Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945 (review)

Professor Morina has written a sophisticated study of World War II, and of how that memory shaped public discourse and eventually political policy: “the public use of history.” This memory centers on the Eastern Front, where nearly 75 percent of German losses occurred (as opposed to just under 20 percent in the West and just under 10 on other fronts). As the study’s title suggests, for both sides the most important focus of memory of the war was Stalingrad, a symbol of German defeat and Soviet victory.

Not surprisingly, the discussion was very different in the two Germanys. In East Germany the leaders cast a positive image of the Soviet Union. German Communists shared in the victory over fascism, and used it to lay the foundations of a socialist state allied to the USSR. The Soviet Union was the “victim, enemy and conqueror of Nazi Germany” in conjunction with the German Communists living in exile there. In this interpretation, the Holocaust and the war on other fronts were marginalized. In the West—at least initially—a negative image of the Eastern Front emerged. The Germans, especially the soldiers, were cast as victims of the Soviet war machine, as were German civilians when the war came home.

Biography plays an important role, although Morina’s is not primarily a biographical study. The experience of a generation of leaders—from Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck to Erich Honecker in the East, and from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Schmidt in the West—formed images of the war that changed with Cold War and post-Cold War developments. The latter compelled the leaders to stress different elements of the war as changes in current politics required them to do so. As Morina summed it up: “political memory is not merely the result of political and ideological calculation but a synthesis of experience, world view and circumstance.” Her biographical portraits vary, some of them short and vague; the best is that of Walter Ulbricht, linking wartime experience, ideology, and politics (including the organization of German POWs in Soviet captivity).

The Nazi interpretation of the war in the East as a noble, but in the end tragic, cause lingered in public memory. In both Germanys postwar popular sentiment rejected the Nuremberg trials. One observer said that the Germans had grown a “thick skin” and were immersed in a “vital forgetfulness” (p. 65). Morina notes that “the Nuremberg Interregnum, with its historical candor and efforts to address individual responsibility, left no lasting impression on the minds of the political elites or on the public mind” (p. 66). This was fortunate for men like Field Marshall Erich von Manstein, an “unrepentant convicted war criminal” (p. 94), while Friedrich Paulus, German commander at Stalingrad, worked with the Communists and even testified against former officers. Military myths justified past and present officer behavior. In the West, the “Wehrmacht myth” swept under the carpet the crimes of the German army. The famous “Affidavit of the Generals” exculpated the Wehrmacht. In the East, former POWs manifested an “inner reversal” by reorienting their views to embrace socialism; these “Stalingraders” admitted to having been misled by Hitler, but claimed the “rehabilitation” that allowed many to join the East German government.

Both sides used the war to justify rearmament in the 1950s. The Soviet Union’s campaign had been a “just” war of liberation, and now the East Germans had to defend that victory. The debate over rearmament in the West mostly left out Wehrmacht crimes; West German politicians lamented the German soldiers still in Soviet captivity. Arming against an aggressive postwar USSR, West German leaders tried to rescue an “honorable” tradition for the Wehrmacht. The Eastern Front faded from the debate over remilitarization in the West, while it remained central to discussions in East Germany. Both sides pointed to renewed threats—capitalist imperialism on the one hand, Soviet expansionism on...