CHAPTER EIGHT

The End of Their Story

You, who shall resurface following the flood

In which we have perished

Contemplate

When you speak of our weaknesses

Also the dark time

That you have escaped.

— Bertold Brecht, ‘To Those Who Follow In Our Wake’

I cleaned my conscience for years, until it lay gleaming like a pebble in the stream of history. My generation knew from the outset what lessons we had to learn from that history.

In the face of the crimes that were committed between 1933 and 1945, not by us personally, but in the name of our nation and our forefathers, there could only be one conclusion: we had to ensure that nothing of the kind could happen again.

We grew up with our grandparents remembering, admonishing, and commemorating. What had happened didn’t pertain to us, but we were inevitably affected by it. From the very beginning, we were informed about the abysmal depths of the Third Reich, the horrors of the Holocaust, and German war crimes.

And not only that. We were also informed that a cloak of silence and repression had settled over history back then, and that we were the first to be fully informed about those crimes, knowledge of which our teachers had needed to struggle to acquire.

When we went abroad and were greeted with malicious glee by people shouting ‘Heil Hitler’, we were hurt. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen, and when it did we were justified in feeling vicarious embarrassment — because of our history, but also because non-Germans were so determined to assure us of our inherited guilt. As blameworthy as our recent history might have been, we were equally virtuous with our enlightened convictions.

While earlier generations of German schoolchildren were inoculated with the poison of nationalism, we were fed guilt, shame, and responsibility by the spoonful. It was liberating, but also unsettling, and like all medicines this one had its side effects. If dismay becomes a ritual, the danger arises of another kind of repression. Then a formulaic cult of memory and a habitual willingness to become enraged stifle any attempt to find one’s own answer to the question: How could it happen?

Lawyer and well-known author Bernhard Schlink recently analysed the contemporary gesture of moral rage in an essay entitled ‘Culture of Denunciation’.1 In the essay, Schlink, who taught Public Law and Legal Philosophy at Humboldt University until 2009, reported on discussions he had had with his students about the moral obligations of lawyers. Schlink had tried to consider the work of lawyers under the Kaiser and in the Third Reich in the context of their times: What latitude did they allow themselves? How could their thoughts and actions be assessed in view of the existing conditions of the state and power politics? ‘But the students were at the level of contemporary morality and weren’t interested in yesterday’s morals,’ Schlink writes, summing up his observations before addressing the cause of the culture of denunciation among the students: ‘At school, instead of understanding the behaviour in and out of the world of the “Third Reich”, they are drilled in moral evaluation of it.’2

Schlink places responsibility for this on the shoulders of a historical scholarship that has paraded moral criticism rather than factual knowledge. He cited the authors of Das Amt und die Vergangenheit (The Ministry and the Past), a 2010 study of the Auswärtiges Amt, as a prime example of this kind of contemporary treatment of moral judgements in academia, when they described the Foreign Ministry in the Third Reich as a ‘criminal organisation’ and conjured a ‘wave of rage’. If we judge history from a contemporary perspective, as if it were the present, the history ceases to be, and at best we replace a historical partiality with a contemporary one.

A good commentator on this topic is a former president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker. His speech on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war in 1985 went into the history books because he described 8 May 1945 not as a defeat, but as a ‘day of liberation’ from National Socialist tyranny. The reinterpretation of defeat as liberation marked the dawn of a new historical and political era, although Weizsäcker’s attitude was a source of controversy at the time, even in his own party, the CDU. ‘I made myself very unpopular in the parliamentary group with my attitude,’ the former president said when I visited him in January 2012.’3

Weizsäcker wanted to put a positive spin on the future. As a former soldier who had lost a brother in the first weeks of the war, and who later, as a young lawyer, defended his father in the Nuremberg Wilhelmstrasse Trial, Weizsäcker was also an eyewitness who was very familiar with the moral hardships of dictatorship. Weizsäcker had never been a member of the NSDAP, but the question of the guilt and complicity of each individual German also preoccupied him in his 1985 speech: ‘There is people’s discovered guilt and the guilt that has remained hidden. There is guilt that people have admitted or denied. Everyone who experienced that time with full awareness is now asking himself quietly about his own involvement.’4

When I met him in 2012, Weizsäcker admitted that he had never talked to his father about his NSDAP membership. It hadn’t interested him: ‘In many cases there were certainly practical, personal reasons for joining the NSDAP, not political convictions. The overwhelming majority only found out what terrible cruelties were associated with the word Auschwitz shortly before the end of the war.’5

Weizsäcker was addressing the same generational conflict between eyewitnesses and the contemporary youth that Schlink describes. In his 1985 speech, the president had exhorted young and old to help each other understand ‘why it is vitally important to keep memory alive. It is not a matter of overcoming the past. That can’t be done. It cannot be changed retroactively, or made not to have happened’.

The further back in the past the events are, the greater our informational advantage over those who witnessed them. Today we have an overview of the horrors of National Socialism that even the main perpetrators couldn’t have had at the time. In more than ten years of research, the academics at the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum have drawn up a list of places of National Socialist persecution during the Holocaust. As The New York Times reported in March 2013, researchers counted some 42,500 camps and ghettoes that formed a Europe-wide Holocaust network.6

Even Adolf Eichmann could not have had such a detailed overview. But can those alive at the time therefore claim to have known nothing about Auschwitz? Did the guilt come only with shame, when the extent of the crimes committed by the Germans became clear after 1945? That was also something which Weizsäcker addressed in his 1985 speech: ‘No one who kept his ears and eyes open, who wanted to keep himself informed, could miss seeing the fact that the deportation trains were rolling.’

During our conversation in 2012, I asked him if he included himself in that. ‘Yes, of course,’ Weizsäcker nodded. Everyone who had lived at the time was affected. I wanted to know if it was easier for us to talk about this responsibility today than it was 20 years ago. After all, the publication in 2010 of the Auswärtiges Amt study The Ministry and the Past had shown that, among the responsible historians and eyewitnesses such as Weizsäcker, there was deep dissent about the evaluation of the role of the Foreign Ministry in the Third Reich. Other studies of that same ministry make it equally clear how apt Bernhard Schlink’s observation about the moral differences in perspective between eyewitnesses and contemporary commentators really is.

There is no denying that, over the last 20 years, much exemplary research has been done into the Third Reich. The awkwardness begins when its insights or conclusions influence the public and political treatment of memory, as in the case of The Ministry and the Past. The fact that a historian such as Norbert Frei, who co-authored the study, does not balk at speculating publicly, without adequate empirical evidence, about the collective enrolment of half-year groups of the Hitler Youth without those individuals’ knowledge is another striking example of knee-jerk moral judgement — regardless of whether it serves the purposes of exoneration or denunciation.

It is a paradox: the more we learned about National Socialism, Schlink believes, the harder it became to imagine ourselves in the situation of people — whether victims or perpetrators — who were living at the time.

For more than sixty years people have been researching, writing, reading about the twelve years of the ‘Third Reich’, new findings have been made and old ones rediscovered and reassessed, there has been analysis and reflection. It is not impossible that the results of this process of research and reflection have been projected into the minds of people acting at the time — as if they had known and considered at the time everything that has come to light over more than sixty years.7

This explains the bafflement and incomprehension with which evidence of the NSDAP membership of exemplary democrats was received. It forces us to imagine ourselves into the world of those affected at the time, a world very different from our own.

According to a cliché of politically engaged writing often evoked today, authors are ‘writing against forgetting’. This always means the forgetting of others, of the masses who must be dragged from the sleep of innocence by wide-awake guardians of virtue such as Günter Grass, Martin Walser, and Dieter Wellershoff. But the truth is more complicated and subtler than we thought. Yes, they have written against forgetting — not only against ours, however, but also against their own. In Walser’s work, that still happens between the lines, as we have seen, because the author denies ever knowingly becoming a member of the NSDAP. In Grass’s case, it was a bombshell when, in his memoir Peeling the Onion, he shook off the burden of his never-forgotten membership of the SS by publicly remembering it. Grass was the only one to risk such a clean break. Walser, Wellershoff, Jens, Henze, Genscher, Luhmann, Loest, and all the rest wrote, composed, researched, and participated in politics against their own forgetting. One can, but need not, see the restless creativity of these Flakhelfer as an act of atonement for being led astray as youths. It is an achievement, at any rate.

In judging the Flakhelfer generation, we are judging ourselves, and finding ourselves satisfactory. Never led into temptation, we have done everything right. This attitude of moral superiority and rebellious ‘memorialising’ serves to anaesthetise our own conscience. ‘Even more than that,’ as Schlink puts it, ‘they seem to eradicate the stain of the German past that members of the third and fourth generation still feel — if they are interested in history and define their identity not only on the basis of life in the present, but also on the basis of life with the past.’8

How different is the story that the Flakhelfer generation can tell us: a story of moral hardship, ethical conflicts, human weakness, and human greatness. It will draw towards a close when the last members of that generation die, but it will return in a new form, and then their story will remind us that we were not born better people, but owe it solely to the happy chance of our birth that we were not led into temptation.

In 1946, the American newspaper correspondent Judy Barden wrote of de-Nazification in Bavaria: ‘It will take 72 years, until 2018, to complete the task.’9 While de-Nazification was officially declared finished in 1948, the Nazi pasts of many of the Flakhelfer generation still surprise and preoccupy us even today. But it would be wrong to try to retroactively de-Nazify exemplary democrats such as Martin Walser, Walter Jens, or Hans-Dietrich Genscher by simply denying the existence of their NSDAP membership cards.

On the contrary: the life’s work that these Flakhelfer created after 1945 as artists, academics, or politicians deserves to be acknowledged all the more for having been produced under the most unfavourable conditions imaginable. Seduced and betrayed, they were released by the Third Reich into an uncertain future — one which they mastered. So they didn’t just contribute to the democratic success story of the Federal Republic. Their fate effectively embodies the transformation from bad to good.

Thomas Mann was one of the first to think, in 1945, about the causes of Germany’s defeat at the hands of the Nazi barbarians. In his essay ‘Germany and the Germans’, the author, exiled from Germany by the Nazis, did not exempt himself from the guilt that weighed upon his compatriots, indeed upon the whole of German culture. After all, Mann had profound personal experience of the temptations of German introspection. So he declared:

This story may bring one thing before our minds: that there are not two Germanys, an evil one and a good one, but only one, whose best was turned to evil by devilish cunning. Evil Germany is the good gone wrong, the good in misfortune, guilt and downfall. So it is just as impossible for a German-born spirit entirely to deny and to explain the evil, guilt-ridden Germany, and to declare: ‘I am the good, the noble, the just Germany in the white robe, I leave the evil for you to eradicate.’10

Thomas Mann would not live to see the guilt-ridden, destroyed, morally corrupt post-war Germany become a genuine democracy. But he would have been able to confirm his view that there are not two Germanys, and that most Germans wore neither the white robe of innocence nor the black cloak of pure evil, but felt their way forward in the grey overalls of compromised reality. The Flakhelfer generation personally experienced that, and worked positively away at it.

So their story has a happy ending, because it proves that things can go the other way, and that the good can grow from the bad.