communism represented a new challenge by a totalitarian movement, and that the establishment of the Federal Republic was a new and positive beginning in a success story in whose development East Germans had a right to share.

The persistence of criticism from the left led to numerous reactions, including examples such as a 1998 speech by Martin Walser complaining “that Holocaust memory is wielded like a ‘moral cudgel’ to bully Germans into accepting a politically correct version of their past.” Even Chancellor Schröder called for the “normalization” of German memory. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century discussion emerged in a number of books and articles about Germans who had been victims of bombing and expulsion from territories in the East.

In the meantime the left, so intensely critical of the alleged lack of contrition in German government and society, was shocked to learn that even some of its leading spokespersons were not entirely free of suspicion, as after the revelation in 2006 that Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass had served in the Waffen-SS when he was seventeen (pp. 3–4).

Such developments show that the sharp intellectual disputes of the past decades are still relevant. Moses wants “to explain the source of controversies about the national past between 1945 and 2005 as manifest enactments of an underlying structure of German political emotions. This structure was articulated in rival memory projects after the end of the Nazi regime, and it began to dissolve only at the beginning of the twenty-first century with the change of generations” (p. 5).

The book presents two basic sets of perspectives: those of the “Non-German Germans” (or “redemptive republicans”) and leftists; and those of the “German Germans” (or “integrative republicans”) and conservatives. On the other hand, Moses suggests that a consensus, while not inevitable, did develop regarding political institutions. This point, however, is more adequately developed in Jarausch’s book.

Some readers may be surprised by Moses’ disagreement with the “conventional view . . . that the...