"Getting History Right": East and West German Collective Memories of the Holocaust and War
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"Getting History Right": East and West German Collective Memories of the Holocaust and War
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| ISBN-13: | 9781611480078 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press Copublishing Division |
| Publication date: | 12/10/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 294 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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"Getting History Right"
East and West German Collective Memories of the Holocaust and War
By Mark A. Wolfgram
Bucknell University Press
Copyright © 2011 Mark A. WolfgramAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61148-007-8
CHAPTER 1
Collective Memory, Politics, and Culture
Why does the past matter so much to us? Why do we expend political and material resources on getting history right, on getting the interpretation of the past correct? We are passionately and emotionally tied to our personal pasts as well as the pasts of our national communities and other groups. We cannot leave the past alone; we have to get the meaning right. Quite often, as will become clear in this study, we feel that we owe a special debt to our ancestors, especially those who died in our all too frequent wars.
Elites, civic groups, and individuals struggle to maintain or change the representations of the past over time. The perpetual struggle for mastery of a nation's historic narrative is a competition for a scarce resource as real as any economic good. It is a struggle for legitimacy, for the speaker or ruler to be seen as right and just, and therefore possessing authority. It is, therefore, a political struggle. All of this leads us back to questions of identity, identity formation, legitimacy, and the links between identity and memory at both the individual and the social level. It is also a struggle for meaning in the face of human mortality and for the living to bear witness for the dead and justify their present exercise of power over others. These questions are at the center of this book and the growing interdisciplinary scholarship of social and collective memories. To answer these questions scholars need to engage in a vigorous study of culture and politics, meaning and symbols.
The present volume highlights the political struggles over the multiple meanings of the past in the context of three German societies: the postwar societies of East and West Germany from 1945 to 1990, and the society of reunified Germany in its first decade, from 1990 to 2000. By reflecting on the struggle for meaning, this book touches upon many of the basic dilemmas of human existence. Once the human consciousness fixates upon the mortality of the individual and the potential meaninglessness of death, there is a struggle in life to create meaning and order through creative symbolic activity. By focusing on meaning, this book places culture and symbols at the center of its analysis and by so doing falls outside mainstream political science. This is a work in culture and politics, not political culture. Rather than a traditional work in political culture, where individual attitudes are aggregated into populations, this book is a study of culture and politics, of shared beliefs and values, and the struggle over their meaning. To examine this relationship between culture and politics, I will look at a comparison of East and West German societies and their respective encounters with the difficult history of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. This is also a study of contrasts, of how and why the collective memories of these traumatic events in an authoritarian and in a democratic society changed over time. It is a study that shows how the changing boundaries of the collective memories and the cultural matrix molded political events, making some more likely and others less likely over time.
Consider the following questions: Why was the Ludwigsburg Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes only established in 1958, thirteen years after the war, with a staff of twenty and a mandate only to investigate crimes that occurred outside Germany? How could a former Gestapo officer sue in a West German court in the 1950s for his full pension and a bonus, in respect of the rank he received while deporting Jews, and win? Why in July 1979 did the Bundestag, the West German Parliament, barely vote in favor of eliminating the statute of limitations for crimes of murder and genocide, when at the beginning of that year it was perfectly clear that the Bundestag was going to refuse to extend the same statute of limitations? Why could Hans Globke, a person intimately involved in the writing of the Nuremberg Laws, which legalized discrimination against Jews, serve as a close adviser to West Germany's first chancellor, Adenauer, in the 1950s and 1960s? Why was Hans Filbinger, another prominent Christian Democratic politician with a checkered past during the National Socialist years, only brought down by scandal in the late 1970s? Why did the East German government at first demonize and ridicule the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Hitler and then in the 1960s turn Claus von Stauffenberg, one of the chief plotters, into a hero? Why was there renewed interest in Jews and Jewish history in East Germany in 1988? Why did a discussion of the crimes of the Wehrmacht only erupt in the 1990s, after Germany's reunification? Why was it only in the 1990s that the Hamburg Institute for Social Research began to collect photographs from the families of former soldiers and then create a highly controversial exhibit known as the "Crimes of the Wehrmacht Exhibit"? Why did it take forty-five years after the war to begin exploring the narrative of "German" rather than only "Nazi" perpetrators, as if Germans and Nazis were separate analytic categories?
To understand these essential political events and many more in the postwar histories of East and West Germany, one needs to grasp the importance of collective memories, which are shared and contested in every society. For example, if one wants to understand why Jews have a vastly more important public role and more political power in Germany today than in 1946, one needs to understand Germany's cultural matrix and the changing nature of Germany's collective memories. Jews living in Germany today have more legitimacy to speak in public than Jews in the past because the collective German interpretation and understanding of the past have fundamentally changed, especially since the 1980s. Their democratic citizenship, their right to participate in social discourse, their greater inclusion in contentious politics, have all changed because the collective social interpretation of the past has changed. Getting history right matters.
This observation, supported by the research presented here, demonstrates the fundamental and underappreciated importance of including collective memory studies in our study of political life. Our ability to understand and explain the success and failure of democratization as well as the relative power of different individuals, groups, and institutions in a society may well depend upon our scholarly ability to chart the changing nature of the cultural matrix. As Anthony Cohen, David Lan, Mary Douglas, and of course Claude Lévi-Strauss along with numerous other anthropologists have demonstrated time and again, the past offers a powerful source of legitimacy, which actors can try to mobilize in the present. What political scientists need to realize is that this is just as true for our so-called modern people as the so-called primitives of anthropological interest. There is a greater unity of inquiry among these disciplines than is often readily acknowledged. As Mary Douglas once lamented, "So little has been done to extend the analysis across modern and primitive cultures that there is still no common vocabulary. Sacraments are one thing, magic another; taboos one thing, sin another. The first thing is to break through the spiky verbal hedges that arbitrarily insulate one set of human experiences (ours) from another set (theirs)." In this study, I combine "their" mythology with "our" collective memories and emphasize humanity's common concerns with the legitimate exercise of power and reconciliation between individuals and groups for past wrongs.
Collective Memory Studies and Political Analysis
There is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary literature in memory, collective memory, public memory, and historical memory studies, terms that some scholars use interchangeably. Scholarship in this field, however, is primarily that of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers. There are, in comparison, relatively few works from political scientists. One reason for this is that collective memory studies, by their very nature, demand a rich diversity of qualitative methodologies including content analysis, ethnographic field research, oral history, and interviews. There is a culturalist orientation in the field of comparative politics, but this field of research is one of the least populated in the discipline. In short, political scientists tend not to work with cultural data and the interpretive traditions in the social sciences. I will return to an explanation and a defense of the culturalist perspective later.
The research presented here provides one of the few sustained comparisons of East and West German reflections on the Holocaust and World War II. Furthermore, along with Kansteiner and Art, I have sought to bring to light how ordinary Germans reacted to and made sense of elite debates and representations of the past in popular culture. A good deal of the scholarship on collective memory has dealt, in some manner, with Germany and the Holocaust, although most of these studies have focused on West Germany. As with other books that deal with the National Socialist past and the German encounter with that past, the Holocaust is central here as well. But to understand the Holocaust narrative in Germany, one must see it in relation to other German narratives of heroism, sacrifice, victimhood, and resistance. This study looks at how these narrative threads, often studied in semi-isolation, collided and interacted with one another. I have made every attempt to avoid any misunderstanding on this delicate point. One cannot understand National Socialism without placing the Holocaust and anti-Semitism at the core of Hitler's political project. Yet West German society basically rejected this interpretation for about three decades, and prior to 1989, East German society never really confronted the Holocaust. This has led to a general misperception that a collective German silence vis-à-vis the Nazi past prevailed, when in fact Germans, East and West, discussed the Nazi past intensely. They even referred to the Holocaust, if obliquely, from the very beginning. Ever since the end of World War II, Germans, Jews, and others have been struggling to get this history right.
Popular perceptions and the general tone in much of the scholarly literature argue as follows: while Germans had once repressed the Nazi past, they now fully embrace the consequences of that past in their public and private lives. This is Daniel Goldhagen's conclusion in his much-discussed Hitler's Willing Executioners. In another recent book on the Holocaust in American life, Peter Novick commented, "The airing of the series [Holocaust], in January 1979, became the turning point in Germany's long-delayed confrontation with the Holocaust.... It was an American 'soap opera' that shattered thirty years of German silence on their wartime crimes." Novick is not primarily concerned with the German example in his book, but his assumption that the silence was only broken in 1979 because of the showing of Holocaust, while widely held, begs for further analysis.
The evidence presented here challenges this widely held perception of a German silence toward the Nazi period and its crimes. Rather than a past that was wholly repressed, I provide evidence that shows an almost compulsive need for Germans to talk about the Third Reich, but from a uniquely German perspective. It has always been a matter of "getting the history right," and this has led to a number of intense political struggles over the proper interpretation of the past. Other scholars have also begun to point to the ways in which German society has sought to make the Nazi legacy "a usable past," one in which the German nation is defended and justified before history.
Rationality and Instrumentalism Versus a Comparative Culturalist Approach
The culturalist argument put forward in this book argues against viewing humans as purely rational actors who simply manipulate culture and cultural products to serve rational interests. This is the rational choice or intentionalist school of thought. The field of collective memory studies includes works that tend to view human action as largely rational, conscious, and intentional, implying that the past is manipulated to serve present political interests. Hobsbawm and Ranger take a top-down perspective, in which the focus is on the ability of elites and the state to manipulate cultural symbols to direct the masses, whereas others argue for a bottom-up resistance to elite attempts to define the past. The culturalist perspective does not dismiss the existence of such intentional manipulations by both the powerful and the weak, but it does argue that such analysis is incomplete. The rational choice, instrumentalist position cannot tell us where the rational actor interests originated and quite often risk falling into the tautological position of arguing that actors do what they do because it is in their interest to do so.
"Why do actors view their interests and their world as they do?" the culturalist scholar is wont to ask. Marc Howard Ross writes, "What they [rational choice and instrumental arguments] lack is thoughtful consideration of where interests come from in the first place, how interests get defined in specific cultural contests, and the ways that culture structures appropriate ways to pursue them. The theories and language of interest and institutional analysis that are the bases for most political analyses make too little space for identity and culture and pay too little attention to how they directly affect conflict." Writing three decades earlier, Abner Cohen expressed a similar lament for much of political science, "Above all, they suffer from an implicit assumption that political symbols are consciously intended symbols and when some of them write of 'political socialisation' their accounts are mechanical and unidimensional." Instead, Cohen argues, we need to consider a two-dimensional humanity that takes into consideration both "symbolic action" and "power relationships." Symbolic action is tied to struggle over meaning, while political and economic power relationships deal with physical coercion and material wealth. The culturalist perspective in comparative politics argues for the study of Cohen's two dimensions, the material and the ideal, the political and symbolic, politics and culture. The point is not to displace completely the study of the material roots of power in society, but rather to argue for the inclusion of meaning, culture, ritual, and symbol, while not making culture wholly dependent on material political power. In the words of Jeffrey Alexander and those working in the field of cultural sociology, scholars need to view culture as having a relative autonomy from social structure, or Cohen's power relationships. Alexander writes, "When described in the folk idiom of positivism, one could say that the more traditional sociology of culture approach treats culture as a dependent variable, whereas in cultural sociology it is an 'independent variable' that possesses a relative autonomy in shaping actions and institutions, providing inputs every bit as vital as more material or instrumental forces." As David Kertzer summarizes, "But this image of 'political man' as a rational actor who carefully weighs his or her objective circumstances and decides on a course of action based on an instrumental calculation of self-interest leaves out culture and all that makes us human." Although the language and disciplines of each of these authors differs there is a unity in their argument for dealing explicitly with meaning and culture as something not merely derived from political power. Meaning and culture are not epiphenomenal; they are not merely extensions of political power, which the puppet masters manipulate in a rational manner to control the masses. Rather, political power is itself constituted and rooted in culture, in shared meanings, and in the perceived correctness of a leader's actions. We need to engage humanity, as Cohen has argued, along two dimensions: culture and politics.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from "Getting History Right" by Mark A. Wolfgram. Copyright © 2011 Mark A. Wolfgram. Excerpted by permission of Bucknell University Press.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Collective Memory, Politics, and CultureChapter 2: Victims and Perpetrators: The View from the East
Chapter 3: Victims and Perpetrators: The View from the West
Chapter 4: Collaboration and Resistance: Blood and Redemption
Chapter 5: Division and Unity: A Revolutionary People Unites Itself
Chapter 6: Defeat and Liberation: Ending the War
Chapter 7 Conclusion: Mourning, Loss, and the Difficulty of Remembering
Chapter 8 Appendix: Charts and Chart Notes