‘Our philosophy is a matter of the heart. Feeling is more to us than reason.’ This simple Hitler Youth principle helps to explain the power of the Nazi movement. When the Germans’ world came to an end in 1945, they had spent twelve years being driven from one extreme emotion to the next: the hope of upturn, the joy of belonging, the pride of being special, the euphoria of success, the arrogance of power, the rage of destruction. They had been in a state of permanent intoxication with never a moment to sober up; there was no respite in those densely packed years, no time to reflect, and when everything ended in collapse, the overblown emotions collapsed too. What remained were the beginnings of other, less exhilarating feelings that had sprouted in the shadow of success: guilt at having taken part, shame at having looked away, hatred and self-hatred, fear of revenge and violence, despair at the emptiness that now faced them.
The suicide epidemic that had rolled in waves across the dwindling Reich—from east to west, Königsberg to Berlin, Demmin to Siefersheim—was a radical response to this emotional collapse. Untold numbers of Germans turned on themselves the violence that had become part of their everyday life. The epidemic, which claimed tens of thousands of victims, was an extreme expression of the meaninglessness and pain people felt in the face of defeat, humiliation, loss, shame and personal suffering.
But millions of Germans survived the downfall and had to carry on with their lives. Although long-announced, the end had come abruptly for them. The awakening was stark and sober. Contemporaries who look back on that time speak, as if in a daze, of a broken spell, a vanished illusion, banished ghosts. The past years suddenly seemed unreal.
After swimming the Elbe, Martin Sieg ended up in a POW camp in Gorleben. He and the other prisoners sat around, staring blankly into space, wrapped up in their own thoughts. They mulled over the hopelessness of their situation, but couldn’t speak about it; they had withdrawn inside themselves. ‘The past, which had left only a void, seemed to me an illusion.’ Martin tried to think his way back to an earlier time, back to the lovely world of his childhood. He held imaginary conversations in the lost paradise of his grandparents’ garden and went on imaginary walks with his parents in the forests of East Prussia. In this way he kept alive the will to carry on.
As Christmas 1945 approached, the first Christmas since the fall of the Reich, Martin Sieg felt uneasy. Memories overwhelmed him; he was afraid that the feelings at this supposedly festive time would prove too much for him. Not long before, news had reached him that his father had been sentenced to twenty-five years’ forced labour in a Russian POW camp. Then there had been the letter from his grandfather, telling him of his mother’s suicide in Rastenburg. ‘That letter forced me to look back with a heavy gaze,’ Sieg said. ‘As soon as I’d read it, I knew I would never come to terms with the past.’
What had the last twelve years meant? He found no answer. ‘Life had slammed shut and locked the door to yesterday.’ He was eighteen. He decided to look ahead, to set himself some kind of task and slog his way forward, to accept these new times, to live on.
Later, when his father returned from the prison camp, Martin Sieg realised how hard it was to reconcile the old with the new. His father found himself in an alien world, unable to feel at home. The sunglasses he’d once worn into town stayed on permanently. He couldn’t cope with the colours of this strange new place.
• • •
In July 1945, the Americans arrested Melita Maschmann in Bad Reichenhall. Until then she’d been on the run, from the Allies but also from herself. It was in a prison in Heidelberg that the full horror of her situation hit her: everything she had lived and fought for was in pieces. But she was still alive. She lay on the floor of her cell, weighing up her options. She could take her life. She could abandon herself to despair and madness. Or, she thought, she could summon all her strength and shut herself off to the onslaught of misery.
That way I would survive the collapse of the world in which I’d been happy. To be sure, it would only be possible if I kept a tight control on my thoughts and emotions. There were boundaries they must never cross again. Beyond those boundaries lay self-destruction.
During her three years in Ludwigsburg Women’s Camp 77, Melita never once crossed those boundaries. The routine of prison life in the company of other high-ranking functionaries and concentration camp guards allowed her to put off confronting what she’d been through. Her time in the camp with these other true believers in the Nazi cause only made her more self-righteous. Not once in those long days divided between idleness and interrogation, she said, did these women pause to question the foundations of their faith. They saw themselves as loyal patriots and stood by their convictions. When their guards showed them photographs of heaped corpses and dying prisoners in concentration camps, they pronounced them fakes. The only weakness they permitted themselves was self-pity. Melita Maschmann wasn’t ready for reality. Only occasionally did a nagging inner voice press her to justify her beliefs. ‘There was only one way to protect myself—to stop thinking altogether.’
• • •
In 1945, Allied soldiers occupied a Germany ravaged by years of air raids and battles drawn out past the point of absurdity. Most city centres had been bombed to rubble. But the behaviour of the Germans, as they picked their way through the ruins of their former greatness and glory, was surprising. Julius Posener hadn’t been in Germany for twelve years. He came from an upper-class family with Jewish roots and had spent his youth in a smart residential area of Berlin before fleeing the country in 1933 and enlisting in the British army. In April 1945, he returned to his native country as a military engineer; later he would become a political intelligence officer and help to establish Germany’s new political culture. Before crossing the border, he was handed a booklet about the Germans’ character, warning him of all the hazards of a deluded nation prepared to die. But Posener found his fellow countrymen in an altogether different state; years afterwards he would write laconically about returning home to pyramids of rubble and how strangely contradictory he found the German people’s response to it all. ‘The destruction was to be expected, but the way people looked and behaved came as a shock. It didn’t add up.’
The way the German people looked and behaved didn’t add up
They didn’t look defeated; they looked more like people opening the windows after a long, hard winter. Perplexed, some of Posener’s British comrades asked him where the cannibals were. They’d been expecting brutal monsters, but all they could see were friendly old people and sweet young girls. Before coming to Germany, they had been in Italy with their unit and seen pale, ragged figures on the verge of starvation. ‘What was that,’ Posener asked, ‘compared with the rows of nice girls dressed in white, going for an evening walk outside the ruins of their town, as flirtatious and unassailable as if the town were still intact and their fatherland weren’t at the bottom of an abyss?’
Posener explained the Germans’ outward wellbeing by pointing to the Nazis’ wartime pillaging and plundering, which had enriched German towns and kept the people’s morale high. But how was he to explain to his British comrades the Germans’ callous reactions to the destruction of their own country and the monstrous crimes committed in their name? When the concentration camps were discovered, the Allies hung pictures of the atrocities outside town halls and showed films. Julius Posener recalled that all the Germans he spoke to guilelessly told him they’d known nothing about it. But they’d all had a friend or cousin at the front or in the hinterland who’d passed on this or that to them.
A lot of Germans knew something. They’d hear something, from some cousin or other, and suddenly a curtain would be drawn back before them—but because they didn’t really believe it, the curtain would fall shut again. Who, after all, would probe into a truth as awful as that?
During his time in Germany, Posener saw people try to wriggle out of their guilt, to justify what they had or hadn’t done. The trials of the perpetrators and the accounts of the atrocities were used to blame the crimes on ‘the Nazis’; it seemed a large majority of the population had not been involved in any way. Once again, a curtain was pulled across reality.
• • •
Hannah Arendt returned to her former homeland three years after Posener. She had grown up in Königsberg and emigrated in 1933. After sixteen years away from the country, she returned in August 1949, aged forty-two, to do some work for a Jewish organisation. She, too, was struck by the Germans’ denial of reality. ‘Nowhere is this nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less talked about than in Germany itself,’ she said. ‘A lack of response is evident everywhere.’
In the three years since Posener had made his observations, things had moved on. While Posener had made tentative efforts to understand, there is something harsh and brusque about Arendt’s forty-page report. The ghostly scenes she describes, as she hunts for clues amid the ruins of a country that was once hers, are brimming with disillusion.
Germans mail each other picture postcards still showing the cathedrals and marketplaces, the public buildings and bridges that no longer exist. And the indifference with which they walk through the rubble has its exact counterpart in the absence of mourning for the dead, or in the apathy with which they react, or rather fail to react, to the fate of the refugees in their midst.
Everywhere she looked, she saw Germans running away from reality. When she spoke to them, they totted up their suffering and compared it with that of others. When she criticised them for this, they icily deflected her remarks. When she asked about the reasons for the catastrophe, they dodged the question with vague talk of the wickedness of mankind. Arendt caught them shuffling out of responsibility with a variety of tricks: self-pity, distraction, apathy. Their refusal to confront what had happened came at the cost of genuine feeling.