In May 1945, after twelve years of the National Socialist, or Nazi, dictatorship and six years of war, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the victorious forces of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The end to the fighting did not bring about immediate relief for many Germans, particularly for young people in the Soviet zone. The disappearance or death of family members during the war, long-absent fathers returning home from POW camps, and a new human landscape brought about by massive refugee movement (e.g., displaced persons) all contributed to a chaotic postwar situation. In the midst of these desperate conditions, young people had to be “denazified” and “democratized” through new school systems. In the three Western zones, which became the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, this new curricular program carried the title of “reeducation.”1 In the Soviet zone, which became the German Democratic Republic in 1949, reformers referred more often to “antifascist democratic education.” The Soviet zone school system, strongly influenced by German social democratic forces, was to educate young people in a new, antifascist, socialist-humanist, German national consciousness. Lessons about the war were taught through essays in history and German classes.
This essay examines how pupils in the Soviet zone learned to recount their memories of the war in a form that demonstrated a specific “antifascist democratic” understanding of these events. Children, no less than adults around them, struggled with issues such as trying to reconcile the new enemy status of Nazis—who were also possibly friends, neighbors, and family members—with the new liberator status of Soviets. Antifascist educational reformers, primarily a coalition of social democrats and communists, used a sort of “memory lesson” to teach young people how to remember their individual pasts and their collective (national) past. This was not an explicit program, but rather a function of the communication between school and society. In history and German classes, young people gradually learned to narrate their wartime experiences within an interpretative framework that encouraged them to remember certain elements, while suppressing or de-emphasizing others. This antifascist narrative helped pupils make sense of their recent wartime and postwar memories, a precondition for accepting the “new school’s” and the new nation’s legitimacy. In this manner, the close link between personal memory and public history construction becomes clear.2 Pupils’ essays in the context of curriculum guidelines from this four-year period illustrate how adults hoped to offer a new set of memories to children and how children carved out their own solutions to the dilemma of relearning their collective and private histories and memories. Just as their parents and teachers, young people sifted and weighed their memories against the new narrative structures they were offered. An analysis of these memory traces in the documents left behind by young people will shed new light on how children not only survived the war, but how they then went on to find strategies for mastering their present, making the transition from Nazis into antifascists.
The sources for this study include curriculum guidelines, educational policy directives, professional journals, educational conference minutes, newspaper articles, and approximately 1,300 pupils’ essays. Almost all of these essays come from East Berlin, with a few dozen originating from other parts of the Soviet zone. Regional school administrators sometimes apparently suggested essay topics to schools, and then read them afterward to check on the state of young people.3 Teachers could also find ideas for assignments in educational journals, or from supplemental teacher seminars.4 Taken together, these materials comprise a dialogue between adults and young people, influenced by but also influencing the society around them, including family, peers, and religious and political organizations.
Developing the Antifascist Narrative: From War History to War Memories
The actual decision of which new history should be taught and how this should ensue was not made by one single, homogenous administrative organization. Nor did standard curricula and centralized educational journals comprise the only area where administrators sought to influence how young Germans understood their nation’s past. Nonetheless, clear broad pedagogical tendencies and philosophies can be identified, especially in educators’ discussions of actual classroom instruction. Germans in East and West called upon history and German classes to imbue pupils with a positive sense of the nation, one that encouraged pride in Germany’s accomplishments without belittling other nations’ achievements.5 Significantly, educational reformers repeatedly noted the need to connect history instruction to other subjects, particularly German.6 But developing a new history curriculum is a time-consuming, delicate process. In the Soviet zone, both Soviet and German educational authorities decided to forbid history instruction for the first academic year until they could adequately train new history teachers and produce acceptable textbooks.7
Young people could not be prevented from remembering their pasts, though, anymore than teachers, parents, or politicians could avoid the topic in other contexts. Thus, as early as October 1945, the month in which schools reopened officially throughout the zone, the first examples of the classroom dialogue between adults and young people about interpreting their national and individual pasts can be found. Educational reformers encouraged this interactive approach to learning, as stated in a 1949 draft for the “Guidelines for the Didactics and Methodology of the German Democratic School”: “Lessons are a joint work of teacher and pupil.”8 The importance accorded classroom instruction drew on a larger tradition of believing that schools and their authority were the most important aspects in the formation of young people’s world views.9 But pupils were assigned, and took, an active part in the reframing of their memories and making sense of a new version of history. Much of this interaction took place during German classes, an important reminder that history lessons are not limited to history class.
Still, the driving force for the new national self-narrative came from outside the school building. In the Soviet zone, where the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) joined forces in 1946 to become the majority Socialist Unity Party (SED), social reformers sketched out a “victim narrative” of national history that positioned their half of Germany as largely innocent of Nazi crimes. Since SPD and KPD members had actively fought against Nazism and fascism, often sacrificing careers and even lives, the SED-dominated government could claim that the two labor parties’ only failure had been their inability to build a joint resistance against the National Socialists. The Nazis had been everyone else. The two other key parties initially admitted in the Soviet zone, referred to as the bourgeois (bürgerliche) parties, were the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Liberal Democrats (LDP). Their smaller voices did not significantly contradict the SED narrative; nor did they question the emerging antifascist historical narrative that residency in the Soviet zone implied personal and national innocence. This interpretation of the Soviet zone as a rupture with the Nazi past proved to be the most significant aspect of teaching young people how to view their nation’s history.
Pupils Recount Their Memories
Young people quickly incorporated this version of history into their assignments when discussing historical events from other epochs. It was not difficult for them to accept new or rehabilitated distant figures in German history as part of their cultural heritage. When asked to express specific political viewpoints, they understood and accepted the new ideas being presented to them. A tenth-grader from the Saxony-Anhalt city Güsten, for instance, wrote a report for German class in 1948 on the minnesingers, referring to them as “Germany’s glory,” and a year later completed a critical essay on Bismarck’s absolutist foreign policy.10 A fifth-grader from Berlin dutifully listed the impressive accomplishments of favored sons such as Friedrich Schiller or Gottfried Lessing.11
But the essays took on a different, more emotional, and even questioning quality when pupils wrote about traumatic events that had touched their lives. When confronted with the task of narrating their own recent pasts and their relationship to the new German nation, young people clearly struggled to accept the official line of how to evaluate their national and personal histories. During the postwar years, young people learned to use the antifascist strategy of placing Soviet zone residents in the role of victim to denounce Germany’s fascist past, without looking critically at their families’ participation in the Nazi regime. This victim narrative, most striking when pupils recounted their own families’ experiences and tried to make sense of their parents’ roles during the war, was a sleight of hand that did not always come easily to them, especially not in the first months after the war. The contrast to pupils’ more sober accounts of Nazi history highlights the difficulty that young people had in reconciling their personal histories and memories with the official collective consciousness proffered by the emerging antifascist, socialist state.
Two essays from the fifth-grader Otto Dieb vividly illustrate a young boy in the first postwar months who had not yet entirely accepted the antifascist narrative for framing the painful ruptures in his personal memory and national history. In December 1944, Otto wrote an essay for his German class entitled “My Friend,” in which he proudly described a powerful, gray-eyed, blonde boy with his hair parted on the left and good skin color, a strong nose, good muscles, and a clear enunciation, who had earned a leadership position in the Hitler Youth.12 There is then a silence of several months in the school notebook when, presumably, the final months of the Second World War kept Otto and his classmates at home. Then, in October, Otto completed the assignment “The Rebuilding of the Countryside and City.”13 Otto began with the standard judgment that the criminal deeds of the Nazis led to misery throughout the entire world. It becomes clear, however, that this essay lacked the earlier tone of self-confidence. This was due in part to Otto’s misunderstanding that the Potsdam Accords intended for Germany to become an agrarian state. “Germany is to be placed into a central European standard of living, that is, such a life as is the case in the Balkan countries, thus living in huts.” Otto believed that it would be hard for Germans to get used to life in this new Germany. He added that the reparation payments “demanded by those peoples that we attacked” led him and others to doubt the newspapers’ rosy visions of quickly reconstructed cities. Shifting tone slightly, Otto then complained that the Nazis had lied to Germans, and only now was the truth about unjust property distribution emerging. In an optimistic conclusion, he closed by proclaiming that the future remained open for Germany.
Otto’s specific situation demonstrates the limits on the school’s ability to dictate a new understanding of his past to him. Other factors and institutions, including families, regional differences, and previous memories, contributed to young people’s historical consciousness and thus affected their understanding of their national history. Otto lived in Oschersleben in Saxony-Anhalt, a region that switched hands from the Americans to the Soviets. The U.S. Morgenthau Plan, which had called for an agrarianization of Germany, was a topic of conversation in the West that would have reached Otto’s ears. He could thus easily confuse it with the Potsdam Accords, which focused on the “4 Ds”: demilitarization, denazification, decentralization, and democratization.14 Perhaps Otto overheard outraged and even sarcastic discussions among his parents and their friends as they bemoaned Germany’s plight, during which he won the impression that he might have to start living in a hut—an idea suggestive of persistent Nazi racist ideology about “primitive peoples.” Yet he did not uncritically accept all that he heard. He was aware of optimistic reports in the newspapers, but these were not enough to convince him that everything would proceed smoothly in the rebuilding of his city. Yet even as young people like Otto established themselves as partial victims, they did not see themselves as helpless receptacles of knowledge or memories. He thus joined the ranks of determined Germans ready to write Germany a better future.
Essays from other pupils a year later demonstrate a clearer internalization of the new “memory lessons,” which implicitly encouraged young people to use personal experience to explain the Soviet zone’s collective history. The theme of the family’s traumatic experiences during or after the war, for instance, served as the frame of reference in many pupils’ essays. This tendency fits in with the specific outlines of the Soviet zone German curriculum for what types of writing pupils were to learn in the fifth through eighth grades. Educators considered three types of essays to be the most important types of written expression: narration, description, and reporting, with a particular emphasis on fantasy and reflection.15 Thus, when thirteen-year-old Vera Müller wrote an essay on the last days of the war, she wrote about her family.16 The personal memories and experiences of pupils lent an untouchable, authentic quality to the essays. On closer inspection, these accounts fit a clear style of antifascist narration that elicited this perception. This is evident in Vera’s essay, in which she recounted a bombing during which she and her mother were attempting to run to their house: “I told my mommy that she should wait for a second so that we didn’t all run across together, that might get noticed. Outside it was deathly quiet, only the dust of exploded grenades lay in the air. I ran as fast as I could, but too late. Just as I reached the sidewalk, I was hit by an exploding piece of grenade.” Vera did not know at the time what had actually happened to her mother. “They told me everything but the truth. Only after I had been in the hospital for four weeks with no news from home did I find out that my parents had been victims of the Nazi regime.”
There is a curious tension between the personal trauma recounted by Vera and the more distanced, formulaic description of her parents’ status as “victims of the Nazi regime.” In fact, it is unclear from her essay whether both parents died during this particular episode. It would seem that only the mother and she were present, although the “together” might indicate other persons. Another possibility is that Vera’s father died in another context: in a concentration camp, perhaps, or as a soldier in combat. This interpretation would explain why Vera, after being hurt and brought into the air raid cellar, only asked about her mother. Pupils like Vera learned quite early to adjust the degree of subjectivity and emotion with which they related experiences depending on the function of the narrative. The essays portrayed the suffering and injustice felt by the authors, but within a clear interpretive framework. Thus, the retelling of even a painful memory about the war almost always further added an evaluative comment about the senselessness of the war, or the fault of the Nazis for disrupting everyday life.
It was not always easy for young people to remain within this framework. Trying to reconcile too many interpretations of the same situation, pupils found themselves caught in contradictory narrative strategies that clearly elicited discomfort in the young authors. Without commenting on its implications, Vera added the statement that she was the one who decided that she and her mother should cross the street separately. From the entire scene, this decision remained important enough in her memory to mention in a school essay. Rather than pose the heart-wrenching question of what might have happened had her mother run with her, Vera learned to give responsibility to the Nazis—the elusive others. And yet, her own role in this scene, which did not neatly fit into an analysis of Nazi responsibility for postwar sufferings, could not be forgotten, any less than the quiet protest that no one would tell her the truth about her mother.
In a time when schoolchildren struggled with the realization that the lessons taught to them during the war were lies, such small perceived injustices of being told “all sorts of stories” did not serve to smooth the transition into accepting the validity of the new system for pupils like Vera, even as she began to accept a new way of understanding Germany’s, and with this her own, history. Vera’s narrative draws its strength from the sense of a painful memory that, even though it is personal and individual, achieved a status of universality through its structure. Vera recounted the scene in such a way that invited contemporary readers to recognize the familiar sense of tragic fate that then segued into the moral of the story: “we were unfortunate victims.” In fact, Vera’s device of mentioning her suggestion to cross the street separately, without explicitly questioning how this decision affected her mother’s death, allowed her and her readers to make this connection implicitly. Her audience and she were then led to immediately proclaim her innocence. In this manner, her readers could also exculpate themselves from their own similar, unarticulated fears of guilt, in private as well as public matters.
Memory lessons could also be used to help young people see the progress being made in the reconstruction of their nation since the war. The antifascist narrative, in this regard, turned the victim narrative of the war into an empowering one of overcoming difficulties. Typical of this strategy was the Berlin essay assignment “gas, water, and electricity services 1945 and 1946,” in which pupils compared the state of basic services after the war and a year later. One of the more charming of these essays is by a group of seven girls from a Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg middle school. “Christel” and her friends wrote a short theater piece to illustrate the reconstruction progress made in Berlin.17 The main figures are the girls themselves and one of the girl’s families. In all the scenes, characters in the play struggle to retake up roles they had before the war. For instance, the “hundreds of people” standing in line for water right after the war are all “tired, [and] longing for quiet and a meal” the new gas flame that finally burns again in Berlin-Neukölln, though weak, shows “its good intention.” In the first scene, we learn that the father has returned home on the previous evening, presumably just after the last days of fighting. Exhausted and disoriented, his initial impressions upon arriving were too quick to notice the luxuries of electricity and the like. As he explains the next day, “I was just happy that it [our home] was still there!” This second day of his homecoming is described sentimentally, with the father surrounded by his proud family, who show off the return of running water. After a night’s sleep, he is able to fully appreciate the successful reconstruction of his city. The play demonstrates the family’s pride in winning the approval of the father, still a key reference point in young people’s lives. The father is a physical marker of the past, both a reminder of where Germany had been and an indicator of how far it had come. Christel and her friends clearly valued the reunification of the family: Father was home again, and the family made room for him to take up his previous role. The assignment is perhaps the clearest example of educators’ and pupils’ attempts to make sense of wartime memories that were, literally, omnipresent, and to use them as markers of progress.
Not all homecomings proceeded so smoothly. In a 1947 letter to her friend, the young Brigitte Reimann, later a leading author of the GDR, described a different scene. She, too, wrote with enthusiasm of the return of her father from a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp to their home in Burg, a small city of 20,000 residents in Saxony-Anhalt. However, she and her three younger siblings had not been prepared for the figure that greeted them at the train station. Their scrawny, louse-covered, and now bearded father elicited shyness and fright in the children, particularly in the younger ones. Even his language had been distorted and rendered unfamiliar by the war experience, “so anxious, so sick and—I don’t know, just so terribly strange!”18 Worse, he had become “rather meticulous,” so that the household had to be run under tighter control. None of this dampened Brigitte’s determination to appreciate the once-again reunited family structure, and she reported that all of the family had grown used to having their father around.
The idealistic description by Christel and her classmates of the father’s return might have been experienced by some of the girls already. Others, however, might still have been waiting for their fathers a year after the end of the war, or lost them. Many fathers returned home wounded and unable to perform previous tasks, or did not return at all.19 In the Western zone city of Hamburg, to provide one example, three out often children did not have a father at home, due either to death or internment.20 When fathers did return, they often experienced jealousy at the intimate relationships that had developed in their absences between their wives and children.21 Very young children lacked memories of their fathers, in some cases putting both sides in the position of having to get to know a total stranger. Many families noted the insatiable hunger of the father upon his returning home, and this sometimes led to bitter fights over food in the family. The father who returned home sometimes seemed to be almost a different person.
Conclusions
Young people in the immediate postwar period had directly experienced little else than war and its trying aftermath. In an instructional environment that encouraged them to learn from and work on their private memories, pupils learned to frame their memories in a way that helped them make sense of their past, present, and future. The framework that their schools’ lessons offered them was a specific antifascist narrative, one that taught young people that they, their families, and their society were victims of the Nazi regime. The responsibility for the war rested on the shoulders of the unidentified “others,” and the others were those who did not live in the Soviet zone. Although pupils occasionally expressed mistrust in the new political system during the first postwar years, they eventually successfully learned to manipulate the antifascist narrative to their benefit.
The cognitive nature of memory and remembering means it can be impossible in many instances to verify if pupils really experienced those events which they later recounted as memories.22 In the process of being offered a new history, however, this distinction is not meaningful. Invented stories such as that of Christel and her classmates clearly had references in the girls’ own experiences—or at least, in experiences they believed they should have had. Regardless of how the girls’ home situations actually looked, they were able to use an antifascist narrative to recount therapeutic memories of how the war should have ended. In other examples, when pupils had the liberty to reflect on and compare their new and old memories, they showed an awareness of the work this entailed, and consistently employed a form of memory narration that coincided with larger social expectations of how to remember.
The school trained pupils to express their wartime memories within a certain antifascist framework that used real and imagined experiences as a means of establishing innocence. Pupils accepted this strategy and employed it to begin the work of mastering their private memories, establishing themselves as part of the antifascist collective in one half of Germany. Pupils were active participants in this process. They themselves learned to use their memories to create meaning for their present and their future, and to count themselves as part of their new nation.23 Their wartime memories helped them break with the Nazi past and, expressing determined hope, accept the proffered role of reconstructing the nation according to an antifascist democratic vision of the future. By writing about the war in an antifascist mode, using both real and imagined memories, young people found a means of moving beyond their wartime traumas.
NOTES
1. JCS 1067, Directive from American Chief of Staff to Commander of U.S. Occupation Troops in Germany, approved by U.S. Congress, April 26, 1945 and by Truman May 10. 1945. In Rolf Steininger, Deutsche Geschichte seit 1945, vol. 1, 1945–1947 (Fischer: Frankfurt, 1996), 50.
2. Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, “Collective Memory—What is it?” History and Memory 8, no. 1 (1996): 30–50; Susan A. Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (December 1997): 1372–1385; Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (December 1997): 1386–1403; Ulrich Neisser, “Self-narratives: True and false,” in The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, eds. Ulrich Neisser and Robyn Fivush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 11; Niklas Luhmann, “Zeit und Gedächtnis,” Soziale Systeme 2, no. 2 (1996): 307–330.
3. Annet Gröschner, “ich schlug meiner Mutter die brennenden Funken ab:” Berliner Schulaufsätze aus dem Jahr 1946 (Berlin: Kontext, 1996), 9–10.
4. The first educational journal for teachers appeared in 1946: die neue schule, 1946 ff.
5. “Lehrplan für die Grund- und Oberschulen in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands, Deutsch, Entwurf der am 1. Juli 1946 veröffentlichten 2. Fassung,” in Joachim S. Hohmann, Deutschunterricht in SBZ und DDR 1945–1962 (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1997), 114; “Die Forderung der Richtlinien der Allierten Erziehungskommission,” Lehrplan für den Geschichtsunterricht an den Berliner Schulen (Berlin [East]/Leipzig: Volk und Wissen, 1948), 3.
6. Karl Ellrich, “Die grundlegende Vorbereitung des Geschichtsunterrichts im deutsch-heimatkundlichen Unterricht der ersten vier Grundschuljahre,” die neue schule 1 (1946: 12), 5.
7. P. Zolotuchin, Leiter der Abteilung für Volksbildung der SMA in Deutschland, to Paul Wandel, May 15, 1946, memorandum allowing history instruction in schools again, Bundesarchiv Berlin (BArchiv) DR 2/6269, no. 115.
8. Emphasis and double emphasis in original. Dorst, Muller-Krumbholz, Sothmann, “1. Entwurf: Richtlinien für die Didaktik und Methodik der deutschen-demokratischen Schule,” Berlin, May 18, 1949, Deutsches Institut für Pädagogische Forschung, Bibliothek Bildungsforschung (DIPF/BBF/Archiv) NL Sothmann, fo. 20, no. 1.
9. “Protokoll über den Pädagogischen Landeskongreb im Maxim-Gorki-Haus,” Schweren 25–26 May 25/26, 1948, BArch DR 2/1394, no. 80.
10. Dorothea Uebrig, Deutsch Kl. 10a, no title, Museum zu Kindheit und Jugend-Schulmuseum (SM) Do 88/555, 16 Feb. 1948, and Geschichte, Kl. 11a, “Absolutismus—Bismarcks Aubenpolitik,” SM Do 88/550, fall 1949.
11. Ingrid Friede, fifth grade, SM/Do 87/107, July 1945–November 1945.
12. Otto Dieb, fifth grade, “Mein Freund (Hausaufsatz),” Oscheersleben, 15 December 1944, SM/Do 93/174.
13. Otto Dieb, fifth grade, “Wiederaufbau in Stadt und Land,” Oscheersleben, October 1945, SM/Do 93/174.
14. Rolf Steininger, Deutsche Geschichte seit 1945, vol. 1, 41–45 and 85–101.
15. “Lehrplan für die Grund- und Oberschulen,” 154.
16. Vera Müller, thirteen years old, “Angestellt bei Beschuss,” [ca. 1946], Landesarchiv Berlin (LAB/STA) 134/13, 179, no. 20–21.1.
17. Christel Novak et al., “Wiederaufbau Prenzlauer Berg,” girls’ middle school, [May 1946], LAB/STA 134/13, 181/1, no. 103–117.
18. Brigitte Reimann, 10 October 1947, Aber wir schaffen es, verlab Dich drauf! Briefe an eine Freundin im Westen 2nd ed. (Berlin: Aufbau, 1999), 16.
19. Hilde Thurnwald, Gegenwartsprobleme Berliner Familien: Eine Soziologische unterschung an 498 Familien (Berlin, 1948), 96–97.
20. “Generation ohne Väter,” in Benjamin: Zeitschrift für junge Menschen 1 (vol. 1, 1 February 1947), 14.
21. Thurnwald, 191–192.
22. Kenneth S. Pope, “Memory, Abuse and Science: Questioning Claims about the False Memory Syndrome Epidemic,” American Psychologist 51, no. 9 (September 1996): 957–974; Terry Castle’s “Contagious Folly: An Adventure and its Skeptics,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice and Persuasion Across the Disciplines, eds. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 10–42.
23. Jürgen Diederich and Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, Theorie der Schule: Ein Studienbuch zu Geschichte, Funktionen und Gestaltung (Berlin: Cornelsen, 1997), 235–240.