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

In his influential study Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (1997), Jeffrey Herf discussed the profoundly different ways in which political actors in postwar West and East Germany addressed the Nazi-era mass murder of Jews and its legacies. Now Christina Morina, who was Herf’s doctoral student at the University of Maryland, has published a book of similar structure and import. Her theme is the divided memory in postwar German history of the Eastern front. As Morina convincingly shows, the experience of this war and its aftermath profoundly shaped postwar German political culture. Her account offers a corrective to the many studies on memory in postwar Germany that reduce “coming to terms with the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) to the Holocaust alone.

Morina’s particular focus is on what she calls the “political memory” of the Eastern Front: the ways in which the history of the war was turned into public use and as such shaped political culture. Germany’s division and the rapidly unfolding Cold War gave the memory of the war against the Soviet Union an extraordinary political charge from the very beginning, as leaders in both parts of Germany grappled with how to position themselves toward the postwar Soviet Union. At the same time, Morina cautions against studying political invocations of history through an exclusively utilitarian lens. Political speech, she writes, should not necessarily be dismissed as propaganda, for it is also rooted in personal experience and often carries personal beliefs and convictions. For this reason, and with a nod to Catherine Epstein’s The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Era (2003), Morina’s analysis focuses on the biographies of a range of politicians and veterans. These are the principal actors of her study.

The book is organized chronologically, and, in a succession of comparative chapters, covers the occupation period, the height of the Cold War, Ostpolitik, as well as German unification and its aftermath. The rigorously comparative perspective brings to light precious insights. In the immediate wake of the war, Germans in both East and West were equally inured to the sufferings of others. Morina pairs the shocked testimonies of Anna Seghers, who returned to East Germany from Mexican exile in 1947, and Hannah Arendt, who visited West Germany in 1949. Nowhere, Arendt remarked, was “the nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less talked about than in Germany itself” (65). These eyewitness accounts make clear how much political work was required to sensitivize the populations of both parts of Germany to different aspects of their country’s problematic past.

In the East, the speeches of Communist leaders left no doubt that the war against the Soviet Union had been a criminal undertaking. The prominent public discussion of the destruction German soldiers had wrought on Soviet soil ensured that no myth of a clean Wehrmacht could emerge, as it would in West Germany. Well into the 1960s (and especially during the June 1953 uprising and again in 1961), East German leaders invoked “June 22, 1941” to sound the alarm of a fascist attack and display their antifascist credentials. A former exile, SED leader Walter Ulbricht presented himself as the leader of “another,” free Germany. That vanguard position gave him license to absolve all German workers from any individual culpability in a mistaken war that had been forced upon them. Former Wehrmacht officers who had fallen into Soviet captivity at Stalingrad similarly embraced a Hegelian mode of history to emphasize how the Soviet system had opened their eyes to a new life and political future for Germany.

In the West, Stalingrad would, for many decades, exclusively connote the suffering of German soldiers who had been sacrificed by callous Nazi leaders. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer acknowledged early on Germany’s responsibility for the mass murder of the Jews of Europe, but signaled no contrition whatsoever toward the Soviet Union. While East German leaders...