(West) German Democracy Fulfilled?

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Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America. By Heide Fehrenbach. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2005. xiii 263 pp. $29.95 (hardback). Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany. By Dagmar Herzog. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2005. 361 pp. $32.95 (hardback)/$19.95 (paperback). Vernichten und Erinnern: Spuren nationalsozialistischer Gedächtnispolitik. By Dirk Rupnow. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. 2005. 384 pp. €32.00 (hardback). Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980. Edited by Ulrich Herbert. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. 2003 (2nd edn). 587 pp. €40.00 (hardback). 1945 und Wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewußtsein der Deutschen. By Norbert Frei. Munich: C.H. Beck. 2005. 220 pp. €19.90 (hardback). The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law. By Devin O. Pendas. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. xx 340 pp. £40.00. The War in the Empty Air. By Dagmar Barnouw. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2005. xiv 303 pp. $21.00 (hardback). 1

I would like to thank Jan Palmowski for inviting me to write this review essay.

German History Vol. 25 No. 2

10.1177/0266355406075722 © 2007 The German History Society

Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Muenchen on March 29, 2016

Democratization as Cultural History, or: When is (West) German Democracy Fulfilled?1

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Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial. By Rebecca Wittmann. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press. 2005. 336 pp. $35.00/£22.95/ €32.30 (hardback).

Let us imagine a new way of looking at democracy in West Germany. Not one that relies on theories of modernization, structure or transition, and not one that deals primarily with classes, élite behaviour or economic well-being. This understanding would readily concede that the three-party system stabilized the Federal Republic; that the absence of a right-wing democratic opposition to the CDU/CSU allowed for liberal conservatism; or that the end to denominational strife pacified the polity. At the same time, however, it would be informed by an emphasis on how democracy is perceived and enacted, rather than idealizations of democracy or teleological models that anticipate specific end results. The work of two prominent political scientists might prove helpful in this respect. Benjamin Barber has undertaken to demonstrate that democratic politics ‘is precisely not a cognitive system concerned with what we know and how we know it but a system of conduct concerned with what we will together and do together and how we agree on what we will do’. Democracy, then, is ‘practical, not speculative, about action rather than truth’.2 Similarly, Adam Przeworski has defined democracy as ‘a system of ruled open-endedness, or organized uncertainty’, which makes it very difficult for any one actor, institution or power to pre-determine the outcomes of decision-making.3 Both thinkers, then, spurn epistemological questions that would require a definition of democracy in terms of its root values and antecedent normative foundations. Instead, they see democracy ‘as a regime/culture/civil society/government in which we make (will) common decisions, choose common conduct, and create or express common values in the practical domain of our lives in an everchanging context of conflict of interests and competition for power’.4 These ideas coincide with the attempt to trace the history of democracy in (West) Germany. They are related to the historian’s interest in how human 2 Bejamin R. Barber, ‘Foundationalism and Democracy’, in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, 1996), p. 348. 3 Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge, 1991), p. 13. The usefulness of Przeworski’s approach lies in its ‘minimalist conception’ of democracy, which allows us to follow debates on how democracy might be improved or perfected without subscribing to a perfectionist view in the first place. See Adam Przeworski, ‘Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense’, in Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón, Democracy’s Value (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 23–55. 4 Barber, ‘Foundationalism’, p. 350.


Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany. By Frank Biess. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press. 2006. xiii 367 pp. $35.00 (hardback).

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5 See also Michael Wildt, Generation der Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002), p. 470.


beings come to embrace or reject certain values, belief systems, or practices. And, both in terms of temperament and outlook, they accord with the proclivity to address discontinuity rather than continuity in German history. While all of the books under review purport to adhere to this anti-teleological principle, some continue to hold fast, albeit implicitly, to the notion that democracy as truth, rather than democracy as action, guides the study of democracy in general, and of West German democracy in particular. That is, although the term ‘democracy’ might not even be mentioned—the subject-matter being sex, or air raids, or Jews instead—the predilection for prescription (how people ought to have behaved) suggests a preference for democracy in a predetermined, normative guise. Perhaps the best place to start in juxtaposing these views is a comparison of Ulrich Herbert’s Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland with Norbert Frei’s 1945 und Wir. The books are very different in nature. The first, a collection of essays by younger historians, is an academic tome; the second, a collection of articles all but two of which have been published elsewhere, a slim volume written for a general audience. Underlying Herbert’s work is the element of surprise. At the outset, he argues that the ‘extent of societal change as well as the political and social stability, especially however the widely discernible “Fundementalliberalisierung” of state and society, politics and culture’ are ‘breathtaking’ (p. 7). This transformation, he continues, is all the more stunning given our knowledge of the degree to which society had embraced National Socialist values during the Third Reich.5 Finally, while shifts in mentality, Lebenswelten, or cultural norms usually require several decades, such change occurred in the course of twenty-five years—and ‘this calls for more precise description and explanation’ (p. 9). The contributors to the volume seek to do just that. To take three examples: in his discussion of Ralf Dahrendorf, who associated the acceptance of political conflict with liberal democracy, and Jürgen Habermas, who claimed that democracy required popular participation, Moritz Scheibe recounts the intellectual ‘search for a democratic society’ in the 1950s and 1960s. Scheibe is able to show how numerous thinkers tried to add flesh to the bones of West Germany’s political institutions by contemplating democratic norms and behavioural patterns that went beyond constitutional arrangements. Julia Ubbelohde examines the debates surrounding the country’s youth, specifically responses to their violations of social conventions. Although surveys of the 1950s indicate that a majority of youth hardly displayed unusual forms of deportment, indeed that most of them were ‘honest’ and ‘upright’ (brav), there still existed a pervasive fear that ‘modernity’ was threatening the younger generation. Ubbelohde argues persuasively that these anxieties

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corresponded with parallel efforts to institute moral and sexual norms based on natural law theory—also as a means to reintroduce bourgeois values in the wake of National Socialism. From the late 1950s onwards, she concludes, the growing influence of sociology, development psychology, and psychoanalysis led to a re-evaluation of youth delinquency, so that scholars and politicians increasingly attributed problematic behaviour to social disorder rather than individual dysfunction. In a similar vein, Torsten Gass-Bohm establishes analogous changes in the school system, where in the 1960s and 1970s officials began to enhance the status of pupils. Unlike in the postwar period, teachers came to spurn the ‘Pädagogik des Durchgreifens’, opting for more tolerant approaches instead. This new line enabled students to explore new avenues—especially with regard to sexuality—within the confines of school and elsewhere. Like Ubbelohde, Gass-Bohm suggests that the impact of sociology and psychology, both of which posited the malleability of individual behaviour, contributed to this revision of hitherto dearly held positions. Norbert Frei’s starting point is not very different from Herbert’s. The Jena historian is equally adamant that Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft had an enduring legacy, one that could be encountered in numerous instances after 1945. Thus, public repudiations of the purported thesis of collective guilt were ‘an expression of the persisting need for a Volksgemeinschaft solidarity’ (p. 32) in the early Federal Republic. In fact, Frei maintains that the very belief that collective guilt had been imposed from outside implied a collective mindset derived from a collective bad conscience (p. 154). According to the author, other examples of this mindset abound, ranging from the near absence of any form of revenge against the foundering Nazi élites in the 1944–1945 period to the ambivalent postwar posture towards the German resistance, the reverence of which would have implied ‘a disapproval of the behaviour of the great majority of the former Volksgemeinschaft’ (p. 130). But while Frei agrees with Herbert on this point, some of the other arguments advanced in 1945 und Wir contrast with the overall tenor of Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland. Its appreciable power notwithstanding, Frei occasionally intimates that a more rapid dissolution of the Volksgemeinschaft ought to have occurred. In the opening chapter, for example, he censures the knee-jerk reactions of many Germans after 1945 when confronted with the wider question of guilt and responsibility. Reacting in this manner, Frei contends, prevented them from engaging in ‘the possibility of real mourning’ (p. 12), including their own suffering. One might question this logic. Many Germans did mourn missing relatives, fallen soldiers, and destroyed cities. Moreover, there appears to be a central paradox in admitting widespread German guilt on the one hand, and expecting mourning and shame on the other. Incapable of reproaching each other, Germans of the Volksgemeinschaft would have had a difficult time in castigating their own crimes. Mourning the Jews, furthermore, would have

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6 Hermann Lübbe, ‘Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Nachkriegsbewußtsein’, Historische Zeitschrift, 236 (1983), pp. 579–99. Also Werner Bergmann and Rainer Erb, ‘Kommunikationslatenz, Moral und öffentliche Meinung: Theoretische Überlegungen zum Antisemitismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 38 (1986), pp. 223–246. 7 In addition to the discussion in this review article, a separate review of Sex after Fascism is due to appear in the next issue of German History, 25, 3 (2007).


assumed that this group had somehow remained part of the larger moral community, something the lingering Volksgemeinschaft ideal all but ruled out. Put differently, was it possible to mourn the Jews in the aftermath of their isolation, ostracism, and deportation to the East, especially at a time when one’s ‘own’ victims were everywhere visible? As for the 1950s, Frei rejects the position, most prominently advanced by Hermann Lübbe, that a certain amount of silence was necessary to incorporate former National Socialists into the new state and thereby to stabilize the fledgling democracy.6 On the contrary, he insists that in the mid-1950s ‘nothing spoke in favour’ of the view that ‘the social and political conditions in the Federal Republic’ were ‘particularly precarious’ (p. 33). But if we take seriously Frei’s earlier emphasis on the impressive afterlife of the Volksgemeinschaft as well as Dahrendorf’s or Habermas’s disquiet in the 1960s concerning the level of support for liberal democracy, some skepticism may be in order. Frei’s conjecture, in short, is less convincing than Herbert’s surprise. Or, Herbert’s attempt at delineating the to and fro of democracy in the Federal Republic accords better with the concept of democracy as action, whereas Frei’s tacit disappointment with past conduct resembles more the idea of democracy as truth. Amongst the books reviewed here, there are more conspicuous examples of the latter stance. While evincing a historical frame of mind, they retain a pedagogical impulse that goes hand in hand with teleology. Both Dagmar Herzog’s Sex after Fascism and Dagmar Barnouw’s The War in the Empty Air belong to this genre, and both are far removed from Herbert’s original position of incredulity. Sex after Fascism is rich, evocative, and often exciting.7 Although Herzog includes a chapter on the GDR, her book is overwhelmingly concerned with the FRG. Put simply, Herzog advances three theses: first, National Socialists encouraged sex; second, postwar West Germans undertook to repress this fact; and third, this repression gave rise to the image of Nazism as sexually constrictive and uptight. From the very beginning, Herzog intimates that postwar West Germans pursued collective projects based on rational choice. Indeed, the Federal Republic itself, ‘in striving to be incorporated into the Cold War West, was able to manipulate the memory of Nazism and to redirect moral debate away from the problem of complicity in mass murder and toward a narrowed conception of morality as solely concerned with sex’ (p. 1). While

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8 Miriam Gebhardt, ‘Haarer meets Spock: Frühkindliche Sozialisation nach 1945’, in Miriam Gebhardt and Clemens Wischermann (eds), Familiensozialisation seit 1933—Verhandlungen über Kontinuität (Stuttgart, 2007), forthcoming.


she admits that this way of ‘managing the memory of Nazism and the Holocaust’ was never ‘fully conscious or rationalized’ (p. 5), much of the language she uses suggests otherwise. Sex after Fascism is primarily about the first twenty-five years after Hitler’s death. Although the author speaks of ‘the’ Federal Republic or ‘the’ West Germans, she really means certain circles in the 1950s and their critics in the 1960s. The first group, comprising conservatives and clerics, espoused a sexual conservatism that was in large part a ‘new postwar invention’ (p. 98) born of the need to overcome National Socialism. The second group, made up of liberals and the New Left student movement, championed sexual emancipation ‘on the grounds that sexual repression was not merely a characteristic of fascism but its very cause’ (p. 2). Herzog’s main point here is that, far from being sexually repressive, the Nazis ‘advanced an often ribald and unapologetic celebration of sexuality’ (p. 4). Their successors, compelled as they were to find alternative morals, responded with pro-family rhetoric and restrictive policy. The next generation, in turn, mistook postwar reactions to Nazi sexuality as Nazi sexuality itself. This version of events is fascinating. Yet it hinges on premises—some empirical, others methodological—that might be qualified. On the empirical side, Herzog’s account of sexuality in the Third Reich is not always convincing. As the author herself admits, ‘throughout the Third Reich, a wealth of regimeendorsed writings advanced the argument that racial purity and national recovery depended on premarital elites’ chastity, monogamous and prolifically procreative marriage, and wholesome family life’ (p. 17). Das Schwarze Korps, for example, repeatedly demanded ‘cleanliness’ in ‘matters of love’ and the ‘realm of sex’ (p. 36), tempering its other statements in defence of illegitimacy and nonproductive extramarital heterosexual intercourse. Furthermore, Herzog cites works that are not always representative of mainstream thought. For instance, she refers to the rather obscure Johannes H. Schulz (GeschlechtLiebe-Ehe, 1940) as a counter-example to the ‘emotional coldness and lack of physical affection’ (p. 31) advocated in Nazi child-rearing literature, although the influence of Johanna Haarer or Hildegard Hetzer, both of whom propounded unemotional detachment, was immeasurably greater, extending well into the Federal Republic itself.8 Methodologically, Sex after Fascism contains passages that, first, reveal an underlying tension between discourse and reality; and second, establish motives that are not substantiated. While we learn much about the language of sex, the extent to which discourse reflected reality is discussed almost in passing. This imbalance is significant because the reader is led to assume that Sex after Fascism is an accurate rendition of how ‘Germans’ or ‘ the Federal Republic’

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9 For example Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill and London, 1995); Yule F. Heibel, Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945–1950 (Princeton and London, 1995) and Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2004), pp. 129–36. 10 Christian Democrats and Social Democrats vied against each other on many fronts, including the question of unmarried couples. See Sybille Buske, ‘Die Debatte über “Unehelichkeit” ’, in Herbert, Wandlungsprozesse, pp. 315–47.


handled the weighty matter. Upon detailing the régime’s affirmations of sexual pleasure, for example, Herzog writes that ‘by no means were all Germans eager to endorse’ this kind of thinking. She continues: ‘Many parents felt keen distress at the idea that their underage daughters should become illegitimate mothers, and many young women and men were repelled by the idea that they ought to become breeders for the Führer or have sex outside of a long-term commitment. For many girls especially the concept of virginity until marriage remained a sincere and idealistic goal’ (p. 59). Does this not mean that policy after 1945 echoed the concerns of many Germans for whom conservative mores had already been paramount during the Third Reich? That in fact these Germans did not invoke the subject of sexuality in order to ‘distract attention from the continuities between Nazis and postwar Christians in values relating to the issues of eugenics, birth control, abortion, and homosexuality’ (p. 105)? Some of Herzog’s more forceful assertions regarding drive, motivation, and purpose must be called into question as well. Indeed, sometimes we are left with the impression that West Germans were principally self-conscious actors with self-serving (and noxious) ambitions. ‘Shifting moral debate away from mass murder and onto sexual matters,’ the author maintains, ‘was one of the major tactics used by West Germans both in domestic politics and international relations’ (p. 104). That was not all. ‘The rhetoric of romantic love, and the injunction to redevelop their “cheerful” femininity and to rebuild German men into more “chivalrous” exemplars of manhood, also had the effect of banalizing Nazism and downplaying many of its most hideous aspects’ (p. 88). May one not ask for a more careful explanation of the author’s assumptions here? In other words, these arguments are not so different from those that affirm the importance of the Wirtschaftswunder in repressing the Third Reich, or of Heimatfilme, informal art, and Nierentische.9 And indeed, all of these could be used as a means to sideline a murderous past, but not deliberately so, as a national project. Because Herzog typically avoids addressing aspects of societal discord and conflict that might qualify some of her more sweeping assertions, Sex after Fascism treats, say, Christian rhetoric as both hegemonic and intimately related to sexual discourse during the Nazi period. But Christian perceptions of sexuality had been no less conservative before 1933, and their apologists after 1945 were just as much (or even more) intent on gaining the upper hand against Social Democrats as they were on banishing the memory of Christian complicity in the Holocaust.10 Nazism, though clearly a major

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11 Michael Kandora’s contribution to the Herbert volume shows just that. The law (§175) against homosexuality, in force since 1871, was justified on the grounds of natural law theory. Conservative circles defended it after 1945 not only with reference to the moral abomination that was Nazi Germany (which had, of course, persecuted homosexuals), but also against the ‘corrosive’ influence of mass society, consumption, and ‘American’ permissiveness. These were topoi that had existed well before 1933. Michael Kandora, ‘Homosexualität und Sittengesetz’, in Herbert, Wandlungsprozesse, pp. 379– 401.


reference point for political and social initiative, was not the only one. Democracy as action in the Federal Republic did not always allude to the Third Reich. It could refer to fundamental Christian mores, to the Cold War, to gender norms, to natural law theory, to modernity, or to the future of the Church in a democratizing polity.11 Unlike Herzog’s engrossing and important book, Dagmar Barnouw’s articulate War in the Empty Air argues one case, and one case only. Barnouw’s main objective is to show that ‘an enduring hierarchy of suffering’ has occasioned ‘the nearly total exclusion from historical memory of German wartime experiences, among them large-scale air raids, mass deportations, and warfare involving millions of conscripts’ (p. xii). This argument is eminently historical. Unfortunately, the author has decided to ignore much of the historical literature in pursuing, relentlessly it must be said, her goal of challenging the ‘curiously blank memory of the war years’ characteristic of West Germany’s ‘stable and competent democratic technocracy’ (p. xi). The conservative undertones of these lines are unmistakable, and they foreshadow Barnouw’s altogether dismissive attitude towards the country’s democratization. In fact, the author’s professed historical inclination is often undermined by her polemical asides against ‘the huge and still growing construction of Holocaust memorystories’ (p. xiii), the ‘politics of identity’ (p. xiii), German ‘self-laceration’ (p. 8), and, again and again, powerful ‘Musterjuden’ (pp. 7, 16, 17, 18, 66, 68, 86, 89— Barnouw’s portrayal of Jews in West Germany and elsewhere ought to be the subject of another review). While this makes for lively reading, it tends to conceal the more serious aspects of The War in the Empty Air. In support of her argument, Barnouw propounds three theses. In logical order and in her own words, they can be summarized as follows: first, ‘In Western modernity, the clearest example of a public memory that has censored, or simply overridden, a plurality of fragmented, unstable private memories is the notorious assumption of an enduringly unmastered, unredeemed German past’ (p. 22); next, ‘Collective memory discourses of previous victimization tend to draw on a totalizing concept of power relations that cannot but compromise historical understanding of a past complex actuality’ (p. 20); and finally, ‘The more respectful Western cultures have become of difference, the more bigoted they appear toward temporal difference, namely the more reluctant to engage with the cognitive distances and differences created and marked by the passage of time’ (p. 21).

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12 Edgar Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 2006); Werner Bergmann, Antisemitismus in öffentlichen Konflikten: Kollektives Lernen in der politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik 1949–1989 (Frankfurt/Main and New York, 1997); Konrad Jarausch, Die Umkehr: Deutsche Wandlungen 1945–1995 (Munich, 2004).


The first point sets the scene. Barnouw reckons that Western public memory imposed upon Germans ‘the assumption of collective guilt and demand for collective remorse’ (p. 30). As Germany lay in ruins, the ‘civilian population’ was forced to ‘view the atrocities committed in their name’ (p. 30). We are led to believe, against well-documented facts, that tens of millions of Germans had to put up with documentaries on the Holocaust. Barnouw surmises that these early postwar activities ‘produced a collective German bad conscience that arguably contributed to West Germany’s remarkably undisturbed democratic development’ (p. 31). Completely misjudging the situation in the first two decades after 1945, she disregards contemporary polls as well as the large corpus of work that has recounted the tenacity of Germany’s Volksgemeinschaft ideology. There are no references to the predominant feelings of victimhood, to the integration of former National Socialists, to the unpopularity of Wiedergutmachung, or to the longevity of antisemitism. And the author’s cavalier treatment of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, for all its ritualistic tedium and bouts of hysteria, assumes that democracy—and especially the search for its liberal facets—knew one truth and required no action. The second point touches on an important subject, namely whether the notion of collective memory is apposite in societies that uphold individual choice and freedom. Unfortunately again, the relevant issue is not really addressed. Far from tackling its many questions—Are individual forms of memory superior to collective forms when commemorating past injustice? Does collective mourning invariably entail ritualistic cant? How important are debates on memorials and museums vis-à-vis democratic culture? and so on—Barnouw goes for highly contentious statements instead. Power for her is clearly in the hands of Jews, Israel, and the United States, all of whom are resolved ‘not to diminish the still growing status of the official victims of the Nazi régime, the still accumulating power of Jewish memory discourses’ (p. 64). What is more, certain members of this formidable cabal, ‘many Jewish-German intellectuals’, insist on the ‘incommensurability of the Jewish experience’ (p. 74). Undoubtedly there are Jews for whom this is the case. But neither Max Horkheimer nor Eli Wiesel, nor even Michel Friedman, has been instrumental in forcing this sad state upon the nation. German collective memory à la Barnouw, if it at all exists, emerged as part of West Germany’s lernende Demokratie, of kollektives Lernen or Umkehr12—and it emerged at the earliest in the late 1950s, experiencing many ups and downs thereafter.

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The final point is by far the most interesting. It relates to the contextualization of trauma, of the means by which language is used to contour silences and change subjects. Barnouw rightly disputes constructions of ‘collective identity’ that rely on ‘neo-Romantic versions’ (p. 228) of rootedness and origins. She rightly entertains an alternative view whereby time constantly alters whatever ‘difference’ there was in the first place. And she rightly seeks to employ these ideas with reference to German traumata in the aftermath of World War II. But instead of doing just that in her book, Barnouw gets bogged down in invective that seriously compromises her worthwhile project. The works by Frank Biess and Heide Fehrenbach are excellent examples of how one might conceive of democracy as action rather than truth. Both authors reject naive accounts according to which Germans simply became more and more democratic as the state itself became more and more Western. They interpret change not as a one-way process that produced liberty in society’s every nook and cranny. And where they acknowledge change, they also address its contestations, mention its side effects, and describe the way in which specific developments were subject to political debate and adjustment. Frank Biess’s superb Homecomings is a model of nuance. Biess examines the return of former Wehrmacht soldiers from Soviet captivity, and in particular their reception, treatment, and experience in both Germanys. The many faces of defeat, he submits, ‘represented a particularly potent symbol for the consequences of war and defeat in postwar Germany’, transcending as they did ‘the binary categories of perpetrator and victim’ (p. 5). Germans therefore developed discursive strategies that ‘sought to erase the consequences of German violence and of violence against Germans’ (p. 7). Biess’s discussion is relevant because it acknowledges both West Germany’s democratic transformation and the costs of postwar stability. It is equally successful in tracing the more rigid approach to the past in East Germany, where ‘antifascist conventions’ allowed for ‘confessions of an abstract historical guilt’—which in turn enabled an ‘exoneration of former soldiers’ individual pasts’ (p. 128). Pace Herbert and Frei, the author indicates that widespread dissatisfaction with the ‘Nazi regime’s failure to account for missing relatives and POWs did not translate into opposition to the regime’ (p. 30). Protests remained highly individualized and did not disturb the Volksgemeinschaft. After the war, however, Germans dealt with the legacy of total defeat in myriad ways, of which only a few can be mentioned here. On the question of Wehrmacht crimes, Biess demonstrates how initiatives to repatriate POWs pitted evil Nazis against innocent soldiers. According to this reasoning, the real criminals had been active on the home front, where they had committed offences against the civilian population. Most soldiers, on the other hand, remained unsullied by National Socialist imperialism, having fought an honourable war against the Bolshevik menace. Gender roles often affected the discussion on returnees’ reintegration into society. Indeed, the author contends that female returnees were never fully

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incorporated into West German memories of the World War II since ‘their experience with sexual violence accentuated men’s failure to protect these women in the predominantly male sphere of the military and the POW camp’ (p. 60). The many efforts to reassert ‘hegemonic masculinities’ (p. 12) in the postwar period, then, were also a reaction to this perceived failure, as was the common recourse to ‘Heimat’, which many hoped would overcome and leave behind the war and its consequences. In the East, by contrast, gender roles were (re-)established through the masculine concept of antifascism, with its militaristic emphasis on ‘struggle’ and ‘fighting’. They were also confirmed by the rhetoric of female ‘political underdevelopment’, according to which women stood for the ‘persistence of a nonpolitical private sphere that tended to subvert the returnee’s political transformation’ (p. 142). Biess’s account of the West German medical establishment and its response to psychic trauma is especially intriguing, confirming Ubbelohde’s and GassBohm’s findings on official policy towards youth delinquency and adolescent behaviour. As Paul Lerner has demonstrated for the period after 1918, German doctors and psychiatrists usually located individual suffering not in external traumatic events but rather in the ‘patient’s pathological mind’ (p. 77). After 1945, a majority of experts again held that any prolonged psychic suffering as a result of external events was due to ‘individual constitutional or possibly hereditary illness’ (p. 77). Only from the mid-1950s on, following the return of the last POWs and their public reception as ‘masculine heroes’, did medical and psychiatric opinion begin to consider the possibility of independent trauma, which ‘increased West German receptivity for the trauma of Holocaust survivors as well’ (p. 87). In short, the role of society became more important in getting to grips with disparate phenomena, a trend that would prompt more discriminating discussions of individual and collective responsibility. Finally, Biess offers a shrewd analysis of the private-public divide in both Germanys. In the Federal Republic, postwar constructions of the POWs as civilian fathers, loving husbands, and earnest burghers ‘eroded the public space that would have allowed a confrontation with their distinctly “uncivilian” past’. On the contrary, ‘the channeling of all these tasks into the private sphere clearly overburdened the family’ (p. 125). Thus, far from succumbing— Barnouw-like—to conspiracy theory, Biess discloses how West Germans themselves contained their own traumatic past in order to manage their unfamiliar present. In East Germany, where the family assumed a much less important place in postwar reconstruction, the private sphere became equally significant for coping with the consequences of the war. Here, efforts by the régime to mobilize returnees for a new politics meant that the family took on the task of dealing with the effects of captivity. In the late 1950s and 60s, however, West German ‘memory became more inclusive and pluralist’ (p. 227): democratic institutions eventually allowed for trauma to be articulated and addressed in the social arena, whereas in the GDR the ‘basic elements of the

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foundational narrative of antifascist conversion’ (p. 228) remained largely in place. Democracy as action could only function with democratic institutions. A model of comparable subtlety, Heide Fehrenbach’s outstanding Race after Hitler explores how West Germans tackled the issue of black occupation children in the postwar era. Because the subject ‘took on a disproportionately great symbolic significance on both sides of the Atlantic’ (p. 2), Fehrenbach is interested both in (black) American reactions to the way in which US military officials approached racial discrimination in their own ranks and in the ‘process by which German understandings of race came to resemble those informing postwar American social science and liberalism’ (p. 8). As the discourse of antisemitism focused less on racialism and more on ‘Jewish’ black marketeering (ostensibly through Displaced Persons), influence (allegedly through the Morgenthau Plan), and vengefulness (through the idea of Wiedergutmachung), Germans often shifted the location of race from Jewishness to blackness. A good example of this change was the term Mischling, the use of which connoted the offspring of white German mothers and foreign men of colour rather than that of mixed unions between Jews and non-Jews. Another example was the possibility, provided for by youth and health offices and Christian welfare organizations, to conduct ‘scientific’ studies of so-called Mischlingskinder on the grounds of racial difference. Ironically, earlier traditions of racism towards blacks—von Trotta’s legacy in German South-West Africa comes to mind, as does the ‘Schmach am Rhein’ following World War I—were now compounded by American attitudes ‘organized around the category of race and a commitment to white supremacy’ (p. 19). Fehrenbach’s discussion of the black predicament in occupied Germany is particularly absorbing. Its pre-history, as she writes, can be found on American soil, where one of the ‘greatest insults to African American soldiers’ had been the ‘comparatively better treatment, even cameraderie, extended to German POWs by white American soldiers and civilians in the presence of black American troops’ (pp. 21–22). In fact, US commanders such as Lucius Clay had opined that blacks soldiers in Germany be confined to parade troops so as not to alienate a local population steeped in Nazi ideology. Once in the country, however, blacks had conflicting experiences vis-à-vis the local population and military government. On the one hand, many Germans welcomed black GIs as less haughty, less of the conquering type than their white counterparts. What is more, unlike in the United States, ‘their uniform and national affiliation dictated German response and superseded their racial classification as “Negro” ’ (pp. 34–35). On the other hand, military occupation reinforced white supremacy as a value of mainstream America, so much so that Germans came to accept that democratization could be consistent with racialist ideology and social organization. Equally fascinating is the author’s record of how West Germans appropriated American social science. Already in the mid-1950s, she shows, anthropologists

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Carlos Santiago Nino, The Ethics of Human Rights (Oxford, 1991), p. 10. Alexandra Barahona De Brito, Human Rights and Democratization in Latin America: Uruguay and Chile (Oxford, 1997), p. 9. 15 Marc von Miquel, Ahnden oder amnestieren? Westdeutsche Justiz und Vergangenheitspolitik in den sechziger Jahren (Göttingen, 2004), p. 8; and Christina Möller, Völkerstraftrecht und Internationaler Strafgerichtshof: Kriminologische, straftheoretische und rechtspolitische Aspekte (Münster, 2003), pp. 522ff. 14


provided optimistic prognostications of the future of ‘mixed-blood children’ given their healthy and wealthy American ‘Negro fathers’ and their ‘caring lower class mothers’ (p. 91). In these early deviations from previous norms, the focus on external conditions (health, wealth, care) became increasingly apparent. But this move also came at a cost. For in ‘rejecting biological explanations of race and shifting the focus to social environment, psychology, and family relations, liberalizing West Germans followed the trends established by postwar American social science and tended to blame the mother’ (p. 105). Indeed, one consequence of this re-assessment of race was that it ‘reinforced the representational link between unregenerate femininity and social disorder by nimbly transforming a social dilemma of national-historical proportions into a “timeless” problem rooted in aberrant white female sexuality and socialization’ (p. 174). Like Biess in Homecomings, Fehrenbach tells a story of ‘willing’and ‘doing’democracy that integrates West Germans’needs, desires, and prejudices without dismissing the very substantial changes that were taking place. How to reconcile the law with human rights was among the most vexing issues in postwar Germany. Today, in the aftermath of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, human rights are usually not simply identified with norms of positive law—indeed they are often created because one recognizes them as being logically independent of the legal system. ‘Respect for human rights,’ as Carlos Nino writes, ‘is demanded even when one is faced with legal systems which do not recognize them, precisely because they do not recognize them.’13 The Allies faced a similar problem in 1945. Because truth and justice were key aspects of the transition to democracy, Americans and British officials sought not merely to punish, but to implement ‘accountability, equality before the law, and a political culture based on a common understanding of the past which is affirmative of democratic values’.14 They therefore endeavoured to ‘stigmatize past injustice’ as well as to establish ‘universal values based on a civilizatory minimum’.15 This agenda required retroactive legislation and new legal concepts such as ‘crimes against humanity’. In the new West German state, however, both were abolished. Yet the courts were still faced with Nazi crimes, especially after 1958, when the government set up the Central Office for the Prosecution of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg. How to reconcile the need for truth and justice with the limitations of West German law is the subject of two impressive books on the Auschwitz trial.

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16 Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: Geschichte und Nachgeschichte (Munich, 2004), conclusion; Gerhard Werle and Thomas Wanders, Auschwitz vor Gericht: Völkermord und bundesdeutsche Strafustiz (Munich, 1995), pp. 42, 215–17.


Both works provide close readings of the legal ramifications of the proceedings in Frankfurt, which took place between 1963 and 1965. Unlike Frei (pp. 36, 180–81), Sybille Steinbacher or Gerhard Werle and Thomas Wandres, all of whom regard the Auschwitz trial as a turning point in West German history,16 Devin O. Pendas and Rebecca Wittmann proffer a more sober view of its impact. While the authors concede, albeit grudgingly, that the trial was a ‘cultural watershed’ (Pendas, p. 251), their primary concern is to address its limitations. This they do well, and, especially in the case of Pendas, with much sophistication. The limitations of the Auschwitz trial were due to the nature of West German Recht. In 1949, the West German state had prohibited retroactive legislation, which made invalid all ex post facto laws. It also prohibited recourse to Occupation Council No. 10 and the charge of crimes against humanity. In 1956, the Bundestag formerly annulled the criminal categories contained in the London Charter and Occupation Council No. 10. As a result, the German penal code (§ 220 StGB) applied the crime of genocide only to future infractions, not to the Holocaust or other past atrocities. As Pendas notes, the ‘single most important thing to remember about German Nazi trials is that they took place under existing statutory law’, making the Auschwitz trial ‘profoundly dependent on “ordinary” criminal procedure and legal categories’ (p. 53). What did these ‘ordinary’ criminal procedures entail? Since Totschlag fell under the statute of limitations in 1960, ‘it became necessary for prosecutors to demonstrate that any given crime met the specific criteria for Mord in order to bring an indictment’ (Pendas, p. 56). These criteria referred to the motives of the perpetrator (blood lust, sexual desire, or other ‘base motives’), the means employed in the killing (malicious or treacherous), and the purpose of the act (to enable or conceal another crime). This concern with the motivational determinants of Mord forced public prosecutors to focus either on indirect proof (such as smiling, laughing, or joking while killing) or on statements made at the time of the crime. Both kinds of evidence were extremely rare. But German law contained a further element that complicated matters: because of ‘the way perpetrators were distinguished from accomplices, the judgement ended up inadvertently privileging atrocity over genocide’ (Pendas, p. 245). That is, Frankfurt’s Staatsanwälte not only were required to prove that a murder had been a special sort of killing, they also needed to ascertain the true culprit as opposed to the ‘mere’ lackey. In order to accomplish both, the prosecution relied heavily on particularly brutal instances of murder, often with torture involved, and thereby suggested that the Holocaust had been the work of seriously disturbed human beings far removed from the rest of society.

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17 Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen, 2006), p. 566; and Dan Diner, Gedächtniszeiten: Über jüdische und andere Geschichten (Munich, 2003), p. 188.


Pendas and Wittmann alike conclude that there was an ‘elective affinity between the German juridical concern for subjective dispositions and the daily press’s efforts to create identifiable characters for their drama’ (Pendas, p. 264). Or, in the words of Wittmann, ‘most people saw the grisly crimes of the sadistic defendants as if they were part of a macabre fantasy world’, and in so doing, failed to ‘make a connection between the perpetrators on trial, the harmless neighbors living peacefully beside them, and their own role in the Nazi past’(Wittmann, p. 246). The lurid expositions found in Bild and elsewhere, then, prevented larger sections of the public from contemplating the reasons for Auschwitz. Rather, ‘individual responsibility and individual atrocities were exaggerated and social structures and broader bureaucratic frameworks were diminished’(Pendas, p. 294). The trial therefore ‘failed socially’(Pendas, p. 302). Have Frei, Steinbach, and Werle/Wandres got it wrong? Why is it that their assessments are so much more sympathetic than the above accounts by their North American colleagues? Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Vergangenheitsbewältigung is how historians themselves have evaluated the strategies of coming to terms with the past. To take a well-known example: so-called structuralists have disowned the so-called intentionalist preoccupation with Nazi bigwigs, popularizing instead the idea that much wider strata within society were involved in the Third Reich. In recent years, however, Nicholas Berg and Dan Diner have challenged this approach, maintaining that, as a conceptual device, structuralism implies a ‘guiltless guilt’, one that diminishes the role of personal responsibility in historical enquiry.17 According to this reading, functionalists have neglected the issue of individual accountability in favour of a model that accentuates the pressures and exigencies—including their unintended consequences—characteristic of Hitler’s state. Yet the distinction between the two historiographical traditions has run its course. Both intentionalism (with its emphasis on ideology and famous men) and structuralism (with its fixation on institutions and bureaucracies) cannot but fail the ‘test’ devised by their respective critics, as the desire to whitewash the German past can be exposed in either case. So, rather than place Pendas and Wittmann in the structuralist camp, where, given their critique of the trial’s preoccupation with individual responsibility as opposed to social causation, they seem to belong, it might be advisable to discuss briefly how they have come to judge so harshly the Auschwitz trial. In Wittmann’s case, the evidence in support of her judgement is wanting. For one, she acknowledges that letters to the editors of major newspapers sometimes displayed ample knowledge of the moral issues involved, including a conception of responsibility that extended well beyond the defendants. For another, she does not really analyse the reception of the Auschwitz trial in any

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18

Dan Diner (ed.), Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt/Main, 1988).


systematic way, relying on a few newspaper articles and never investigating alternative means whereby we could gauge the effects of the proceedings on public opinion. That is not enough for an author who avers forcefully that the trial was ‘a formative moment in most of the German public’s understanding of Auschwitz’ (p. 274), particularly if at the same time the picture presented is predominantly one of failure. Pendas is much more scrupulous in analysing the reception of the trial. Indeed, he admits that the liberal press focused very much on the trial’s moral lessons, and that for liberal journalists the trial was to serve ‘as a school for democracy’ (p. 284). But then he makes an inference that is difficult to follow: ‘As didacticism shaded into moralism, and the psychopathology of the individual defendants substituted for social analysis, much of the German public rejected the lessons the liberal press insisted they should learn from the trial’ (p. 284). Here, it seems, Pendas gets carried away by his brilliant analysis of the trial’s legal implications, as well as by the sensationalism of the yellow press. For it is not clear whether didacticism necessarily shaded into moralism, and, even if so, whether a ‘moralistic’ posture was such a terrible thing at the time. After all, it could be argued that moral revulsion was the prerequisite for subsequent political action. As for the yellow press, what should we expect? The very nature of Bild or Abendzeitung demands that sadism make the headlines rather than elaborate discussions of collective responsibility. Any subsequent Bild story on, say, Cambodia or Rwanda would most certainly confirm this. But does this mean that nothing changed after the Auschwitz trial? One may surmise that Pendas and Wittmann see little good coming out of the Frankfurt proceedings because they underestimate the persistence of Volksgemeinschaft ideology and expect too much of emerging democracies. What distinguishes them from Frei, Steinbacher, and Werle/Wandres is not only their belief that the nature of German law inescapably determined the nature of public perception—a logic that implies passive recipients incapable of (re-)interpreting certain news items—it is also the unhistorical appeal to democracy as truth, which evinces little patience with minor shifts and expects explosive transformations. The rhetoric of 1968, however, would have been impossible without such first stirrings as the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, its serious shortcomings notwithstanding. Dirk Rupnow’s erudite Vernichten und Erinnern is primarily devoted to the Nazi period. In the main part of his book, Rupnow examines the various testimonies of National Socialist Gedächtnispolitik—and in particular the way in which museums and research institutes attempted to produce or obliterate memories of Europe’s Jews following their anticipated destruction. Rupnow’s main thesis adapts Dan Diner’s concept of Zivilisationsbruch to the field of memory.18 The break with civilization, he maintains, was not confined to the

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‘practice of extermination’, but deliberately included the ‘intention’ to cause a ‘break with memory’: ‘the expropriation of the victims’ past would have meant the culmination of their humiliation and the fulfilment of their destruction’ (p. 82). Expropriation could mean different things. Museums displaying the remnants of Jewish culture presented material that, were it not to subvert official policy, validated Nazi antisemitism and denigrated Jewish existence. Judenforscher aimed at constructing a memory of the Jews that both explained the pre-history of the Third Reich and legitimized National Socialist ideology. Museums and research institutes alike were to function as repositories of an antisemitic memory that allowed for the continued existence—if in the shape of visual images, ritual objects, and written documents—of an indispensable enemy. Rupnow’s discussion of these subjects is learned, ambitious, and important. His desire to deconstruct postwar commemoration, however, does not succeed. In his endeavour to detect continuity rather than change, the author delegitimizes Vergangenheitsbewältigung and deprecates its practitioners. Jürgen Habermas and Richard von Weizsäcker, for example, do not figure as men who experienced and influenced West Germany’s Lernprozess. Quite the opposite is true. Rubnow contends that they saw the Holocaust as a ‘necessity on the path of the Germans’ to overcome ‘their National Socialist traditions’, as an ‘extreme event’ that, although ‘unfortunate’ in its consequences, was ‘essential in discrediting negative elements’ in German culture (p. 332). That not being enough, the author intimates that this kind of thinking ‘resembles conspicuously’ the ‘image that Himmler tried to construct’ of the Holocaust as a ‘tragic but necessary task’. In his partiality for the longue durée, Rupnow decides to make sweeping judgements that make a mockery of complex developments. If Habermas is no longer rendered as the opponent of revisionism but as its secret authority, then it comes as no surprise to learn that the ‘rhetoric of Bewältigung’ often played into the hands of ‘the actual Gedächtnismörder’ (p. 341). Rupnow simply conflates the unfortunate connotations of a term (Bewältigung = Schlussstrich) with ‘coming to terms with the past’ as a process of negotiation and conflict. And, in the end, he contradicts his own views. For in writing that memory and commemoration ‘in themselves do not constitute something of value’, adding appropriately that ‘their contents and narratives are decisive’ (p. 342), he unwittingly reinforces the relevance of such figures as Habermas and von Weizsäcker, whose narratives contributed significantly to greater self-reflection on the part of many Germans. Rupnow’s anti-historical bent bars any sense of societal dissonance. Finally, it presumes an unrealistic leap over space and time from a situation in which the majority persecutes the minority to one in which the minority decides how to be remembered by the majority. With Rupnow’s book we have come full circle. If we take seriously the notion of democracy as action, then discord and development alike belong to

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Keele University

ANTHONY D. KAUDERS

Abstract This review article seeks to advance the notion of democracy as action as a concept for the study of (West) German democracy. It suggests that it would be preferable to define democracy as practical rather than speculative so as to show how democratic culture, far from being merely an object of reverence, emerged in the form of serious disputes and equally serious displacements. Because democracy is the régime within which the struggle for democracy finds legitimacy, the study of democracy means examining how men and women invoked democracy in the struggle for what they believed were democratic goals and aspirations. Among the books under review, three in particular seem best to anticipate future research in the area, in that they examine post1945 German democratization in an anti-teleological vein, mindful of conflict and the competition for power. Keywords: democracy, democratization, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, cultural history, Federal Republic, memory


the history of West German democratization. Looking back at the works discussed above, Frank Biess, Heide Fehrenbach, and Ulrich Herbert offer the most promising approaches in this respect. While they concede that major change occurred after 1945, they are equally interested in showing how the new democratic polity, far from being merely an object of reverence, emerged in the form of serious disputes and equally serious displacements. Greater tolerance towards blacks, for example, could stabilize gender hierarchies; greater civility in the public sphere perpetuated trauma in the private fold. Upon reading any of these works, we may ponder the tenacity of racism, misogyny, and violence in West Germany without claiming that nothing has changed. Future research on democracy in the Federal Republic might follow their example. That is, because democracy is the régime within which the struggle for democracy finds legitimacy, the study of democracy means examining how men and women invoked democracy in the struggle for what they believed were democratic goals and aspirations. The historiography of democracy is open-ended: it may include multiculturalism today and socialist redistribution tomorrow, but it is never complete. In that sense, it is inherently anti-teleological, which should suit most historians pretty well.