Those happy years of peace between 1933 and 1939, when success had followed success, were now shrouded in a distant, unreal mist. Stéphane Roussel, who had documented those years for her French readers, returned to Berlin to find them lost in a thick cloud of forgetting, no more than an inconsequential prelude to what came after.
For most Germans, the drama began in 1944 or ’45, when the country was destroyed, the cities bombed, military bases established. They’ll talk freely about the great ‘trek’—the exodus of people from the east, fleeing the advance of the Red Army. In fact, they’ll talk about anything that makes victims of them.
Roussel had come up against a phenomenon that increasingly troubled neutral observers and deeply embittered the regime’s victims and former opponents. Not long after the end of the war, most Germans considered themselves victims of the Nazis.
During her journey through postwar Germany, Hannah Arendt had the opportunity to study this phenomenon. In her conversations with Germans, she often found they had a blind spot when it came to the causes and origins of the totalitarian experiment, and their own participation and involvement in it. Her questions on these subjects were met with angry bewilderment.
This is usually followed by…a deluge of stories about how Germans have suffered (true enough, of course, but beside the point); and if the object of this little experiment happens to be educated and intelligent, he will proceed to draw up a balance between German suffering and the suffering of others, the implication being that one side cancels the other…
The final months of the war had been apocalyptic: carpet bombing and low-flying aircraft, enemy armies advancing on all sides, futile defensive battles, the horrors of the Soviet army in the east and, on top of everything else, the ruthless terror of Germany’s own regime. The feeling of existential threat—not knowing whether the next day, or even the next hour, would be survived—was burnt deep into people’s minds. No one who had lived through the intense events of those last weeks would ever forget them, while what had come before—the rejoicing, the happiness, the successes—soon faded from memory. It was the tragic moment of collapse that shaped the way the Germans perceived themselves. They had been afraid of the war; they hadn’t wanted it. The worse their experiences, the more ill-used they felt, and from there it was only a short step to believing that they themselves had been targeted by the regime. The way the Germans saw it, the orgy of violence at the end of the war had left them the ultimate nation of victims.
‘But what about us? We are adrift and abandoned.’ Decades later, Lore Walb couldn’t believe that her twenty-five-year-old self had complained about being let down by the Führer, like a small, dependent child. Even before the war was over, she had started to think as millions of Germans soon would. Her generation saw themselves as deceived, cheated of their youth, betrayed in their ideals and values, exploited and used—after putting all their energy into the movement’s ideas. ‘What a course things have taken. Now the people have to suffer for it. If Dad had lived to see this!’
Lore Walb’s father, who had died in 1936, was spared having to witness the bankruptcy of the idea he had supported as a party member. Unlike millions of other party officials who had held jobs of various descriptions, he never had to justify his part in things. Even before the guns had fallen silent, the Germans had begun to distance themselves from the regime. People flocked to defect—from Hitler Youth boys to those in the highest echelons of power. At the Nuremberg war crimes trials, generals, Gauleiter, ministers and commanders-in-chief pleaded forgetfulness and ignorance or claimed to have been oppressed and manipulated. Even the Nazi elite insisted they’d merely been following orders. Every finger was pointed at the man who had misled his people with lies and betrayals, coercion and terror—who was to blame for their lost homeland, the destruction of their family homes, their fallen brothers and sons, the rape of their mothers, sisters and daughters.
The idea that they were victims freed the Germans from the need to examine their own consciences. This willingness to renounce the Nazi cause made the job of the occupying forces easier in some ways; the Allies were relieved not to face resistance from diehard loyalists or underground guerrilla units. But hardly anyone would admit to having been involved in the Nazis’ crimes, and the Allies’ ineffective attempts to distinguish the guilty from the innocent only reinforced the Germans’ collective refusal to face up to the past. The practice of denazification ended up creating even more ‘victims’.
The bureaucratic notion of using questionnaires to distinguish Nazis from non-Nazis failed. Membership of a Nazi organisation such as the civil servants’ league, the teachers’ league or the motor vehicle corps was no indication of the extent of a person’s involvement in the Nazi system, and neither was their rank. Whether innocent or guilty, Germans did not consider such information sufficient evidence to support a lay judge’s verdict for or against them. Many regarded denazification as an absurd theatre of injustice—and as a threat to their families and futures, leading as it often did to imprisonment, or exclusion from their previous professions.
When Melita Maschmann appeared before the court of arbitration during her internment in the women’s camp at Ludwigsburg, she vehemently disputed the judges’ right to assess her case. She saw the German judges as henchmen of the occupying powers, accusing her not of any crime, but of fighting for a political ideal. She scorned the idea that it was possible to determine guilt or innocence by bureaucratic means. ‘I despised those courts of arbitration so much that I wouldn’t have hesitated to fight them with every lie and trick in the book, if I’d thought it necessary,’ she said.
Charged with being a ‘major offender’, Maschmann did everything in her power to be ranked a follower instead. She had no qualms about bringing her rhetorical skills to bear to get the judges on her side, and the success of this strategy left her acutely aware of Germany’s political helplessness. The court found Melita Maschmann guilty of poisoning the minds of the young people of Germany with her work for the Hitler Youth, but she got off with a light sentence.
Gerhard Starcke’s decision to submit to denazification was practical rather than moral: he was keen to work as a journalist in postwar Germany and thought serving time in prison a wiser move for his future career than going underground like some of his comrades. He acted entirely strategically. Having turned away from the church in the early 1930s, he began to get involved again while in the camp at Neuengamme. ‘I saw my return to the Protestant Church as another way to speed my release.’
Because Starcke had been a party member and worked in propaganda, his denazification was long and drawn-out. He was just going through the motions; it would never have occurred to him to question seriously what he had done. All the same, he must have been surprised when the court of arbitration found that he had been a follower who had lent no substantial support to the Nazis. ‘The English can’t have probed very deeply,’ he would later comment. Now he began a second life, in provincial West Germany, unshadowed by the past. He continued to work as a journalist. Nobody asked him about his early writings. His autobiography of more than four hundred pages ends on a note of near incredulity: ‘However bleak and sad things may have looked when I was released from Neuengamme in 1947, they soon took a rapid and quite spectacular turn for the better.’
The Third Reich may have splintered into millions of pieces as it went down, but it was not without a legacy. A new community of suffering was born out of the shared experiences of hunger and cold; a community of victims emerged from the sense of betrayal, injustice and helplessness; a community of interests sprang up as reconstruction began. Wherever she went in Germany, Hannah Arendt saw people working away, even on Saturdays and Sundays. It was as if they were under a kind of compulsion to keep themselves busy, toiling away from morning to night. There was something unnerving about the speed at which the Germans had got back into their hardworking routines.
Watching the Germans busily stumble through the ruins of a thousand years of their own history, shrugging their shoulders at the destroyed landmarks or resentful when reminded of the deeds of horror that haunt the whole surrounding world, one comes to realize that busyness has become their chief defense against reality.
The great appeal of the ‘zero hour’ metaphor that was adopted for 1945 was its twofold promise: on the one hand, the severing of all ties with an overwhelming past, and on the other, a fresh start for a society that felt its downfall absolved it of responsibility for its actions. The idea of a ‘zero hour’ encouraged the revival of the old psychological metaphor of the inner rift. As in the Nazi years, the people of Germany acted as though a part of reality didn’t exist. This time they were in denial about their own history.