The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans

Preface: The Loss of History in Postwar German Memory

Preface ix PREFACE The Loss of History in Postwar German Memory In human-political terms, the concept of a guilt beyond the crime and an innocence beyond kindness and virtue is meaningless. —HANNAH ARENDT TO KARL JASPERS, 17 AUGUST 1946 The War in the Air For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead Who rarely bothered coming home to die But simply stayed away out there In the clean war, the war in the air. Seldom the ghosts came back bearing their tales Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea, But stayed up there in the relative wind, Shades fading in the mind, Who had no graves but only epitaphs Where never so many spoke for never so few: Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars, Per aspera, to the stars. That was the good war, the war we won As if there was no death, for goodness’ sake. With the help of the losers we left out there In the air, in the empty air. —HOWARD NEMEROW (WAR STORIES 1987) Since the end of the Second World War, the politics of German memory has been fraught with fears of being misunderstood—fears that have grown and intensified over the last decades and have themselves become a part of German postwar history. They are familiar fears, and when Preface x asked about them ordinary Germans tend to shrug them off as a natural leftover from the Bad German past, a fact of life. Life, on the whole, has been relatively pleasant and reassuring for large numbers of Germans, as it has been for most populations in the West, once the all-consuming chaos of World War II ebbed. For the many millions of refugees, deportees , and late-returning POWs it took longer to get settled, but finally most West Germans, even those whose traumatic wartime experiences left them with harrowing memories, found their way back to a relative normality. Surprisingly soon, given the physical and emotional devastation , the unimaginable destruction caused by that war, the past retreated . As far as it concerned their own lives during the Third Reich, the past became shadowy, insubstantial, in the powerfully persuasive substantial presence of rebuilt cities and well-functioning political and social institutions that followed, as if logically, from the good, clean Allied victory. In hindsight, it may seem both natural and strange that this normality had repressed the recent past so quickly and thoroughly; that forgetting had become so impenetrable—as it were, memory-resistant. This would have been natural in the case of extreme experiences, because the instability and fragility of memory processes allowed a protective shield to form between the acceptable present and the unacceptable past. Yet it seems also strange because not all German experiences during the Nazi regime were extreme, or troubling. In its early years, the Third Reich seemed a good place to many of the intended inhabitants of that National -socialist utopia, the working and lower middle classes—better at any rate than the Weimar Republic, particularly in its late stage. But memories of these earlier years too appear to have retreated into a past beyond remembrance. It is true, this utopia’s pronounced exclusionary tendencies would soon show their true destructive, dystopian nature; and this change for the worse would have contributed to collectively forgetting the past experiences of those ordinary Germans who were not the designated victims of the Nazi regime’s increasingly violent tactics. If, looking back over sixty years, one sets aside for a moment those tactics and their terrible results, the most difficult to understand, the most strange, might seem the absence of German mourning for their dead killed in battle, in air raids, on the enforced treks from the East—as if, since they had not been permitted access to public memory, they could not be mourned. And like the dead, the loss of artifacts, created over many hundreds of years and destroyed in a few minutes by the huge storms of fire unleashed in the Allied air raids, was not mourned to keep them alive in memory. Their pitiful remnants were swept up in the clear- Preface xi ing away in preparation for rebuilding that started while the bombs were still falling, the corpses still decomposing under the rubble. The Federal Republic of Germany developed, as if naturally, into a stable and competent democratic technocracy boasting a high standard of living for a...