A Duty to Forget? The 'Hitler Youth Generation' and the Transition from Nazism to Communism in Postwar East Germany, c. 1945-49

In Soviet-occupied East Germany during the mid- to late 1940s,a remarkable but scarcely remarked-upon transition took place.Hundreds of thousands of young Germans who had previously beenmembers of the Nazi youth organizations, the Hitler Youth (HJ)and the League of German Girls (BDM) flocked to join the Communist-ledFree German Youth (FDJ), a unisex ‘united youth organization’founded under Soviet auspices in March 1946. This paper examinesthe experiences of this ‘twice betrayed’ generation,whose members rapidly—though with varying degrees of enthusiasm—switchedallegiance from Nazism to Communism after the Second World Warand ultimately exchanged life in one authoritarian youth organizationfor life in another. Drawing on archival and interview material,it first seeks to outline Communist attitudes towards denazificationamong the young in the postwar period, before going on to examinefrom a grass-roots perspective the experiences, motivations,and attitudes of those who exchanged their HJ or BDM membershipbooks for those of the FDJ. Despite, or perhaps because of,East Germany's strongly-espoused and rigidly dogmatic ‘anti-fascism’,open discussion of the Nazi past was—for a variety ofreasons—taboo during the immediate postwar period, particularlyamong the young. This paper concludes by discussing the reasonsbehind this ‘pact of silence’ between the Communistsand the ‘Hitler Youth generation’—and howit impacted upon subsequent generations of young people ‘borninto socialism’.     

'Pomorze' or 'Preussen'? Polish Perspectives on Early Modern Prussian History

The attitudes of Polish historical scholarship towards the historyof early modern Prussia has been deeply marked by the partitionsof Poland and the anti-Polish coalition between Prussia, Russiaand Austria, which denied Poland its own statehood for wellover a century. In contrast to nineteenth-century German ‘Landesgeschichte’,which focused on local research and archival resources, historiansfrom Poland have usually opted to stay more within patternsof national history-writing. When the Polish state was reconstitutedafter the First World War, hostilities built up between Germanand Polish historical schools on Prussia, expressed in the NationalDemocratic-influenced myl zachodnia (Western thought) on thePolish side, and a not less expansionist Ostforschung on theother side of the border. It was only after the catastropheof the Second World War, the redrawing of national borders ineast central Europe, and under the influence of Marxist historicalconcepts in the People's Republic of Poland that nationalistapproaches as well as the ‘black legend’ of thePrussia's past were temporarily suppressed and finally replacedby a more research-led scholarship. During the second half ofthe twentieth century, Polish historiography was in fact muchquicker and more thorough than its German counterpart to forgethe history of Prussia into a major academic subject. Sincethe 1980s, if not earlier, an extremely fruitful dialogue hasdeveloped between scholars—a dialogue which does not alwayspenetrate journalistic and public awareness, as recent polemicssurrounding the controversially planned ‘Centre for Expulsions’in Berlin have shown.     

Foreign banks' attraction to the financial centre Frankfurt--an inverted 'U'-shaped relationship

This article traces the location of foreign banks in Germanyfrom 1949 to 2006. As suggested by New Economic Geography models,we find an inverted ‘U’-shaped concentration offoreign banks in Germany. Only after a competition between severalcities, Frankfurt has emerged as the pre-eminent financial centre,triggered by the ‘historical event’ of setting upthe German central bank in Frankfurt. After a strong increase,Frankfurt's share in the location of foreign banks in Germanydecreases slowly but significantly since the mid-1980s. We concludethat there will be a lesser role in Europe for second-tier financialcentres in the future.     

'For a Genuine and Noble Nakedness'? German Naturism in the Third Reich

This essay, based on primary sources from the privately-runInternationale FKK-Bibliothek and a growing body of secondaryliterature, examines some of the myths and misconceptions regardingthe fate of naturism in the Third Reich. It shows that despiteGoering's decree of 3 March 1933, which described the ‘nakedculture movement’ as ‘one of the greatest dangersfor German culture and morality’, naturism did not cometo an abrupt halt after the Machtergreifung. While officialhistories of German naturism talk proudly of the movement's‘persecution’ and ‘non-violent resistance’,there was little concerted effort to close down naturist associationsor to arrest individual activists. In fact, without a definitiveorder from the Führer, Germany's naturists existed in asemi-legal limbo for much of the 1930s. Many National Socialistsregarded the clothes-free lifestyle with contempt, but therewere elements within the Nazi state—and particularly theSS—which could see significant benefits from celebrating‘the instinct for bodily nobility and its beauty in ourVolk’. A mutual desire to de-eroticize nudity helped cementthe bond between Heydrich, Himmler and naturist leaders. Asa result, German Freikörperkultur passed some of its mostimportant landmarks in the years of Nazi rule, including itsvery first book with photographs in full colour, a full-lengthfeature film, and a new, more permissive Bathing Law. Thus whileGeorge Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality claims the Nazis ‘forbadenudism after their accession to power’, a closer examinationof the fate of naturism after 1933 reveals a more complex picture,which serves to highlight not only the limits of the régime'stotalitarian aspirations, but also the naturist movement's owndisparate and problematic heritage.     

From Barbarism to Religion: Church History and the Enlightened Narrative in Germany

The subject of this essay is the historical vision of the GermanCatholic Enlightenment as seen in the work of Michael IgnazSchmidt, a Catholic priest and author of the eleven-volume Historyof the Germans (1778–1793). A proper acknowledgement ofSchmidt's career helps us revise the standard account of Germanhistoricism and historical practice in the eighteenth century,and also sheds light on the place of religion in the GermanEnlightenment. Schmidt wrote a thoroughly modern ‘historyof manners’ that was indebted both to Voltaire and toRobertson. Yet his work passed into obscurity largely becausehe focused on the Holy Roman Empire and the Imperial Church—thetwo great casualties of the Napoleonic passage. Schmidt's viewof the Reformation, and, more importantly, of the history ofthe pre-Reformation German national Church, stands out in theprominence it assigns the Church as part of the history of thedevelopment of German manners. Schmidt's account throws intoquestion the common view in the history of the German ‘nation’that Germany could not be accorded the normal attributes ofa state and existed only as a ‘cultural nation’.The essay addresses the German problem of bi-confessionalism,and Schmidt's awareness of developments in Protestant theologyin the eighteenth century. While this paper does not try todeal comprehensively with all these issues, the essay showshow the agenda of reformist religion, national history, andthe Enlightened vision of Europe's Christian past coalescedin this unjustly forgotten work.     

Not Just a 'Dating Game': Origins of the Holocaust at Auschwitz in the Light of Witness Testimony

Historians now view Auschwitz as marginal to the origins ofthe Holocaust. In a surprising volte-face from a generationago, Historians now accept what can be called a ‘transformationnarrative’. That is, most accounts cast Auschwitz, notas first mover, but as late comer to the destruction of theEuropean Jews. This fits a much larger historiographical movementattributing the Final Solution to a local initiative withina disorganized, even ‘debureaucratized’ German state.Once again, this departs completely from, say, Raul Hilbergor Hannah Arendt, who defined the Holocaust as a crime uniqueto modern, organized society. Thus, in the case of Auschwitz,what some have come to ridicule as the ‘dating game’—thealmost obsessive attempt to identify a precise microchronologyof the final solution—has larger implications. It cutsto the heart of whether we see the Holocaust as a crime of amodern, dynamic industrial state or as a haphazard initiative. This article uses testimony from the three most relevant professionalgroups that built the genocidal factories of Auschwitz to reassessthe current consensus. Contrary to the ‘transformationnarrative’, little evidence supports the argument thatthe SS and its independent contractors were somehow divorcedfrom efforts to mechanize genocide from Minsk to Lublin to Oswiecimin the autumn of 1941. The testimony as a whole—drawnfrom civilian managers, SS architects, and prisoner-engineers—leaveslittle doubt that the new crematoria of Birkenau were intendedfrom the beginning (that is, from October 1941) as gas chambers.The ‘transformation narrative’, ironically enough,finds support in only one account: the internally contradictoryand almost desperate testimony given by one former SS architectat his own trial. To put a fine point on it, the ‘transformationnarrative’ hews most closely to a dubious defence narrativegiven by a perpetrator, in which neither his lawyers nor hisfellow defendants placed much credence.     

DDR Museum Berlin

In the summer of 2006 a new permanent exhibition on East Germanhistory opened its doors on the banks of the river Spree, justa frog's jump away from the Berliner Dom and the slowly disappearingPalast der Republik. The DDR Museum¹ sets out to show all facetsof life and growing up in the German Democratic Republic inbasement premises measuring just 400m². The exhibition is composed of seventeen thematic areas, rangingfrom earnest topics such as ‘border’, ‘statesecurity’ and ‘construction’ to the more diverting‘fashion’, ‘consumer goods’ and ‘holidays’.The whole space is designed as a miniature pre-fabricated housingdevelopment, the facades of which incorporate display cabinetsand drawers inviting visitors to explore their contents. Eachthematic area is given roughly the same space, and consequentlythe GDR's dozen or so popular bands get about as much room asthe Stasi.     

The Annaberg as a German--Polish Lieu de Memoire

This essay analyses a fiercely contested transnational lieude mémoire in twentieth-century Polish—German history:the Annaberg. Historiography has thus far largely neglectedthe role played by this ‘holy mountain’ of UpperSilesia, a symbol that has stood at the heart of a number ofcompeting identity-forging narratives. The competition overthe Annaberg as a site for multiple collective memories occurredon three distinct but often overlapping levels: first betweennation-states, secondly between ideological camps, and thirdlybetween national- and local-level actors. Drawing on a substantialbody of primary sources, this article contributes both to thescholarly investigation of a political myth that cast a longshadow over German—Polish relations and to the growingacademic interest in transnational ‘realms of memory’.     

Leo Amery's Imperialist Alternative to Appeasement in the 1930s

Leo Amery has long been seen as one of the leading figures inthe anti-appeasement movement. However, key aspects of his caseagainst government foreign policy are not addressed in previouswork. This article considers Amery's reputation pointing outthat it is problematic to characterize him as an ‘anti-appeaser’because he did not rule out concessions to Germany and was willingto see Germany dominate Central Europe. However, he differedfrom the government in advocating a Danubian economic bloc tocreate stability and satisfy some German desires. This flowedfrom Amery's imperialism and his economic nationalism. Meanwhile,he fervently opposed colonial concessions, believing that Germangrievances could only be satisfied in Europe. Considering whetherAmery was an ‘anti-appeaser’ or a ‘real appeaser’,the article analyses Amery's doubts over whether to supportNeville Chamberlain over the Munich agreement. It concludesthat although Amery disagreed with Chamberlain more on tacticsthan strategy, these alternative tactics were significantlydifferent from government policy. As such, aspects of the anti-appeasementcase should be seen as being more nuanced than previously recognized,and the imperialist dimension of it should be understood.     

The Professors' Africa: Economists, the Elections of 1907, and the Legitimation of German Imperialism

German economists led by Gustav Schmoller created the KolonialpolitischesAktionskomité (colonial-political action committee) duringthe so-called ‘colonial crisis’ of 1906–1907to promote the German colonial empire at a time when it wassuffering much scandal and criticism. Widely esteemed and enjoyingthe appearance of non-partisanship, they worked closely withthe government of Bernhard von Bülow during the electionsof 1907, arguing that colonial empire was economically and politicallyindispensable and that its financial burdens were bearable.Straddling a position between the economic imperialism of manyGerman liberals and the settler colonialism prevalent in conservativeand radical nationalist circles, they helped secure a middleground that enabled the Bülow bloc and developed many ideasfor colonial reform that came into currency during the Dernburgera (1906–1910). Through lecturing, the mass disseminationof relatively high-quality literature, and the demarcation ofthe new academic sub-discipline known as Kolonialwissenschaft(colonial science), a potent complex of liberal-nationalistambitions was fused with a new ‘scientific’ colonialismthat helped redefine and legitimate a German civilizing missionin Africa and forge an imperialist ideology that gained a nationalaudience.     

Pictures of Atrocity: Public Discussion of Der gelbe Stern in Early 1960s West Germany

This article discusses Der gelbe Stern by Gerhard Schoenberner,a book of Holocaust photodocumentation appearing in West Germanyin 1960, and analyses its reception in the contemporary WestGerman press. Both the work and its public discussion are placedin context of Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (‘comingto terms with the past’) and of what historian Habbo Knochhas termed ‘the return of the pictures’, in otherwords, atrocity pictures of the kind that the Allies forcedGermans to see right after the war, that Germans tended to shunthereafter, but that came back into public view in the late1950s. The reception of Schoenberner's book included reviewsfrom a wide range of West German newspapers and magazines. Thesereviews were overwhelmingly favourable and in considerable agreementon the book's importance. There was consensus that its pictureswould stir viewers emotionally and lead them to ‘the truth’about the Third Reich and its crime against the Jews. In addition,there were moral, historical and political reflections, includinga discussion of German ‘guilt’ concerned not onlywith specific crimes but with the general acquiescence of Germansociety in persecution of Jews in the 1930s. There was alsoappreciation of the role of pictures in conveying historicalunderstanding and, it was hoped, in educating West German youth.In addition, some reviewers considered Der gelbe Stern to bea prod to greater public discussion and thus to an enlargementof democratic culture. There was a marked reticence in the reviewsto indicate that awareness generated by this book would contributeto public outcry against the employment of men with a Nazi pastas high officials of the Federal Republic, or to defend Schoenberneragainst the charge that was sure to come from the Right: sincesome of his photos were from Communist Eastern Europe they wereof dubious origin and no doubt part of a plot to distract theWest from the fight against Communism. It is suggested thatsilence on either issue would have had the effect of keepingreaders focused on the pictures and their moral, historicaland democratic implications.     

A Balancing Act: Domestic Pressures and International Systemic Constraints in the Foreign Policies of the Great Powers, 1848-1851

During the revolutions of 1848 and their aftermath, the governmentsof France, Austria and Prussia, respectively, were exposed toextraordinary pressure from a variety of nationalist movementswith fundamentally different agendas. They had difficult choicesto make as to whether they let their foreign policies be determinedby domestic concerns or heed the rules of the internationalsystem—it was hardly possible to do both. As a resultthey performed a ‘balancing act’ on a tight rope:a wrong step could cause their fall, either because they wouldbe overthrown by their own people, or they would risk war withother Great Powers. Those not affected by a revolution in 1848,i.e. conservative Russia and progressive Britain, had to opteither for backing countries with political tendencies similarto their own, or for simply upholding the balance of power andinternational rules. The author concludes that the ‘primacyof foreign policy’—within this context more preciselythe primacy of the international system's rules and the balanceof power—helps to understand the actual foreign policiesof four of the five Great Powers during the European crisisof 1848–51. Austria's government, the one country tryingto overthrow the balance of power and change the nature of thesystem, was effectively checked. The rules of the post-1815international system were still an efficacious tool for discipliningstates.     

The Psychologization of the Socialist Self: East German Forensic Psychology and its Deviants, 1945--1975

In the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s, East Germanylargely criminalized and politicized such things as drug abuse,alcoholism, delinquency, and even mental illness, often treatingthem as moral threats and acts of subversion. By the 1960s,however, policy makers, courts, and social services in the GDR,in a development paralleled in other industrialized countriesat the time, began turning to psychological and psychiatricapproaches in addressing antisocial behaviour. Based on publishedand archival records, this essay argues that this change wasthe result of a constellation of social, party-political, institutional,and international developments that led not only to a reconsiderationof anti-social conduct in the GDR, but also to a sweeping reconceptualizationof the psychological workings of the individual within socialism,culminating in the ideal of the ‘socialist personality.’This mirrored trends in contemporary western Europe and theUnited States, granting psychological complexity and depth todeviant personalities in East Germany; however, it representedless a pragmatic concession to western reforms than an extensionof the socialist utopian project. As a result, professionalsand policy-makers in the GDR minted an historically unique conceptof deviance that wedded Marxism—Lenin-Leninism with mainstreampsychiatry and psychology. The example of forensic psychologyin East Germany raises important questions about the relationshipbetween liberal, socialist, and fascist projects of social reformin twentieth-century Germany.     

The Decline of the Empire and the Economic 'Decline' of Britain

In the 1950s and 1960s, decolonization coincided with the ‘goldenage’ of British capitalism, with record rises in popularliving standards. Economic historians have understandably usedthis coincidence to suggest that by this period the BritishEmpire was no longer offering substantial economic benefitsto the mass of the metropolitan population. Yet there were linksbetween economic performance and the decline of the Empire.First, despite the good performance, profoundly pessimistic‘declinist’ accounts of British society and theeconomy abounded in the early 1960s, and these had a major impacton policy formation. A key underpinning for such accounts wasthe ‘culture of decline’ intimately linked withthe loss of imperial status. Secondly, while it has become acommonplace of discussion of post-war Britain to assume thatreversing ‘decline’ and modernizing the economyrequired a re-orientation of policy away from the Empire andCommonwealth towards Europe, such a reorientation was not aconstant feature of modernization strategies. Indeed, a centralfeature of the initial period of Wilsonian ‘modernization’after 1964 was its attempt to use closer links with the Commonwealthto achieve this objective.     

The Joint Polish--German Commission for the Revision of School Textbooks and Polish Views of German History

The Joint Polish–German Commission for the Revision ofSchool Textbooks was set up in 1972, bringing together historiansfrom Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany in view of reopeninga scholarly dialogue after decades of almost complete noncommunication.Until the late 1980s, the commission played a prominent roleas a forum for cross-national discussions on Polish-German Beziehungsgeschichte,and most of the leading Polish experts in German history participatedin its proceedings. For the development of Polish historiographyon Germany the work of the commission seems to have been relevantin at least two respects. The commission's regular conferenceson controversial or methodologically complex issues of Polish-GermanBeziehungsgeschichte contributed, on the one hand, to defininga new agenda for Polish historiography on Germany. The interestin explicitly comparative approaches to German and Polish historyincreased, and the focus shifted from specifically ‘Polishinterests’ in German history to more general issues. Onthe other hand, these conferences provided Polish historianswith the opportunity to make their research more visible toGerman historians (even outside the field of specialised EastEuropeanists)—a fact that encouraged Polish historiographyon Germany to pursue more ambitious tasks.     

The Production and Display of Domestic Interiors in Wilhelmine Germany, 1900-1914

In the opening years of the twentieth century, the German homeassumed new cultural meanings and symbolic significance as asite of economic, political, artistic, and social intervention.This article investigates a range of Wilhelmine institutions—fromthe Wertheim department store and the Prussian Commerce Ministry,to the Applied Arts Movement and the Movement for Art Education—toillustrate the variety of German approaches to promoting newconceptions of the home. Examining the ways in which Wilhelmineprivate and state reformers turned the topic of how one livedand dwelled into a topic of pressing significance, the articleargues that private, commercial efforts and state-driven policyinitiatives interpenetrated to a degree previously underappreciatedin Wilhelmine historical studies. These private and state initiativeswere, in turn, closely tied to the cultivation of German consumeridentities, and to larger efforts on the part of Wilhelmineinstitutions to adapt to the dizzying conditions of twentieth-centurycapitalist modernity. As a result of these developments, specialexhibitions of artistic home interiors originated in premierGerman department stores as well as in the halls of the statebureaucracy; historical ornaments termed ‘modern’in one decade were denigrated as barbaric in another; and generationsof craftsmen battled one another for a legitimacy conferred,to a significant degree, by private commissions, generous statesubsidies, and admission into prestigious exhibitions.     

Death and the Making of West Berlin, 1948-1961

This essay traces shifts in attitudes towards death, practicesof burial, and rituals of mourning in West Berlin from the 1948currency reform to the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall.It shows that West Berliners in the years immediately followingthe Second World War maintained an arduous devotion to theirdead—particularly the war dead. Yet as the war becamea less immediate experience over the course of the 1950s, broadcultural shifts took shape, including a renewed sense of optimismand an emerging feeling that the suffering associated with thewar could be and was being redeemed. Meanwhile, a cult of thedead long venerated as part of the very foundation of Germanculture gradually became ‘less German’ and ‘moreWestern’ over that same period. In this way, it also becamea means of distinguishing West Berlin from its Communist neighbourto the East. By focusing on shifts in perceptions and practicessurrounding death, the essay reveals part of the process bywhich moral and ethical values were reconstructed after Nazism,and how the racist collectivism of the Third Reich graduallygave way to the broadly individualist, democratic-socialisthumanism that would form the basis of an expressly West Germanpolitics and society.     

Mass Politics and the Techniques of Leadership: The Promise and Perils of Propaganda in Weimar Germany

This paper traces the development of ideas about ‘professional’and ‘scientific’ publicity during the Weimar era,and their gradual absorption by mainstream politicians and officialsfrom the late 1920s onwards. The unprecedented wartime effortsto influence domestic morale and the scandalous revelationsof misinformation afterwards greatly increased popular awarenessof the ability of élites to manipulate public opinion,and generated intense interest in the problems of communicatingwith mass publics. Nowhere was this fascination greater thanin Germany, where many attributed their defeat primarily tosuperior enemy propaganda. The result was a wide-ranging postwardiscourse about the power of this modern ‘weapon’and its unavoidability as a part of modern political and commerciallife. Far from learning the so-called ‘lessons of thewar’, government self-representation efforts were steadilycriticized by journalists and advertisers as both quantitativelyand qualitatively inadequate. Whereas most republicans regarded‘propaganda’ as mendacious and unstatesmanlike,many of the radical parties’ publicity efforts clearlyreflected the basic tenets of the concurrent propaganda discourse,in particular the emphasis on emotional appeal and ritualisticsymbols. During the crisis of the early 1930s, amidst the visiblesuccess of the Nazis’ advertising-inspired campaigning,the spread of this discourse across the political spectrum helpedto hollow out democratic conceptualizations of leadership andpublic opinion from the very centre of Weimar political life.     

Nobles, Modernism, and the Culture of fin-de-siecle Munich

Historians of central Europe agree that the fin de sièclewas a time of artistic ferment and change that was criticalin the formation of the ‘modern’, but ignore theinfluence and role of the nobility, assuming that nobles wereinsignificant actors in the cultural realm. This article conteststhat notion by investigating the janus-faced artistic nobilityin Munich. The author argues that nobles played an importantrole in the artistic markers of Munich's fin de siècle(Secession, art nouveau, cabaret); more importantly, many nobleswere instrumental in the reception and propagation of ideasthat informed the European avant-garde, and acted as a modelfor a European variant of alternative modernism.     

A Mastered Past? Prussia in Postwar German Memory

This article compares the recent ‘Prussia Year 2001’events marking the 300th anniversary of the founding of thePrussian state with the famous ‘Prussia Wave’ ofthe late 1970s and early 1980s in order to evaluate the evolvingstatus of Prussia in postwar German memory. It asserts thatGermans have largely abandoned their formerly polarized viewsof Prussia and have increasingly arrived at a more balancedview of its historical legacy. In developing a more normalizedview of the Prussian past, Germans have demonstrated that difficulthistorical legacies may, to some degree, in fact, be ‘mastered’.At the same time, the article shows how the seemingly successfulconfrontation with the Prussian past remains burdened by theenduring effort to confront the legacy of the Third Reich.