Arendt was brought to the newly established Federal Republic of Germany by her work as director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, an organisation set up in 1947 to trace and distribute ‘heirless’ Jewish property within the US occupation zone. She spent more than six months there and her report shows that she put a great deal of energy into into grappling with the psychological devastation of the people she encountered. She was astonished by the emotional vacuum left by Germany’s defeat.
She often started conversations by telling people she was a German Jew and explaining what had brought her to Germany. Not once did this prompt questions about her fate or her family’s fate. Nor did it evoke sympathy or pity. Instead people trotted out well-rehearsed stories about the Germans’ suffering.
This general lack of emotion, at any rate this apparent heart-lessness, sometimes covered over with cheap sentimentality, is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.
Arendt observed the same reaction of chilly indifference towards the millions of refugees and uprooted people who were drifting across the country from the east. The younger generation struck her as emotionally paralysed, incapable of expressing themselves appropriately or putting their feelings into words. Instead they bridged the depths with platitudes and clichés. Arendt found it difficult to say whether this signified ‘a half-conscious refusal to yield to grief or a genuine inability to feel’.
• • •
The Germans’ refusal or inability to yield to grief had, in a way, begun on 1 May 1945. At about half past ten that evening, Hitler’s death had been announced over the radio. The wording of the announcement transformed his unglamorous suicide into the death of a hero, fighting to the last against Bolshevism. Even so, the announcement of the century met with indifference; few of Hitler’s many millions of supporters mustered more than a shrug. If he’d fallen victim to the assassination attempt of 20 July, he would have been revered as a martyr. But by the time he actually came to die, the masses had turned away. Surreptitiously, they took down their Führer portraits and buried them in their gardens. As if by arrangement, all the other icons, symbols and devotional objects vanished too, suddenly reduced to mere trinkets and trash. Hitler’s myth had died in the weeks of the final battle, before the man himself. Nobody grieved.
By the time Lore Walb heard the news of the Führer’s death on 2 May, French troops had occupied her homeland. The few lines she devotes to Hitler are divided between pity and reproach. He gets satisfactory marks for domestic policy, but a clear ‘poor’ for foreign affairs. ‘He’s at peace now, which is surely the best for him. But what about us? We’re adrift and abandoned and it will take us more than a lifetime to rebuild what the war has destroyed.’
This entry and the last in the diary are a week apart. During that week, Germany’s military defeat was accomplished and the surrender signed. And within the same space of time, Lore Walb made a complete break with the leader she had believed in. He had featured in the first entry she ever made in the blank book she received for her fifteenth birthday, on 23 May 1933. Later that year, at the Saar rally, she had been moved to tears by the sight of him and blessed with the most beautiful and poignant moment of her life. She had heard his voice on the radio and wished he’d go on speaking for hours. She had paid tribute to his achievements in carefully composed school essays. She had admired his will and his peacetime strength. He was her comfort and support when the war frightened her. His genius as a statesman gave her faith in his genius as a commander.
Lore Walb had loved Hitler like her own father and asked God to protect him. For twelve years he had been the focus of her diary. On 8 May 1945, as the spring sun shone and the birds sang, Lore wrote her last entry:
Hitler is dead now. But for the rest of our lives, we and those who come after us must bear the burden he has inflicted on us. This, then, is what has come of his rule. God seems not to love us anymore.
Lore felt as if the perpetrator had slipped from the dock, leaving the judge to pass sentence on his minor accomplices.
Gerhard Starcke devoted no more than a single dry sentence to the death of Hitler—the man who had been his inspiration, his protector, his leader. At the 1930 rally Starcke attended as a penniless student, Hitler had appeared before him like the Old Testament God. Hitler had given him a purpose in life and set his nerves quivering. Starcke had followed him first along the way of peace and then along the warpath. He had the Führer to thank for all that he’d achieved in life.
But as soon as he realised that Hitler wanted Germany to fall with him, Starcke’s only thoughts were of survival. When he surrendered to the Americans on 3 May, he drew a line under his life as a Nazi, like someone quitting a job. It cost him no inner anguish. During his two years in the former concentration camp of Neuengamme, where he was imprisoned by the British for being a Nazi propagandist, Starcke wrote his life story. In the conclusion he refers to Adolf Hitler as a black magician who put a spell on his life.
Until we awoke from the spell cast on us by a madman on the cusp between putative genius and lunacy—a madman whose propaganda concealed that lunacy from his people—we, too, were struck with blindness.
As a Nazi propagandist, Starcke had spent twelve years helping to sustain the madman’s magic.
• • •
Ten days after Hitler’s suicide, Melita Maschmann heard the news of his death on the radio. She never forgot the moment. She was in a remote Alpine valley when she heard and, looking out of the window at the evening light on the mountains, she half expected the craggy rocks to rear up and fall crashing into the valley. Hitler, the man of the people, had epitomised her ideal of national community and given her life meaning. She had devoted her life to the organisation that bore his name. Recalling the shock of 20 July 1944, when her knees had given way and she’d had to fight back tears, she waited to see how she would react this time. ‘Hitler was dead! But nothing happened. The Alpine sunset faded. An almost black purple settled over the peaks. Then, calmly and coldly, it began to rain.’
A feeling of emptiness gripped her. She recalled how he’d looked in the previous week’s newsreel: an ageing man with a stooped walk, casting distraught glances about him. She felt no tears rising. She had been dreading this moment, but when it came, it left her cold.
In almost all German memoirs that describe this period, his death is a gaping void. Those writers who do mention it sound as if they are fulfilling a duty. They refer to him in passing, devoting a few brief words to him as if he were some overbearing relative—one-time family patriarch and tyrannical centre of the clan, now long gone and little lamented. Some wiped away a fleeting tear. But they were done with high-flown emotion. No laments, no eulogies. No one asked about the funeral.
• • •
‘What had happened to their love? For the Germans loved Hitler.’ In 1938, after five years in Berlin, Stéphane Roussel had been forced to shut her correspondent’s office, and made up her mind then to have nothing more to do with the Germans. She’d had enough. They all—every one of them, from her concierge to the ladies in her kaffeeklatsch—idolised Hitler. Their love for him aroused fear and disgust in her—and not just because of her Jewish roots. Despite the show and hyperbole, their devotion was real; what Roussel had witnessed among the spectators at the Sportpalast was neither acted nor forced. But she had been afraid of him. He had driven her out of Germany.
But soon after the establishment of the Federal Republic, she returned to run France Soir’s office in the new capital, Bonn. No one showed less interest in her earlier experiences in Germany than the Germans themselves. Conversations on the subject soon dried up. ‘When I tell people that I lived under Hitler until the eve of the war, it rarely elicits a reaction,’ she said. Stéphane Roussel searched in vain for the old devotion. Gone were the women who had put up little altars in front of Hitler’s portrait, adorned with flowers and candles. Gone were the men who had trusted and admired him. Gone were the boys who had worshipped him, smitten with him because he pronounced them men. ‘It was best to forget, to draw a line under the past, avoid explanations, rewrite one’s part in things,’ Roussel said. ‘Disappointed love can produce talented authors.’
People’s love for Hitler had vanished overnight. The cult of the Führer was gone, along with the displays of public devotion and euphoria, the confessions of faith in market squares and forest clearings. Sensationalism and sloganeering had become suspect, as had collective frenzy. The dream that everything was possible had died a death, leaving people with nothing. Holy Germany, a fatherland mythicised out of all proportion, had forfeited its power to create meaning. The sacrifice demanded of its worshippers had been for nothing.
Collective passion gave way to the sober desire for a quiet, circumscribed life, without risks, without intense surges of feeling or near-uncontrollable emotion. To some outsiders, the atmosphere in postwar Germany seemed severe and sterile, and its people stony, joyless and cold.