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

1. Historical Memory and the Uses of Remorse

1 Historical Memory and the Uses of Remorse Suspicion The single most exploitable political commodity in the postwar era has been Nazi Evil. At the end of what was arguably the most destructive war in Western historical memory, Germans were confronted with the inescapable enormity of material and moral devastation and the expectation that they accept it as their responsibility. Collectively they had become “the German Question” announced on the title page of Life’s famous photo essay on the opening of the concentration camps. Like televised images later, these photo images would reach a large American viewership, penetrating into the private sphere of their homes. But photographs ’ presence there would be more permanent and thus more powerful . Connected with other photos sequentially, each moment frozen in the individual image would not supersede nor yield to the others; it would not easily release the appalled and fascinated viewer. Widely distributed and looked at repeatedly, these photographs were meant to assure the permanent memory—“lest we forget”—of the unspeakable , unbelievable suffering of the victims and the cruelty of the perpetrators: how could “the Germans” have done it? Were they not all monsters? For a variety of reasons, assumptions of collective guilt and demands for collective remorse would not only endure but grow for over half a century. This period has seen enormous cultural and political changes, among them rapid globalization; but the notion of a uniquely German “unmastered,” “uncompleted,” unspeakably and in- The War in the Empty Air 2 exhaustibly “bad past” has remained a politically potent issue—in important ways even more so now than in the first decades after the war. The politics of suspicion since the end of WWII have drawn on profound doubts that “the Germans” will ever “truly” confront their “bad past”; that “they” have never been, will never become “truly” remorseful , and therefore can never be “truly” forgiven, readmitted to the comity of peoples, “redeemed” in normality. Morally powerful arguments, these doubts have drawn on semireligious, supra-historical yearnings for an enduring, uniquely meaningful status of the victims of Nazi persecutions : “the Holocaust” as the exclusive focus of German collective memory of the Second World War and the crucible of Western modernity . The desire, inevitable in this situation, for acknowledgment of guilt and signs of remorse and the suspicious accusations that the remorse of the guilty, the irredeemable Tätergeneration (generation of perpetrators ), was not sincere were to increase and harden over the decades because German collective guilt had seemed, and therefore remained, irrefutable from the beginning. This did not mean that the Germans felt collectively guilty but that it had become increasingly difficult to discuss this topic with any degree of openness, once the anxiously self-searching debates of German guilt in the immediate postwar years had come to an end. Curiously, over the years it seemed more and more impossible to look at the issues from different perspectives supported by different experiences and state these positions publicly. One of the reasons was the moral-political authority, from the beginning, of the assumption of collective guilt, which would reassert itself powerfully in the generational conflicts of the sixties and seventies. This authority was largely responsible for focusing all public remembrance of the war on the victims of the Nazi regime, especially Jews, which made public control of memory more effective. The desire to direct collective memory has to be seen in connection with both spontaneously horrified and politically calculating reactions, on the American as well as the German side, to the extraordinary scale of Nazi criminality revealed at the end of the war.1 In time this control would result in a near total lack of interest, both German and international, in the extreme war experiences of a large part of the German population. An important aspect of this development has been fear that memory discourses of German war experiences might be perceived as intentional parallelism suggesting comparability with the experiences and memories of the victims of the Nazi regime. Historical Memory and the Uses of Remorse 3 Such feared misperception would provoke strong accusations that Germans wanted to challenge the uniqueness of Nazi persecutions and thus question the cultural status of the Holocaust, “Auschwitz,” as the all-devouring black hole of Western modernity. In postwar Germany, all public and private German memory discourses of WWII could only mean one thing, namely guilty attempts to avoid the responsibilities...