Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe 9781845459987

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Histories of the Aftermath

Histories of the Aftermath The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe

[[[ Edited by

Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2010 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2010 Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Histories of the aftermath : the legacies of the Second World War in Europe / edited by Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-732-7 (hardback : acid-free paper) 1. Reconstruction (1939–1951)—Europe 2. World War, 1939–1945—Influence. 3. Collective memory—Europe—History—20th century. 4. Memory—Social aspects—Europe—History—20th century. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Motion pictures and the war. 6. Group identity—Europe—History—20th century. 7. Citizenship—Europe—History—20th century. 8. Military art and science— Europe—History—20th century. 9. Europe—History—1945– I. Biess, Frank, 1966– II. Moeller, Robert G. D829.E8H57 2010 940.55’4—dc22 2010010761

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-1-84545-732-7 Hardback

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1

Frank Biess

I. Defining the Postwar Chapter 1. The Persistence of “the Postwar”: Germany and Poland

13

Norman M. Naimark

Chapter 2. Feelings in the Aftermath: Toward a History of Postwar Emotions

30

Frank Biess

Chapter 3. In the Aftermath of Camps

49

Samuel Moyn

II. Public and Private Memories Chapter 4. Nothing Is Forgotten: Individual Memory and the Myth of the Great Patriotic War

67

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

Chapter 5. Neither Erased nor Remembered: Soviet “Women Combatants” and Cultural Strategies of Forgetting in Soviet Russia, 1940s–1980s

83

Anna Krylova

Chapter 6. Generations as Narrative Communities: Some Private Sources of Official Cultures of Remembrance in Postwar Germany

102

Dorothee Wierling

III. Mass-Mediating War: How Movies Shaped Memories Chapter 7. “When Will the Real Day Come?” War Films and Soviet Postwar Culture Denise J. Youngblood

123

vi

Contents

Chapter 8. Winning the Peace at the Movies: Suffering, Loss, and Redemption in Postwar German Cinema

139

Robert G. Moeller

Chapter 9. Italian Cinema and the Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy

156

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

IV. The Reconstruction of Citizenship Chapter 10. War Orphans and Postfascist Families: Kinship and Belonging after 1945

175

Heide Fehrenbach

Chapter 11. Manners, Morality, and Civilization: Reflections on Postwar German Etiquette Books

196

Paul Betts

Chapter 12. “We Are Building a Common Home”: The Moral Economy of Citizenship in Postwar Poland

215

Katherine Lebow

Chapter 13. From the “New Jerusalem” to the “Decline” of the “New Elizabethan Age”: National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1945–56

231

Sonya O. Rose

V. In the Shadow of the Bomb: Military Cultures Chapter 14. The Great Tradition and the Fates of Annihilation: West German Military Culture in the Aftermath of the Second World War

251

Klaus Naumann

Chapter 15. Soviet Military Culture and the Legacy of the Second World War

269

Mikhail Tsypkin

Chapter 16. 1945–1955: The Age of Total War

287

Pieter Lagrou

Select Bibliography

297

Notes on Contributors

303

Index

307

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Acknowledgements

T

HIS VOLUME REPRESENTS A selection of much revised contributions to a conference that was held at the University of California, San Diego. The editors are very grateful to a series of institutions for their crucial financial support: the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Historical Institute (GHI), the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), the Humanities Center at UCSD, the Institute of European History at the University of California, Berkeley, the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (IICAS) at UCSD, and the UCSD Department of History. We would also like to thank Gershon Shafir, the director of IICAS, for providing indispensable logistic and organizational support. In particular, we could not have organized this event without Melissa LaBouff ’s excellent professionalism and organizational skills. We are also grateful to the following individuals who served as commentators at the conference: Choi Chatterjee, John Connelly, Geoff Eley, Kai Ewers, Peter Gourevitch, Deborah Hertz, Martha Lampland, Phil Nord, and Pamela Radcliff. They are not represented as authors in the volume, but their ideas and suggestions entered the individual contributions in innumerable ways. Two anonymous reviewers for Berghahn Books provided detailed and constructive criticism. Although we were not able to incorporate all of their suggestions, their input undoubtedly made this a better volume. Finally, we would like to thank Marion Berghahn for her interest in the project, and Ann Przyzycki, Melissa Spinelli, and Jamie Taber for shepherding the manuscript through the production process.

[[[ IN T ROD UC T ION

Histories of the Aftermath Frank Biess

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European “postwar” is en vogue, as is signaled by a series of conferences, edited volumes, and monographs that have addressed the legacies and aftereffects of the Second World War on the European continent.1 Tony Judt’s massive synthesis Postwar offers a culmination point of a historiography that has emphasized the “long shadow of World War Two” that “lay heavy across postwar Europe.”2 The new research on the postwar reflects an important shift in historiographical perspective: it no longer treats the post-1945 period primarily as the incubation period of a new Cold War order that was shaped by the antagonistic influences of “Americanization” and “Sovietization.” Rather, it makes central the lasting and persistent aftereffects of the Second World War for the history of European societies after 1945. Instead of analyzing European societies for what they became, the history of the postwar directs attention to the rubble—psychological, emotional, literal—from which they emerged. In this sense, postwar history seeks to capture multiple narratives of the aftermath in the wake of the Second World War. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism clearly formed the most important political contexts for this historiographical shift. These momentous events defined the years from 1945 to 1989–91 as a distinct historical period that could be subjected to historical scrutiny without running the risk of succumbing to the ideological antagonisms of the Cold War. But the origins of this renewed historiographical interest in the aftermath of the Second World War extend even further back. Even before the end of the Cold War, a more revisionist historiography began to deconstruct national mythical memories as they had emerged during the first postwar decades. These rigid and redemptive “usable pasts” had served essential functions for postwar reconstruction and were also deployed as weapons in the ideological battles of the Cold War. But they largely wrote the murder of European Jews out of national commemorative cultures.3 It was therefore the ascendancy of Holocaust history and memory from the late 1960s onward, but especially in the 1980s, that increasingly HE HISTORY OF THE

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destabilized these narratives, first in the West and, after 1989, in the East as well.4 In the (West) German context, a renewed judicial prosecution of former Nazi perpetrators as well as a larger commemorative shift toward the victims of Germans (rather than German victims) actually preceded historians’ newfound interest in the Holocaust.5 In other parts of Europe, the emergence of the Holocaust as a new historiographical and commemorative paradigm implied the exposure of long-denied histories of collaboration in the territories of former Nazi-occupied Europe.6 It demonstrated the extent to which large sections of European societies had been contaminated by fascist-induced violence, even in countries that were spared direct occupation by Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. At the same time, Holocaust historiography also brought into focus the enduring aftereffects of the massive experience of violence, especially in the figure of the survivor, who advanced to become perhaps the iconic character of the twentieth century. The new historiography of the postwar takes the literature on the Holocaust as a moral and historiographical starting point. But just as the new literature on the Second World War has sought to (re)integrate the murder of the European Jews into the larger context of German occupation policy and the war of annihilation against civilian populations, the history of the aftermath seeks to reconnect the legacies of the Holocaust with the war’s broader aftereffects.7 The history of the postwar extends the scope of inquiry to a wider range of individual and collective experiences of violence that were characteristic of the Second World War: population displacements, mass starvation, internment, forced migrations, aerial bombardments. In this sense, postwar history derives from the specific nature of the Second World War that targeted, at least in some of its localities, civilian noncombatants to an unprecedented extent. It investigates the ways in which individuals and groups managed to cope with active and passive experiences of violence during the war and its aftermath. To be sure, this approach needs to avoid the risk of creating a new kind of consensus history in which everybody becomes a victim of the war.. Instead, the history of the postwar should maintain crucial moral and analytical distinctions between, for example, ethnic cleansing and genocide, or for that matter between victims, accomplices, bystanders, and perpetrators. To be sure, an individual could occupy several or all of these roles during the war and the immediate postwar period. Yet it is precisely by delineating the specificities of experiences of violence during the war that we might be able to assess the precise ways in which they radiated into the postwar period. This volume seeks to give greater analytical, thematic, and historical depth to the concept of “the postwar.” It defines the postwar not only as a chronological and thematic unit but also as an epistemological tool. By making the divergent wartime experiences of European societies—and different groups within them— central to understanding their post-1945 histories, postwar his-

Introduction

3

tories disrupt the notion of 1945 as a complete hiatus that severed, in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, the “age of catastrophe” from the “golden age.” 8 This approach, however, goes beyond merely challenging the notion of a “zero hour” in 1945, which an older historiography has already begun to deconstruct.9 Rather than highlighting the social transformations of the wartime period as a precondition for the reconstruction of European societies after 1945, the history of the postwar adopts, as it were, the reverse point of view. It does not see the war merely as the “prehistory” to the postwar period but seeks to unearth and render visible the persistent hidden—and sometimes not-so-hidden— traces of the Second World War within postwar societies. Postwar as an analytical concept allows for at least three distinct and original perspectives on European history after 1945. First, by focusing on the abiding legacies of the war, the concept undermines the largely self-congratulatory narratives that have celebrated Europe’s successful postwar reconstruction. After 1945, Europeans in East and West confronted enormous challenges in coping with shared experiences of mass death and destruction on an unprecedented scale. Yet both communist and capitalist reconstruction projects were largely centered on the erasure of wartime violence. They adopted an optimistic, forward-looking perspective that emphasized overcoming and selective remembering rather than a public reckoning with the lasting impact of war and fascism. A transnational psychiatric culture that largely denied any lasting psychic damage due to extreme experiences of violence both reflected and reinforced this larger culture of “moving on” rather than “looking back.”10 The official disavowal of the war’s destructive legacies, to be sure, was not simply a matter of “forgetting” and “repression.” Rather, the history of the postwar reveals the active and often quite conscious efforts by which postwar societies sought to manage and sanitize the memory of the war. At the same time, the history of the postwar seeks to uncover the ongoing presence and subtle traces of violence in European societies after 1945. It highlights the persistent injuries, fears, and traumata within European societies that stood in uneasy tension with public and private strategies of overcoming. In so doing, it seeks to reveal some of the ways in which postwar Europe remained bound to the previous order of Hitler’s Europe despite persistent claims of a radical break with the past.11 Secondly, postwar history seeks to restore the plurality and multiplicity of European histories in the aftermath of the Second World War. It analyzes the post-1945 trajectories of European societies not simply as a function of their position vis-à-vis the two antagonistic Cold War empires but also as a product of various, nationally specific linkages between war and postwar. In this sense, postwar histories were shaped not just by the external context of the Cold War but also by their preceding wartime histories: the extent of wartime losses, histories of resistance and collaboration, and different modalities of liberation

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and/or defeat at the war’s end. To be sure, since the war’s violence was distributed very unevenly across geographical regions and among social groups, those linkages between war and postwar assumed very different temporalities and meanings in different localities and for different groups. This approach does not suggest that all European societies remained in the grip of the war’s legacies in the same way and for the same duration. For example, several contributions to the volume identify the late 1950s and early 1960s as a period when the formative influence of the war on European societies began to wane. But other essays reveal European societies’ continued and multilayered engagement with the war’s legacies up until the 1990s and beyond. The European postwar thus consists of a multiplicity of histories of the aftermath that defies a single periodization or thematic definition. Thirdly, by defining the war and its legacy as a central point of reference for postwar Europe, the volume points to a yet-to-be-written transnational and comparative history of the aftermath of the Second World War. With only a few exceptions, most contributions to the volume are written within the paradigm of national histories. This focus on the nation not only reflects the stilldominant institutional organization of historical knowledge; it also denotes the significance of the nation for the experience and memory of the war and its aftermath. Meanwhile, the concept of the postwar opens up new analytic possibilities for cross-national comparison that also cut across the East/West divide. Postwar societies in East and West needed to confront similar challenges as a result of their shared experience of the Second World War, and a comparative history of the postwar can allow us to explore the ways—some similar, some different—in which liberal-democratic and communist states negotiated those common legacies. Such cross-national comparisons might also point toward an integrated and transnational history of the European aftermath. This is not meant to advocate a new master narrative that defines common victimhood in the Second World War as the basis for an otherwise elusive shared European identity.12 Instead, such transnational histories might bring into focus the convergence of individual and social experiences of the war and its aftermath that cut across national boundaries. The postwar experiences of Jewish DPs, of war orphans, or of returning veterans may thus exhibit more similarities than the collective experiences of national entities. The distinctiveness of the present volume lies in the geographical distribution of the contributions as well as in its thematic and methodological focus.13 About half of the contributions concentrate on either Germany or the Soviet Union. This emphasis reflects the predominant significance of the Eastern front for both wartime and postwar history. As a result of extremely brutal German warfare and occupation policies, the Eastern front became the central killing zone of the Second World War, where approximately 27 million Soviet citizens perished, two thirds of them civilians. The volume analyzes the significance of

Introduction

5

these unprecedented active and passive experiences of violence and mass death for German and Soviet postwar societies. It treats the Soviet Union emphatically as part of Europe in the post-1945 period. The other half of the volume extends the geographical focus to Eastern, Western, and Southern Europe. The absence of neutral countries such as Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden does not suggest that these countries did not have a “postwar,” even though the concept arguably appears to be more promising for countries with a direct experience of war and fascist occupation. Several contributions, notably the essays by Sonya O. Rose and Pieter Lagrou, also begin to probe the intersection of the postwar and the onset of decolonization. This link has been explored much more fully with respect to the East Asian context of the war.14 The complex ways in which decolonization both provincialized and diversified postwar Europe certainly constitutes a field for further research.15 And while the contributions in this volume suggest some possible lines of inquiry, analytically it ultimately focuses on the legacies of the war within European societies, not on how the war has brought the world to Europe. The volume brings to bear more recent social- and cultural-history approaches to the postwar period that extend the inquiry to topics such as memory, gender, citizenship, race, and military and popular culture. This emphasis also derives from the fact that some of the best recent syntheses have offered excellent analyses of the ways in which the legacies of the war informed the political and economic reconstruction of the Europe, and the volume complements these accounts.16 The thematic focus of this volume is on what could be called “meaning making processes,” that is, the perceptions and representations that Europeans developed in order to make sense of unprecedented experiences of displacement, upheaval, and violence. Even the section on the military deliberately focuses on military culture by analyzing the ways in which memories and perceived lessons of the Second World War informed the self-perception and strategic planning of postwar military elites. The volume consists of five thematic sections. The first set of essays takes up the fluidity and indeterminacy of the postwar concept and offers a set of methodological proposals for studying the aftereffects of the war.17 Norman M. Naimark discusses the postwar’s different temporalities and shows how the beginning as well as the presumed end of the postwar varied according to different localities. He then provides a comparative analysis of the ongoing confrontation with the violent legacies of the Second World War in Germany and Poland. Frank Biess’s essay probes the potential of the history of emotions as an alternative approach to studying the war’s aftermath and defines the war’s aftermath in terms of a distinct emotional regime. In particular, he analyzes the emotions of hope, fear, and resentment as central to European societies’ confrontations with the legacies of the Second World War. Reflecting the significance of shifting conceptions of the Holocaust for the history of the aftermath, Samuel Moyn’s

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essay delineates the move from one commemorative paradigm—the concentration camp—to another—the extermination camp—in Western Holocaust memory. His essay highlights the rhetorical figure of synecdoche, in which the part stands for a whole, that structured public memories and defined which aspects of the past came into public view and which remained excluded from it. The category of the postwar would be inconceivable without the “memory boom” in twentieth-century Europe.18 Memory has become a central category of the new cultural history, and it is probably the concept that has also been deployed most extensively in the study of the post–Second World War period. The second section on “Public and Private Memories” draws on this rich literature on the history of memory yet also expands on it by systematically exploring the relationship between public and private, collective and individual memories. It does so by focusing on Germany and the Soviet Union as the two countries that were arguably at the center of the destructive history of the Second World War. Much of the recent historiography focusing on memory has demonstrated the powerful ways in which public representation of the past structured individual and private memories. Not all private and individual memories, however, were drawn into public narratives. By examining memories of the siege of Leningrad, Lisa A. Kirschenbaum challenges the widespread assumption of a gaping chasm between false official narratives on the one hand and authentic individual memories on the other. Her contribution reveals not only how individual narratives informed the public cult of the war in the Soviet Union but also the extent to which individuals were invested in these mythical memories of the war. Anna Krylova’s essay, by contrast, addresses a subtle and never entirely complete erasure of non-gendered representations of female soldiers in the Red Army. While wartime representations had fused the identities of “women” and “soldiers” in a non-essentialist manner, the postwar paradigm of victimization again rendered dominant more gendered representations of female soldiers, even though nontraditional wartime representations were reactivated in the autobiographical writings of former female soldiers from the 1960s onward. In her essay on recent German debates on “war children,” Dorothee Wierling proposes the concept of generation as a central mediating force between public and private memories. Building on her analysis of two postwar generations in East and West Germany, her essay traces the emergence and sociological profile of a generation of war children primarily in the former Western parts of now unified Germany. The third section, on “Mass-Mediating War” and postwar film, focuses on the cinema as a privileged site of memory. Never before or after did movies assume such a central status for the production of meaning as during the first two postwar decades. Yet, as the essays in this section demonstrate, the precise contribution of war movies to the formation of public memory varied according to different cinematic traditions as well as nationally specific conditions for

Introduction

7

the production and reception of films. Offering a synthetic view of the evolution of Soviet war films during the long postwar, Denise Youngblood demonstrates the reconfiguration of Soviet representations of the war during three distinct periods—Stalinism, the “thaw” beginning in 1957, and the Brezhnev period up to the beginning of perestroika. While official Soviet cultural politics defined the contours of what could be shown in these films, specific directors managed to expand the thematic boundaries of the officially sanctioned heroic narrative of the war by depicting human-centered experiences of loss and suffering. Robert G. Moeller’s essay also provides a broad overview that highlights the significance of representations of war in postwar films for the emergence of a functioning democracy and civil society in West Germany. While early postwar films offered a very selective view of the war that focused primarily on German suffering, by the late 1950s some films had begun to exhibit a more critical stance that also addressed German complicity in National Socialist crimes—a tendency that appears to be reversed by very recent German cinematic productions that have recycled the trope of German victimization. Ruth Ben-Ghiat analyzes one film from the Italian neorealist tradition, Alberto Lattuada’s Il bandito, as emblematic of a larger crisis of signification, meaning, and language in the aftermath of fascism and war. In her analysis, neorealist film emerges as a privileged site for the negotiation of private residues of war and fascism that were often obscured in optimistic, forward-looking narratives. The fourth set of essays addresses the problem of the “Reconstruction of Citizenship” in the postwar period. “Citizenship” is defined here not primarily in terms of (legal, political, social) rights but as a broader concept of belonging.19 Wartime violence, defeat, and occupation had disrupted the vertical and horizontal bonds between individuals and the state as well as between members of communities. The reconstruction of postwar communities thus entailed the restoration of individuals’ sense of belonging to larger (national, social, ethnic, familial) communities as well as a redefinition of the social and emotional bonds that brought them together. Heide Fehrenbach discusses this process of the reconstitution of community with respect to the one institution that arguably carried the bulk of the war’s destructive legacies: the family. Her focus is on war orphans from minority communities who could not easily be reunited with ethnic and national collectives, such as formerly hidden Jewish children, abducted and “Germanized” children from Eastern Europe, or children fathered by African-American occupation soldiers in postwar Germany. Policies and social practices to restore these children to a nurturing familial context, she argues, were thoroughly shaped by a sustained engagement with the legacies of Nazi racism and eugenics, thus reflecting not just a postwar but also a more specific postfascist context. Paul Betts’s comparative analysis of etiquette books in East and West Germany shows how prescriptions for proper conduct constituted nothing less than competing efforts at (re)inventing civil society

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in the aftermath of war and fascism. These efforts were predicated on social distance in the West and on the forging of a new kind of socialist personality in the East. Linking the historiography on postwar reconstruction with that on decolonization, Sonya Rose demonstrates how postwar British conceptions of nationhood and citizenship were shaped by the interrelated contexts of war and empire. A postwar heroic sensibility that defined Britishness as inherently white manifested itself in highly symbolic acts, such as the 1953 coronation ceremonies that sought to assert Great Britain’s status as a benevolent empire. Yet the reality of brutal colonial wars as well as the onset of transnational migration from the colonies exposed these notions as nostalgic fantasies that were soon to be overtaken by the anxiety of imperial decline. Katherine Lebow’s essay, finally, underlines the appeal and the significance of the productivist ethos for Polish conceptions of citizenship. Polish workers’ genuine enthusiasm for participating in building projects such as Poland’s “first Socialist city,” Nowa Huta, reflected a postwar moral economy of citizenship that was centered on the ideas of work and communal solidarity. The last section, on “Military Cultures,” addresses a theme that has thus far remained underrepresented in histories of the postwar: the reconstruction and remaking of military regimes in the aftermath of the Second World War. Whereas a new military history has brought to bear social- and cultural-history approaches on the study of warfare, a similar perspective has rarely been applied to the history of military formations after 1945.20 The contributions by Klaus Naumann and Mikhail Tsypkin analyze the implications of victory and defeat for postwar military cultures in the two main belligerents of the Second World War, Germany and the Soviet Union. As Tsypkin shows, the Second World War reinforced long-standing traditions in Russian and Soviet military culture that relied on space and expandable manpower while also strengthening the idea of military professionalism. What the powerful myth of the war failed to assimilate, however, was the new reality of nuclear weapons, which Soviet military leaders continued to treat as an extension of conventional weapons. Focusing on the idea of annihilation, Naumann reveals how the legacy of the Wehrmacht continued to shape the self-understanding and operational thinking of German military elites until the mid 1960s at least. It was only under the impact of the nuclear dilemma that traditional military culture gave way to more flexible ways of thinking and new styles of military leadership, only to experience a revival shortly before the end of the Cold War in the 1980s. Pieter Lagrou’s essay, finally, highlights another way in which the European postwar was inextricably intertwined with the process of decolonization. By stressing the prospective function of Western European war crime trials, he shows how Western European legal elites were keenly aware of the similarities between the Wehrmacht’s military transgressions during the Second World War and European military practices in colonial wars in Africa and Asia.

Introduction

9

Taken together, the individual contributions offer a wide-ranging discussion of the aftereffects of the Second World War in a variety of areas and settings. The volume does not aspire to a comprehensive, textbook-like coverage of the war’s aftermath. Instead, the individual essays represent a selection of new and innovative paths of inquiry. As such, the volume is intended to serve as a reflection of the state of the field in postwar historiography as well as an inspiration for further research.

Notes 1. Istvan Deak, Jan Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000); Klaus Naumann, ed., Nachkrieg in Deutschland (Hamburg, 2001); Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to the Social and Cultural History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003); Jörg Echternkamp, Nach dem Krieg: Alltagsnot, Neuorientierung und die Last der Vergangenheit, 1945–1949 (Zürich, 2003); Richard Ned Lebow, Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kantstseiner, eds., The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, 2007); Jörg Echternkamp und Stefan Martens, eds., Der Zweite Weltkrieg in Europa: Erfahrung und Erinnerung (Paderborn, 2007). See also the research program “Sorties de Guerre des deux conflits mondiaux” at the Centre d’histoire, Sciences Po., Paris, . I use the term “postwar” in quotation marks here to denote that it signifies not just a periodization but also a conceptual term. In the following, quotation marks will be left out and context should make clear how the term is used. 2. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005). 3. Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001); Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 2000). 4. Judt, Postwar, 803–34; Dan Diner, Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse: Über Geltung ud Wirkung des Holocaust (Göttingen, 2007). 5. The long absence of the Holocaust in West German historiography is stunning, even if the underlying reasons for this delay remain controversial; see Nicolaus Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen, 2003). 6. Henry Rousso, The Vichy-Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA, 1991). For an impressive synthesis of this massive literature, see now Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (New York, 2008), especially 416–70. 7. See the contributions in Ulrich Herbert, Nationsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen (Frankfurt, 1998). 8. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York, 1994). 9. See, for example, Martin Broszat, Klaus Dieter Henke, Hans Woller, eds., Von Stalingrad zur Währungsreform: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland (Munich, 1988). 10. On this psychiatric culture in West Germany, see my Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat (Princeton, 2006), 70–94, and Svenja Goltermann, “Psychisches Leid und herrschende Lehre: Der Wissenschaftswandel in der deutschen Psychiatrie der Nachkriegszeit,” in Bernd Weisbrod, ed., Akademische Vergangenheitspolitik: Beiträge zur Wissenschaftskultur der Nachkriegszeit (Göttingen, 2002); on the Soviet Union, see Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth Century Russia (New York, 2000). 11. This point is emphasized in Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 575. 12. See Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens, “Der Weltkrieg als Wegmarke: Die Bedeutung des Zweiten Weltkrieges für eine europäische Zeitgeschichte,” in Echternkamp and Martens, eds., Der Zweite Weltkrieg, 1–33.

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13. The volume edited by Bessel and Schumann, Life after Death, largely excludes Eastern Europe, whereas the volumes edited by Deak, Gross, and Judt (The Politics of Retribution) and Lebow, Fogu, and Kantsteiner (The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe) adopt a more specific thematic focus. 14. Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham, 2001). 15. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000); Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, 1997). 16. See especially Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998) and Judt, Postwar. 17. Klaus Naumann, “Einleitung,” in Naumann, Nachkrieg in Deutschland, 9–26. 18. Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History (New Haven, 2006). 19. Kathleen Canning and Sonya Rose, “Gender, Citizenship, and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations,” Gender and History 13, no. 3 (2001): 427–43. 20. Thomas Kühne and Benjamin Ziemann, eds., Was ist Militärgeschichte? (Paderborn, 2000).

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Defining the Postwar

[[[ CH AP T ER 1

The Persistence of “the Postwar” Germany and Poland Norman M. Naimark

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HIS ESSAY BEGINS WITH an exploration of the definition of “the postwar,” a historical concept recently brought to our attention by Tony Judt’s justifiably celebrated study of Europe since the end of the Second World War.1 Then the essay turns to case studies of Germany and Poland with two purposes in mind. First, each of the cases reflects in discrete ways the persistence of the postwar in the new Europe. Second, these cases highlight the linkages between the histories of two European countries deeply affected by the war and their parallel problems of historicizing the past. In this way I seek to demonstrate that the persistence of the postwar in Europe sometimes has as much to do with the increasing interaction between European nations over common history as it does with the issues of conscience, history, and memory within individual societies. Clashes of historical memory between countries in contemporary Europe provide an ongoing challenge to the creation of a common European identity.

Definitions There are a number of ways of thinking about the postwar in Europe, the most obvious being to regard it as the chronological period after the conclusion of the Second World War. But simple chronologies can be deceptive. When, precisely, would the postwar period begin—8–9 May 1945? This certainly will not do for Poland or Romania. The Soviets had already occupied a big chunk of eastern Poland in 1944; in January 1945 they handed over civilian power in territories west of the Bug to the Communist-dominated Polish Provisional Government. In August 1944, Romania, which had not been occupied by the Nazis, shifted its loyalties from the Axis to the Allied cause. By summer 1944,

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as well, Tito and the partisans had liberated almost all of Yugoslavia from its Axis occupiers. By November 1943 the partisans had established a provisional government that would form the basis of the postwar order. Albania followed a similar path: the Wehrmacht withdrew from the country in November 1944, while the Albanian Provisional Government, dominated by Communists, took power in October. Do Italians really think of 8–9 May as the beginning of the postwar, when Mussolini had already been overthrown by the king in July 1943 and shot by partisans at Lake Garda in April 1945? The persistence of civil war in northern Italy into 1946 also makes the dating of the postwar in that country a difficult task. Similar problems with clear chronological limits are encountered upon asking when the “prewar” ends. For the Czechs, the war started with Munich in August 1938; for the Poles it began in September 1939; for the French in July 1940; for the Soviets (and today the Russians) in June 1941, though actually in September 1939, and so on. In short, there was no all-European “Stunde Null” (zero hour) at which the war began, and despite the enormous historical significance of the defeat of Nazi Germany, there was no “Stunde Null” when it ended and the postwar began. Even more problematic is the issue of when the postwar itself ended in Europe. Most historians agree that the transition from the state of warfare to the institutionalization of peace, even in those countries where there was no civil war, took much longer than traditionally assumed.2 Some historians would suggest that the postwar in fact concluded in the late 1960s, with the emergence of a new generation of Europeans untouched, at least directly, by the war and its memory. From the perspective of many Germans (and neighbors of Germany), the postwar concluded only with the unification of Germany. Of course, there was the hope, especially among the Poles, the British, and the French, that the two Germanys—the Federal Republic and German Democratic Republic—would remain in place forever. But once that proved impossible, the postwar for them came to an end. One could also argue that the Baltic states and parts of Eastern Europe are still experiencing the postwar, since their “natural” postwar histories were in one fashion or another hijacked by Soviet occupation and the vagaries of the Cold War. Like the strict chronological definitions of a European-wide postwar, historical definitions also hold up poorly to close scrutiny. It has now been more than a quarter of a century since Martin Broszat, Klaus-Dietmar Henke, and Hans Woller edited the important study Von Stalingrad zur Währungsreform, which demonstrated historical continuity between the wartime and postwar periods in Germany.3 Götz Aly, among others, has pointed to the historical continuities between the social and fiscal policies of the Nazis before and during the war and those of the Bonn democracy that followed.4 In her recent book on the German Democratic Republic, Mary Fulbrook points to similari-

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ties between Nazi and the Communist “participatory” dictatorships, as have a number of other scholars.5 Strong continuities between prewar, wartime, and postwar regimes in Europe are not just confined to Germany. Jan Gross wrote a series of provocative essays about the continuities between the wartime and immediate postwar periods in Eastern Europe, especially in terms of mass social transformations.6 His two most recent books—Neighbors, about the massacre of Jews in Jedwabne, June 1941, and Fear, about the Kielce pogrom of July 1946—follow naturally and easily one upon the other.7 Yet the Jedwabne massacre, which took place at the outset of the German occupation of the Bialystok region, was very much tied to the previous nearly two-year period of Soviet occupation and to the growing influence in the late 1930s of the anti-Semitic Polish National Democratic Party (Endecja) in the area. Though the Kielce pogrom needs to be understood in the postwar context of the establishment of a Communistdominated order in Poland and the reconstruction of Polish towns and industry, it drew its inspiration from prewar anti-Semitism, the Nazi occupation, and wartime Polish acquisition of Jewish property and assets. One could argue that the virulently anti-Semitic thrust of Polish history and politics dating back to the 1930s and represented by Jedwabne and Kielce ended only in 1968 with the expulsion of some 14,000 Jews from the country, leaving only a handful to carry on the traditions of half a millennium of Jewish life in Poland.8 The Soviet Union was changed dramatically, it would seem at first glance, by the end of the war and the onset of peace. Formerly an outcast in Europe in the interwar period, the Soviet Union became a conquering giant and superpower. While Germany was humbled and divided, “Great Russia” regained most of its pre-1917 empire and occupied vast stretches of Eastern and East Central Europe. At the cost of 27 million people and untoward resources, Stalin’s Soviet Union won the war and emerged dominant on the European continent. There is no question that the myth of the war in some ways supplanted and in others was a transmogrification of the myth of the Great October Revolution.9 “Victory” demonstrated the economic superiority of the Soviet socialist system; “Victory” revealed the unparalleled dedication of the Soviet people, especially the Russian people, to their homeland; “Victory” was guaranteed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (bolshevik) and its great leader, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Despite the mythic proportions of the meaning of the war in the Soviet Union, there were remarkable continuities between the prewar and the postwar. The political system remained essentially unaltered. The purges of the 1930s had done their work well, and Stalin’s dictatorship—and the allegiance and terror it invoked—was unassailable. Even more striking, the loosening of economic and social strictures that characterized the wartime period was aban-

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doned for the same uncompromising attention to production quotas, collectivized agriculture, and the elimination of small-scale entrepreneurship. The Soviet authorities made every effort to curtail the population mobility and looser residence requirements that had characterized the wartime period. Andrei Zhdanov’s vitriolic August 1946 attacks on the famous satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and especially on Anna Akhmatova (as simultaneously a “whore” and a “nun”), whose poems had inspired millions in the defense of the country and particularly of Leningrad during the siege, signaled no more and no less a return to the intellectual strictures of the 1930s. For the European “periphery” newly incorporated into the Soviet Union after the war—the Baltic states, Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, Moldova, and the Kaliningrad region (oblast’) (northern East Prussia)—there was no period of transition or of hope for a new and different future, as there was still at the time in most of Eastern Europe. True, the populations of the newly incorporated areas experienced the shock of recognition from the period of Soviet occupation during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939–41, which also saw measures of Sovietization and forcible incorporation. But despite continued fantasies among some segments of the population about a war between the Soviet Union and the West that would produce their independence, these regions were Sovietized with a firmness of purpose and unrelenting brutality that allowed no exceptions.10 This was not an issue, as it was sometimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany, of the Soviets knowing no other way to govern and rule than a form of Bolshevization. Instead, in the Baltic states and elsewhere along the new western borders of the Soviet Union, Moscow intended to carry out a combination of the Lenin and Stalin revolutions in one fell swoop. Though the “Forest Brothers” continued to fight in Latvia and remnants of UPA (the Ukrainian Insurgency Army) assassinated Soviet officials and intimidated local peasants who were forced into collective farms, their cause was lost from the beginning. Despite the rumors about intervention and the presence of agents from the West, there would be no help from the outside.11 In these regions, the war was ongoing, with Soviet occupation in 1939 and then again in 1941, and ended only in 1991 with the breakup of the Soviet Union.12 Istvan Deak has noted that the most important and lasting results of the Second World War in Eastern Europe were the demographic, rather than the political, changes the war precipitated.13 The postwar in this sense meant Eastern Europe without the Jews who had been slaughtered by the Nazis and their local collaborators. Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague would and could never be the same without their vibrant Jewish populations, and many of the small towns of eastern Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania would be bereft of their Jewish character. The postwar also meant an Eastern Europe without Ger mans, who were driven out of the region in the millions. Even more than

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after the First World War, the Second World War brought with its conclusion the overwhelming domination of the mono-ethnic nation-state, or of multinational states like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, where individual nations occupied discrete geographical territories within formal federations. The staggering movement of populations in Europe had already begun during the war, when Germans were brought “Home to the Reich” from the Baltic countries, Bessarabia, and Ukraine, while Poles (and Jews) were forcibly deported from what was claimed to be Germany. By the end of the war, the principle of population transfer, based on the model of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 and confirmed by Allied agreements regarding the “humane and orderly” transfer of Germans out of East Central Europe at Potsdam (July/August 1945), was fully accepted by the rulers of the new national states.14 In accordance with Polish-Soviet agreements, over two million Poles were forcibly deported from the Soviet Union (Ukraine and Belorussia) to Poland, while 480,000 Ukrainians were deported to the Soviet Union. During “Operation Vistula” in the spring of 1947, Polish units killed some 5,500 Ukrainians, scattering the rest of the Polish Ukrainian population, some 140,000 people altogether, throughout the new “recovered territories” in the west of Poland with the idea that they would become completely Polonized.15 Those of mixed nationality—Silesians, Mazurians, Kashubians, Lemkos, and Hutsls, among others—were forced to chose their nationality (Polish, Ukrainian, or German), as were offspring of mixed marriages.16 The nationalist principle reigned supreme, especially in those countries that were dominated by Communist parties, which sought legitimacy through the forced expulsion of unwanted minorities. By the end of this process, Poland was never so Polish as after the war, Ukraine never so Ukrainian, Germany never so German, Latvia never so Latvian, Lithuania never so Lithuanian. There is another, often forgotten side to this story that also complicates an easy distinction between postwar and wartime society. Some 250,000 Polish Jews survived the war, many of whom returned to Poland from the Soviet Union. The vast majority of Budapest’s Jews, some 185,000 altogether, had been spared the transports to Auschwitz after Horthy’s demise.17 Some Jews in the region assumed leadership positions in the new ruling Communist parties. Even the Soviets were wary of the large number of Jews in important positions in the Eastern European parties. In Hungary alone, states Charles Gati, “most of the available [Communist] cadres” and the majority of Politburo members between 1945 and 1956 were of Jewish background. Between 70 and 80 percent of the political police (AVO) were recruited from the population of Hungarian Jews.18 In Poland, the head of the Communist Party, Wladyslaw Gomulka, expressed regret at the excessive number of Jews in the leadership and tried to convince Moscow to deal with the situation.19 There were also pogroms in 1945 and 1946 in Poland, Hungary, and Romania. Tens of thou-

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sands of Jews found themselves in Germany after the war: some had returned; some survived; some were refugees from Eastern Europe. In short, neither the Jews nor the Jewish question disappeared from Europe after Hitler. Similarly, the Germans, when they could, remained in their Eastern European homes. They became Polonized, joined their Czech spouses, or pledged allegiance to the new Hungarian and Romanian states. They continued to be a part of the history of these countries, eventually leaving for the much more prosperous West as so-called Volkswagen Deutsche in the 1960s and 1970s. Tony Judt’s Postwar takes a different angle on the problem of what constitutes the postwar. He views the beginning of the period rather pragmatically, essentially as Stunde Null, when the war ends and the peace begins. The postwar period concluded in 1989, with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the unification of Germany. “After 1989,” he writes, “with the return of eastern Europe the past would, unavoidably, have to be spoken. After 1989 nothing—not the future, not the present and above all not the past—would ever be the same.” The postwar was then the period dominated by a gargantuan struggle—institutional, emotional, and intellectual—with the past of the war and what it meant. “Memory” is too flimsy a word to capture what he means exactly, and the German Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mastering the past) too inaccurate. There was a “shadow” of the past hanging over Europe in the postwar period, he writes.20 Yet the history he describes is more visceral than that. As memory (for want of a better word) passes into history, Europe will be born anew and the postwar is over. Stories of the war vary from country to country, generation to generation, people to people. They also vary depending on individual experiences. The postwar, in this sense, is deeply embedded in the consciousness and even subconscious of the men and women who experienced it. Even when the generation of Europeans who directly experienced the war passes from the scene altogether, as will soon occur, their friends, relatives, and offspring carry with them the difficult memories of the past. Will the jousting with the past end with the passing of this generation? Private memories shared with intimates only sometimes merge with public discussions of historical issues elicited by political and social circumstances. Will the postwar end once individual memory is gone, as Judt has suggested? I think not—certainly not for the Germans and the Poles, whose collective lives and fate remain haunted by the war. The rest of this chapter explores their predicaments.

The Germans The Germans started the war and fought it far beyond the point where it could have been won. They engaged in murderous campaigns against the Poles and

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Russians, among others, they killed their own handicapped and homosexual populations, and they perpetrated genocide against the Jews and Roma. Resistance to the Nazi program among the Germans was minimal. Even those who did not “know” about the Holocaust, surely the majority of Germans, could have known a lot more if they had cared at all about the fate of the Jews. With its aggressive actions and the promulgation of its evil ideology, Germany wrecked the European continent. Few Germans can avoid the sense of responsibility, if not collective guilt, for the terrible results of the Third Reich’s homicidal “Rassenwahn” (racial madness). Especially in the first decade after the war, the Germans could focus on little else about the war except for their own trials and suffering.21 Over time, however, the Germans have done relatively well with the straightforward recognition of their responsibility for the depredations of the war and have repeatedly and genuinely expressed their repentance as a nation for the Holocaust. But drawing a line between this expression of repentance and an uncomplicated future free of the shadow of the war and of national guilt is complicated by several factors. Some Germans, to be sure not the majority, remain antiSemitic and defensive about the propriety of the war. For these Germans the Holocaust is the mark of Cain, and they blame the Jews for Germans’ having to be constantly reminded about it.22 As the Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex noted in an often-repeated partial truth, “the Germans can never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” The ambivalence toward Israel in German society is only one aspect of this problem. Many German Jews themselves feel the pain of not being fully accepted by German society today. The anti-Semitism of some Germans activates the heightened vigilance of others to combat its historical and contemporary implications. Another factor complicating Germans’ reaction to the war and the Holocaust is the continuing relevance of their past suffering to present generations.23 The litany of the genuine horrors endured by the Germans is long and painful. There was the relentless bombing of their cities, including the fearsome firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg. There was the exploitation and starvation of millions of German POWs in Soviet camps. There was the Vertreibung (forced deportation) of 12–15 million Germans from Eastern Europe. As many as two million Germans may have died in the process—of starvation, disease, and exposure, not to mention as a result of violent attacks by Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Soviet soldiers themselves. Hundreds of thousands of children were orphaned; whole German towns were leveled; people fled to the West under the most trying of circumstances. The Germans were perpetrators, but they were also victims. They started the rampage, but they also suffered as a consequence of its horrors. Perhaps most complicated of all in this litany of German suffering was the ubiquitous threat and reality of rape, gang rape, and rape murder faced by Ger-

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man women and girls during the period of the Soviet assault and at the outset of the occupation. Rape is a violent crime. Yet in contrast to murder, assault with a deadly weapon, or false imprisonment, its highly personal and ostensibly sexual character has created a pall of silence about its perpetration. Men do not like to talk about rape when it relates to their wives and daughters because of the supposed “shame” it brings on them and on the family. Women avoid the subject for some of the same reasons. In some cultures, rape is equivalent to the desecration of a woman’s purity and honor. The German word Schande or Schändigung (versus Vergewaltigung) carries some of this meaning. Soviet occupation policies also made it difficult, if not impossible, to talk about rape in the East. Stalin and his generals did not want the honor of their soldiers, indeed of the great and victorious homeland, besmirched by such “incidental” acts.24 There were certainly countless reports of rape in the massive autobiographical materials collected about the Vertreibung by Theodor Schieder and his team after the war.25 But even then, the reports were muted and relatively infrequent, in comparison to the stories that were told from woman to woman.26 That the Soviets and even Russians today, with very few exceptions, refuse to recognize the widespread and destructive nature of the rape during the war has its roots in the romantic identification of the heroism of the Red Army during the Second World War with the positive moral attributes of the Russian people. To stain the honor of Soviet soldiers during the war would be tantamount to insulting the dignity of the Russian people. But Germans, even those in West Germany who were free from the control of Communist censorship, also were not anxious to lift the taboo about the rape. Part of the problem was the personal issue mentioned above: no one wanted his or her wife, sister, or mother to talk about it. But part of it was intensely political. Especially after the late 1960s, the notion of German victimhood was equated with right-wing causes and therefore rejected by the left. At the same time, the political right, more conservative, more Catholic, and more patriarchal in connection with women’s issues, was not willing to deal openly with the problems of rape. Between the mid 1960s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the academy in the West was dominated by the left, which continued to discourage debate and scholarship on such issues as the Vertreibung, the fate of German POWs, the Soviet detention camps in eastern Germany, the Soviet exploitation of German industry and manpower, and, of course, the rape of German women by Soviet soldiers. All of this was seen as expiating the Nazis and the German right. Meanwhile, though the German right was more than willing to talk about all of these issues, with the exception of rape, it remained isolated and outside the mainstream of the academy. With the fall of the GDR and the Soviet Union, the taboos on work about the Soviet exploitation of Germany and Germans and about the Vertreibung for the most part broke down. Helka Sanders’s film and book about the Soviet rape

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of German women (1992) helped legitimize the subject, as did, I hope, the 1995 translation of my book.27 The positive reception of Antony Beevor’s 2002 bestseller, The Fall of Berlin, which focuses unsparingly on the widespread rape of German women, indicated something of a normalization of the issue among the German public.28 Similarly, in 2003, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger reissued in German the anonymous wartime diary A Woman in Berlin, which was first published in the United States in 1953. The book is filled with interesting psychological insights and revelations about the fall of Berlin and the widespread rape that followed, including the author’s own. Enzensberger writes that “German readers were obviously not ready [before the 1990s] to face some uncomfortable truths, and the book was met with either hostility or silence.”29 A controversy broke out about the attempts of a journalist to reveal the woman’s identity, demonstrating a misplaced understanding of the importance of the problem itself. It is hard to separate history and memory; they inevitably overlap. But the extent to which sensitivities about the war remain, Germany cannot leave the postwar behind. This is demonstrated as well by the critical reaction to the sensitive and nuanced novel by Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Der Verlorene (The Lost). In almost every case, the critics skirt the central biographical event of the novel, the rape by Russian soldiers of the chief protagonist, a German woman driven from the East with her husband. She herself never speaks of it. But, as narrated by her youngest son, born right after the war: “At some point, I understood this much, something terrible happened during the flight before the Russian advance. What it was, Mother never said, she only said over and over again that fleeing from the Russians something terrible happened to her and also that Father could not help her, and that no one could have helped her.” In a moment of fear and panic at the appearance of the Russians, the woman passed her firstborn son, Arnold, to another woman on the trek, losing track of him and subsequently spending the rest of her life trying to find him. The novelist and the critics talk—at last, one might say—about the Vertreibung and the heartrending quest to find Arnold, the lost son. But what about the rape, the “Schändung” and the likelihood, strongly hinted at in the novel, that the youngest son was the product of the rape? “I was—in the truest sense of the word—zum Heulen [to wail about], only I understood only much later why that was so.” The reader, however, never learns the truth.30

Poland The Second World War began on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland by the Nazis. It is astonishing how often this fact is forgotten or subsumed in particularistic patriotic concerns, whether in France or the United States,

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the Soviet Union or Denmark. On 22 August, shortly before the invasion, Hitler spoke to a gathering of Wehrmacht generals and leaders in Obersalzburg: “Our war aim is not to attain a particular line, but the physical destruction of the enemy.” According to most accounts, he added the words: “Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?” Here, Hitler meant the destruction of the Poles as a nation, not of the Jews, as is sometimes assumed, even in the scholarly literature.31 The actual occupation of Poland demonstrated that Hitler’s satraps enthusiastically followed his lead. The SS coordinated Operation Tannenberg, the drawing up of lists of leading Polish citizens—churchmen, politicians, professors, lawyers, and others—destined for execution.32 As a result, some 60,000 were killed in the first weeks and months of the occupation. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were forcibly deported from the newly incorporated territories of the Reich to the Generalgouvernement, commanded by the thoroughly racist Hans Frank. Those Poles who survived this first onslaught were slated for the life of helots, to be slaves and workers of the Third Reich, deprived of their country, their dignity, and their ambitions as a nation. Needless to say, Polish Jews were also the targets of Hitler’s murderous policies, but for the moment Nazi policy was focused on expelling them from territory in the Reich in acts of ethnic cleansing, forcing them into ghettos in the Generalgouvernement, stealing their property, and limiting their access to food and medicines. In Soviet-occupied eastern Poland during the period from 1939 to 1941, the Soviets engaged in four waves of deportations of the local elites, for the most part Poles, but also Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Jews.33 In the Soviet version of Operation Tannenberg, some 22,000 Polish officers located in three different POW camps were shot in 1940 on the orders of Stalin and Beria and buried in the Katyn Forest, among other secret sites of mass graves. Polish schoolteachers, clerks, lawyers, businesspeople, and others—with their entire families—were exiled to Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far North, some 320,000 people altogether. Many tens of thousands perished of hunger, disease, and exposure before the amnesty of July 1941. After the Nazi attack on Russia on 22 June 1941, the NKVD hastily murdered thousands of prisoners, most of them Ukrainians and Lithuanians, who were accused of having resisted the Soviet takeover in some fashion. That some Jews worked for and were part of the Soviet administration of eastern Poland left the Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians with yet more excuses to hate the Jews. Altogether during the war, the Poles lost 20 percent of their prewar population, three million Polish Catholics and three million Polish Jews.34 By the war’s end the country was devastated and its capital, Warsaw, leveled. Millions of surviving Poles were on the move back to Poland, from forced labor and concentration camps in Germany, from exile in the Soviet Union, from the battlefields of Western Europe and the Middle East, and from territories of

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Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia newly annexed by the Soviet Union. Poles from the central districts of the country moved into the so-called “recovered lands” in the west, searching for booty. At the end of the war, everywhere in Europe there was hunger, apathy, unemployment, fear, and—especially in the winter of 1946–47—fierce cold. But it all seemed much worse in Poland, where the sheer brutality and duration of the Nazi occupation had cut such deep wounds into the fabric of society. With the help of the Soviets, the Communist authorities gradually took control of the country’s politics and economy. Remnants of the Home Army, the AK (Armija Krajowa), continued an armed struggle against Soviet occupation and Communist takeover, but their cause was a hopeless one. Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, whom the Allies brought back to Poland from London to join a coalition with the Communists, fled for his life in October 1947, symbolizing the end of any hope at all for a free parliamentary system in Poland. For most Poles, like the Germans, the immediate postwar period was dedicated to forgetting their own culpability for the horrors of the immediate past. The Poles’ own immense suffering was the only legitimate subject to be commemorated, which suited the pro-Soviet and anti-German purposes of the Communist-dominated government. The fate of the Jews was of little interest; Polish martyrdom could be shared publicly only with the glorious exploits of the Red Army. The utter brutality of the wartime period, the petty collaboration, Polish complicity in the occupation, and the indifference among the majority to the murder of the Jews—the many instances when survival trumped morality—were wartime phantoms that were pushed into a deep psychological freezer. This was easier to do than in Germany because the Poles had to contend with an unpopular Communist government, supported by the hated Russians. Still, many joined the party in the hopes of participating in the rebuilding of the nation, others because there was no other way to get ahead. At the same time, the Polish government, in search of legitimacy and support, was not interested in pointing out the culpability of Poles for their own suffering, especially when this did not suit its political needs. The Poles got a later start than the Germans in dealing relatively openly with the reality of the war. In part, this was due to the Communist censorship imposed on Polish society, which made it impossible to investigate and talk about good Poles as perpetrators or collaborators with the Germans, not to mention as victims of the Soviet occupation during 1939–41. Even the death of Stalin and the end of Polish Stalinism did not help matters much. This was because party anti-Stalinists, led by Wladyslaw Gomulka, used Polish nationalism to foster their programs. Even into the 1960s and 1970s, Auschwitz was about the killing of Poles, communists, and Soviet POWs, not about the Jews. In public life (and in private), the Poles ignored the catastrophe that befell the Jews in their country, as if a zero-sum game of victimhood was at work.

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Recognition of Jewish suffering ostensibly diminished that of the Poles. AntiSemitism in Poland was far from dead, and ideas about zydo-kommuna—that the Jews were responsible for the woes of communism—still carried weight in wide circles of Polish society. Things began to change only in the 1980s, when the Solidarity movement inspired a fresh reading of the Polish past, one that challenged party-supported orthodoxies. Old mythologies about Polish martyrdom were questioned, and a series of important articles called into question the behavior of some Poles in connection with their Jewish neighbors. Jan Blonski’s famous 1987 essay, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” provoked a series of defensive protests, but also affirmations of Polish culpability and guilt not only for looking the other way, but, in the case of the infamous szmalcownicy (greasers), of identifying Jews to the police, helping the Nazis uncover Jewish hideouts, and fingering fellow Poles who concealed Jews.35 The fall of communism gave added impetus to the questioning about the traditional portrayal of Polish victimhood during the Second World War. To be sure, the main blow came from outside, when in 2001 the Polish-American scholar Jan Gross published his devastating study of the massacre at Jedwabne, described above. Not only were the Poles bystanders and even informers, they also brutally killed Jews themselves. Gross’s book provoked a wave of protests and criticism when it appeared in Poland, but to the Poles’ credit, many took his work seriously and began investigating many similar episodes of mass killing involving Polish perpetrators.36 This was by no means an easy lesson for Poles to absorb. Polish-Jewish relations have been plagued with problems of Polish defensiveness and denial for a very long time indeed. ( Jewish anti-Polish prejudices have not helped.) In this context, the strides made by the Poles in recognizing their complicity in the Holocaust over the past dozen years have been remarkable.37 Significantly, this makes Polish-German dialogue on wartime issues much more fruitful. Despite occasional setbacks and nasty polemics from the right, the new openness in Poland to discussion of Polish-Jewish relations during the war serves the cause of bringing the country into synchronization with the evolution of the postwar in Western Europe. Just as in Germany, it has proven easier for the Poles to deal more straightforwardly with the destruction of the European Jews than it has with the expulsion of the Germans. Partly this has to do with the sheer trauma of the war for the Poles. The Nazi occupation of Poland, the killing and humiliation of the Poles, the elimination of the Jews, and the brutal expulsion of Germans left deep wounds that have healed only slowly. Willy Brandt helped the process along in 1971 when he visited Poland and knelt in silent mourning at the monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. It took another two decades of patient diplomatic exchanges for the Poles and Germans to sign a treaty that put to an end the nagging uncertainty about

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the incorporation of the western territories into Poland. Only then were the Poles willing to apologize for the bitter fate they had inflicted on the Germans after the war, and the Germans, in turn, begged the Poles’ forgiveness for the horrible events of the occupation. Both sides are coming to terms with their responsibility for the suffering of the other. The fall of communism in Poland produced a wave of literature on all of those topics having to do with Soviet and Communist oppression that had been prohibited since the end of the war: the Katyn Forest massacre, the deportation of Poles from eastern Poland in 1939–41, NKVD actions against the Home Army at the end of the war, the role of Polish secret police and informers in society, the influence of Soviet advisors in the Polish government, and so on. Scholars and publicists came around to the issue of the expulsion of the Germans more slowly and deliberately. Still, a number of excellent studies were published on the subject.38 Polish scholars enthusiastically embraced a German-Polish commission on the expulsion of the Germans. The report of the commission made great strides in constructing a common narrative of the Vertreibung (wypedzenie in Polish) that emphasized the crimes of the Nazis in Poland but also the harsh fate of the expellees at the hands of the Poles.39 The joint publication of documents from the Polish archives has been one of the most important results of the new cooperation.40 Polish textbooks were also rewritten to include the forced deportation of the Germans, and numerous binational conferences and symposiums were held on the subject. But the growing scholarly consensus in Poland and Germany about the causes, the costs, and the consequences of the Vertreibung masked deep unease in both Poland and Germany about the legitimacy of placing German suffering at the center of any historical understanding of the Second World War. Marek Edelman—a veteran of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising—stated many Poles’ views unambiguously: the Germans were the hangmen and the Poles were the victims, and there was nothing more to be said about German suffering.41 Many Germans, fearful of the “relativization” of German responsibility for the war and Holocaust, think the same. In 2000, when Erika Steinbach, member of the Bundestag and president of the Bund der Vertriebener (BdV) (Association of Expellees), proposed a fundraising campaign to build a museum in Berlin against forced deportations (Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen) to commemorate and document these events in the twentieth century, the press in both Poland and Germany raised a storm of opposition. Before her visit to Poland in the fall of 2003, Steinbach was portrayed on the front of the popular magazine Wprost (17 August 2003), as a leather-jacketed Nazi dominatrix riding on the back of her Trojan horse, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. There were counterproposals from Germans (like Markus Meckel) and Poles (Adam Michnik, Adam Krzeminski, and Wlodzimierz Borodziej) to build an all-European museum on forced deportation in Wroclaw (Breslau). Others suggested Strasbourg as the best site.

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Meanwhile, a parallel initiative in 2003 came primarily from Central European (German and Polish) academic circles and cultural officials, supported by resolutions of the European Council. This involved the creation of a European Network of Memory and Solidarity that would integrate the projects of research institutes and social organizations interested in developing an allEuropean approach to the history of ethnic cleansing, mass killing, and oppression in the region. “The objective of the network,” stated a resolution from the 2 February 2005 meeting in Warsaw, “is the analysis, the documentation, and the dissemination of the history of the 20th century, a century of wars, totalitarian dictatorships, and of the suffering of civilian populations….” The idea is to develop a common history of mass killing and deportation and absorb it into a single European narrative of past, present, and future. As then Cultural Secretary Christina Weiss put it in Warsaw: “to broaden the narrow national view of the past into a European viewpoint.”42

The Post-Postwar Recently there have been a series of setbacks in the development of the end of the postwar43 (establishing a common European viewpoint, to restate Weiss). The change of government in Berlin in the fall of 2005 from the SPD-Green coalition to the Grand Coalition led by the CDU’s Angela Merkel gave a shot in the arm to the Steinbach (BdV) project, so that a much-criticized traveling exhibit—“Erzwungene Wege: Flucht und Vertreibung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts” (Forced Paths: Flight and Forced Deportation in Europe in the 20th Century)—was put on in Berlin across the street from the German Historical Museum, which had sponsored a rival exhibit—“Flucht, Vertreibung, Integration” (Flight, Forced Deportation, and Integration)—that avoided comparative issues and focused instead on the long-term history of Germans in Eastern Europe and the integration of the expellees into German society, rather than on their actual expulsion. There are plans afoot for some kind of permanent installation in Berlin, despite opposition from the left, which would combine the two approaches to the history of the Vertreibung. The Poles were very critical of the Steinbach exhibit and of the Germans for having allowed it to be housed on Unter den Linden in Berlin. Complicating Polish reactions to the development of a “common historical viewpoint” was the election in the fall of 2005 of a right-wing populist government led by the Kaczynski brothers ( Jaroslaw and Lech). Their nationalism and barely concealed contempt for German progressive culture made both formal and informal Polish-German relations much more difficult. In an interview with Der Spiegel (6 March 2006), Polish President Lech Kaczynski stated that he was against any

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Zentrum gegenVertreibungen in Berlin because it would inevitably lead to “relativizing” German guilt for what happened between 1939 and 1945.44 Despite the fall of the Kaczynski government in the fall of 2007, the Polish elite remain mistrustful of attempts to construct a German narrative of victimhood, while the German political class is weary of being lectured by the Poles about the war. Matters have not been helped by ongoing suits in the European courts about the restoration of former German property in Poland. These suits, sponsored by the Preussiche Treuhand, an organization representing the property interests of some BdV members, have soured Polish-German relations even further. Continuing German sensitivities about the problem of rape and episodic Polish denial about the role of Poles in the Holocaust contribute to the impression that the Second World War has been insufficiently historicized in both Eastern and Western Europe. The recent history of Polish-German tensions also calls into question the construction of a common European historical narrative about the war and its aftermath. At the same time, one should not ignore the important strides that have been made toward an all-European vision of the past and future. As suggested earlier, discussions of the issues of rape in Germany and of the killing of Jews in Poland have become much more normalized since the fall of communism. The Network of Memory and Solidarity, Viadrina University in Frankfurt/Oder, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, and other such institutions serve as valuable conduits for multilateral historical exchanges. Polish and German scholars and publicists maintain ongoing relations and profit—financially and morally—from the long-term investments that both sides have made in dealing sensibly with the difficult and even traumatic common past. In this sense, the “post-postwar” has begun. But if the hullabaloo surrounding the plans for building a museum about the Vertreibung is any indication, the postwar will be with the Europeans for a long time to come. I would like to conclude by noting an important issue about the postwar. There may be good reasons why the horrible nature of the violence in the Second World War has been so difficult to historicize and relegate to textbooks, monuments, and museums, especially in Germany and Poland. This is not just a matter of Auschwitz as both a universal symbol and a reality of mass killing and genocide. Despite the distortions of the past and the problems of facing up to its harsh realities, through their struggles with history and memory both Poles and Germans know something very important about the nature of war and occupation, about the corrupting evil of racist ideologies and of subjugating other peoples. The Germans know this primarily as the perpetrators of the Second World War, the Poles primarily as victims. But they also can or should understand how quickly victim can become perpetrator and perpetrator can become victim. The postwar reminds us constantly of these horrors: perhaps it should never end.

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Notes 1. Hereafter, I will not put the postwar in quotation marks. Context should make clear whether postwar is being used as a conceptual tool or as a straightforward adjective. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005). 2. Istvan Deak, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe:World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000). 3. Martin Broszat, Klaus-Dietmar Henke, and Hans Woller, Von Stalingrad bis Währungsreform: zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland (Munich, 1988). 4. Götz Aly, Hitler‘s Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus; mit einem Nachwort—Antwort auf die Kritik (Frankfurt am Main, 2006). 5. Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven, 2005). 6. Jan T. Gross, “Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of the Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 4 (spring 1989): 198–214; Jan Gross, “War as Revolution,” in Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii, eds., The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe 1944–1949 (Boulder, 1997), 17–40. 7. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors:The Destruction of the Jewish Community of Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, 2001); Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New York, 2006). 8. Dariusz Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967–1968 (Warsaw, 2000). 9. See Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001). 10. Amir Weiner, “Between Two Seas: Sovereignty, Governance, and Violence between the Baltic and Black Seas, 1930s–80s,” in Draft Paper for Mass Killing Seminar, Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, 8 December 2006. Weiner argues here that the incorporation of the new “western” territories of the Soviet Union was a product of fierce Sovietization and did not have a particularly “ethnic” content. 11. See Jeffrey Burds, The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944–1948, Carl Beck Papers no. 1505 (Pittsburgh, 2001). 12. Norman M. Naimark, “The Holocaust in Latvia in Context: Problems of Comparison and Historicization” (in English and Latvian), in Holokausta Izpetes Problemas Latvija/ The Issues of Holocaust Research in Latvia (Riga, 2001), 19–28. 13. See Istvan Deak, Essays on Hitler’s Europe (Lincoln, 2001), and Deak, “The Crime of the Century,” New York Review of Books, 26 September 2002. 14. See my discussion of this issue in Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, 2001), 124ff. 15. This story is well told by Timothy Snyder, “To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and For All: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 2 (spring 1999): 111–15. 16. See Piotr Madajczyk, Przylaczenie Slaska Opolskiego do Polski 1945–1948 (Warsaw, 1994); Bernadetta Nitschke, Wysiedlenie Ludnosci niemieckiej z Polski w latach 1945–1949 (Zielena Gora, 1999); and Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569– 1999 (New Haven, 2003). 17. Krystyna Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948, trans. John Micgiel and Michael H. Bernhard (Berkeley, 1991), 214–15. 18. Charles Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham, 1986), 100–101. 19. For the Gomulka story, see Lech W. Gluchowski, “Gomulka Writes to Stalin in 1948,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 17 (2004): 365–82, and Pawel Machcewicz, Wladyslaw Gomulka (Warsaw, 1995), 28–32. 20. Judt, Postwar, 3, 10. 21. Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001), 51–88.

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22. Gitta Sereny, The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections, Germany, 1938–2001 (New York, 2001), 67–68. See also the recent work by Andrei Markovits, which links German antiSemitism to anti-Americanism: The Uncouth Nation: European Anti-Americanism from the American Revolution to George W. Bush (Princeton, 2006). 23. See Helga Hirsch, Schweres Gepäck: Flucht und Vertreibung als Lebensthema (Hamburg, 2004), who writes about the centrality of the Vertreibung to the “sons and grandsons” of the Vertriebene. 24. See my treatment of this issue in Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, 1995), 69–140. 25. See the famous Schieder project: Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus OstMitteleuropa, I, Bd. 1-2: Die Vertreibung der deutschen Bevölkerung aus den Gebieten östlich der OderNeisse (Bonn, 1954–1957, reprinted Munich, 1993). The project was tainted by Schieder’s background during the Third Reich. 26. Moeller would disagree with this statement. See his War Stories, 67ff. 27. Helka Sanders and Barbara Johr, eds., BeFreier und Befreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder (Munich, 1992); Norman M. Naimark, Die Russen in Deutschland: Die sowjetische Besazungszone 1945–1949 (Berlin, 1997). 28. Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York, 2002), 409–11. 29. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, foreword to Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary, trans. Philip Boehm (New York, 2005), xi. 30. Hans Ulrich Treichel, Der Verlorene (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 140. My translations. 31. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 57. 32. Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence, 2003), 86. 33. See Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II (Pittsburgh, 2003), 9–11. 34. Some young Polish historians have recently challenged these numbers, suggesting that the number of non-Jewish Poles killed was closer to two million. 35. See Antony Polonsky, ed., “My Brother’s Keeper”: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London, 1980). 36. See especially Pawel Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak, Wokol Jedwabnego, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 2002). 37. See Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2004). For an understanding of continuing “denial,” see Joanna Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln, 2006). 38. See especially Madajczyk, Przylaczenie Slaska Opolskiego; Nitschke, Wysiedlenie Ludnosci Niemieckiej; and Bernard Linek, “Odniemczenie” wojewodztwa slaskiego v latach 1945–1950 (Opole, 1997). 39.Wlodzimierz Borodziej and Hans Lemberg, eds., Der Komplex der Vertreibung: Abschlussbericht. 7. Dezember 1996 (Warsaw 1996). 40. Wlodzimierz Borodziej and Hans Lemberg, eds., “Unsere Heimat ist uns ein fremdes Land geworden…” Die Deutschen östlich von Oder und Neisse 1945–1950. Dokumente aus polnischen Archiven, 4 vols. (Marburg/L: 2000–2004). 41. See the interview with Edelman in Tygodnik Powszechny, 17 August 2003, by Krysztof Burnetko and Jaroslaw Makowski. 42. See my discussion of the network and some of the issues broached in this essay in Norman Naimark, “Die ‘Killing Fields’ des Ostens und die Falle der Erinnerung,” Transit 30 (winter 2005/2006): 57–70. 43. Stefan Troebst uses the term “post-postwar” for understanding the trajectory of “Erinnerungskultur” (the culture of memory) in his introduction to Troebst, ed., Vertreibungsdiskurs und europäische Erinnerungskultur: Deutsch-polnische Initiativen zur Institutionalisierung: Eine Dokumentation (Osnabrück, 2006), 27. 44. Troebst, Vertreibungsdiskurs: Dokumentation, 243.

[[[ CH AP T ER 2

Feelings in the Aftermath Toward a History of Postwar Emotions Frank Biess

T

HIS CHAPTER PROPOSES AN alternative and hitherto neglected conceptual framework for studying the aftereffects of the Second World War in Europe: the history of emotions.1 The essay outlines the conceptual possibilities that are inherent in applying the history of emotions to the study of the postwar. It engages a multidisciplinary research on “emotions,” and it seeks to elaborate the potential significance of some of its key aspects for a history of the aftermath.2 Lest my analysis remains too abstract, I illustrate my more theoretical points with examples relating primarily to the emotions of “hope,” “fear,” and “resentment.” Because these emotions were closely linked to the experience and memory of violence, they were particularly important in confronting the legacies of the Second World War. But they were clearly not the only ones that became operative in the postwar period. Other historians, for example, have already illuminated the role of “hatred” and “trust” in the making of the postwar period.3 Both the theoretical and the more historically specific parts of the essay are meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive, thus charting possible paths of inquiry toward a theoretically informed yet empirically based history of emotions of the postwar period. My examples largely come from postwar West Germany, yet some of my findings are also applicable to postwar Europe more generally.

Emotional Control, Emotional (De)mobilization Much of the past history of emotions has traced long-term patterns of emotional change. Emotional regimes have appeared as rather stable and as responding largely to macro-level transformations such as urbanization, industrialization, the rise of the bourgeoisie, or the emergence of a service-oriented economy in

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the twentieth century. Conversely, emotional responses to cataclysmic events like 9/11 largely derived, as Peter Stearns argues in his recent book, from longstanding emotional traditions, such as the history of “race fears” and a distinctly millenarian strand in American culture.4 An emotional history of the postwar thus needs to locate the place of the Second World War and its aftermath in the larger continuity of the twentieth century.5 To what extent did the war alter the long-term evolution of emotional norms and emotional experience? Did Europeans cope with the aftereffects on the basis of a preexisting emotional repertoire? Or did the war also transform existing modes of emotional expression and emotional norms? One way of addressing these questions is to investigate the dialectics of emotional mobilization and control throughout the modern period. In the grand narratives of Western-style modernity by Weber, Freud, or Elias, the increasing control, refinement, or marginalization of emotions functions as one of the preconditions for the emergence of a Western “occidental rationality” and “civilization.” Emotions remained the propensity largely of nonwhite, female, or premodern subjects, whereas normative bourgeois masculinity was defined by the ability to control and repress emotions even in moments of great personal danger.6 To be sure, cultural anthropologists have stripped these modernization narratives of their universal claims by showing how Western emotional regimes were themselves historically and culturally contingent.7 More recent interpretations of Max Weber’s work have also highlighted the hitherto neglected status of emotions as driving forces in his explanation of the emergence of Western capitalism.8 And, by showing rather rapid and dynamic emotional change in the early Middle Ages, the medievalist Barbara Rosenwein has deconstructed the dichotomy between a “childish,” authentic, and emotionally expressive premodern period and an increasingly refined, repressed, and regulated modernity.9 Still, the thesis of an increasing (self-)control of emotions also emerges from more specific studies of the emotional history of the twentieth century. In his American Cool, Peter Stearns posited a specific emotional style of “antiintensity” that was compatible with a modern, urban, service-oriented economy.10 Along similar lines, the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz charted the decline of emotions in the historical construction of subjectivities. Whereas the bourgeois subject of the nineteenth century still generally recognized the validity of emotions even if they needed to be controlled, the “post-bourgeois white collar subject” from the 1920s onward defined emotions in general as negative and sought to avoid any form of emotional expression.11 The disavowal of emotions or “cool conduct,” as Helmuth Lethen has called it, advanced to an emotional norm of the interwar period.12 This cool and detached habitus remained impervious to human suffering, and it also informed the Nazi ethic, especially among the intellectual elite in the SS.13 Structural-functionalist

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explanations of the Holocaust, as they emerged in the 1980s, additionally confirmed the view that mass murder resulted not from intense emotional investment but rather from bureaucratic rivalries and careerist ambitions. Contrary to this assumption of increasing coolness and emotional control, however, more recent work has brought into focus the significance of emotions for the perpetration of violence.14 In this view, the first half of the twentieth century did not so much see the repression and control of emotions but rather their mobilization on an unprecedented scale.15 Recent research, for example, has highlighted the significance of emotions of fear, hatred, rage, and resentment as preconditions for violence and ethnic killing.16 According to Enzo Traverso, the fear of a violent death functioned as a central emotion in what he sees as a “European civil war” between 1914 and 1945.17 A similar argument— fear as a motivating force for violence—has also been developed to explain the lethality of military fighting in the closing stages of the first and second world wars.18 Emotions have also returned in Holocaust research, which has again more strongly emphasized face-to-face violence as well as the culturally mediated individual motivations of the perpetrators.19 In these works, emotions are—implicitly or explicitly—tied to action; they appear as central motivations for exclusionary practices and violent behavior. This emphasis on the role of emotions in the perpetration of violence finally appears to live up to Lucien Febvre’s classic plea for a new history of sensibilities. Writing at the height of the Nazi empire in Europe in 1941, Febvre called for a history of “emotional life of man and all its manifestations” that would especially have to include the study of the “cult of the basic forces within us” as well as the “history of hate, the history of fear, the history of cruelty, the history of love.”20 Febvre, however, was still operating in a thoroughly Cartesian framework that was based on the opposition between “reason” and “affect.” As such, his call for the study of emotions derived from an understanding of fascism as being based on a “primitive mentality” that manifested itself in savage and archaic rituals.21 In contrast to this traditional association of emotions with irrationalism and uncontrollable physiological arousal, recent interdisciplinary research has increasingly emphasized the cognitive dimension of emotions. Emotions now appear as a form of cognition, or at least as containing strong cognitive elements. Neurobiological and psychological studies have highlighted the central significance of emotions for the perception and interpretation of external reality as well as for the ability to make rational decisions.22 Emotions are seen as part of an “affective-cognitive involvement in the world” (Jakob Tanner) that pre-selects themes and issues that are important to us.23 In Martha Nussbaum’s words, emotions constitute an “appraisal or value judgment[s], which ascribe[s] to things and persons outside the person’s own control great importance for

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that person’s flourishing.”24 To be sure, the emphasis on the “rationality of emotions”25 does not mean that they were always accurate—they can also be based on fundamentally skewed or distorted perceptions. On a very basic level, emotions point to cultural priorities and direct individual and collective economies of attention. They signal the extent to which individuals and societies invest certain issues and themes with particular importance for their own well-being. Rather than simply relegating emotional reactions in the past to the realm of the irrational, emotions function as markers of cultural significance. These two insights—the significance of emotions for the perpetration of violence as well as the emphasis on their cognitive dimension—have important ramifications for a history of emotions in the aftermath of the Second World War. First, if the mobilization of emotions indeed represented an essential element of the wartime period, then the postwar period necessitated a process of emotional demobilization that weakened, converted, or rendered ineffective previously destructive emotions. How, then, did postwar societies contain or transform emotions such as such as hate, rage, and fear? Since emotions are always relational, this process of emotional demobilization also entailed the ascendancy of countervailing emotions such as hope, trust, love, and empathy.26 The recasting of emotions was therefore central to the restoration of a moral order and a new sense of community in the aftermath of extreme experiences of violence.27 Secondly, emotional demobilization needs entailed not simply the containment and repression of “irrational” emotions by the forces of reason. In light of emotions’ cognitive component, it rather involved a fundamental transformation of underlying beliefs and perceptions of reality. The durability of perceptual frameworks that did not change as quickly as dominating ideologies, for example, may also explain the continuity of racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes across 1945. In addition, any attempt at emotional management “from above” needs to take into consideration the potential “ironic effects of mental control,” i.e., the fact that any effort to influence an emotion may have unintended and possibly opposite consequences.28 Attempts to reduce the feeling of “fear,” for example, may actually have the opposite effect by constantly directing an individual’s attention to this particular feeling. A focus on emotions thus cautions against the postwar belief in the virtually unlimited malleability of human beings, as manifested not only in Communist projects of building a “new man,” but also in the American confidence in the power of reeducation.29 Still, it is precisely their cognitive content that makes emotions accessible to change. In this sense, a postwar history of emotions can accommodate not only the enduring legacies of the past but also individual and collective learning processes. It can trace, for example, the gradual evolution of an emotional affective bond between individual citizens and the postwar state as an essential element of postwar democratization.30

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The Postwar Emotional Regime(s) Most recent histories of emotions have treated emotions as social and cultural constructs. They have emphasized the historically variable and culturally specific norms that guide individual emotional expression and experience. This shift to what Peter Stearns has called “emotionology” was important because it pointed to the historical variability of emotional norms and disbanded the assumption of “a constant psychic apparatus, usually along Freudian lines” as it had dominated the practice of psychohistory in the 1970s.31 The emphasis on emotional regimes that shape the experience and expression of emotions is especially well suited to the twentieth century, when the modern mass media provided unprecedented opportunities for propagating and manipulating emotional norms.32 The dominant emotional regime of the postwar period was one of restraint and anti-intensity. This emphasis on emotional restraint, however, did not simply derive from the long-term evolution of emotional regimes in the process of modernization but rather represented a conscious and explicit response to the real and perceived emotional excesses of the wartime period. Emotions always contain a self-reflective dimension. Postwar emotions were thus inextricably intertwined with contemporaries’ perceptions of their own emotionality.33 In particular, memories of emotions as a driving force of fascism strongly affected postwar emotional norms and modes of expression. To give one example: in his last publication before his untimely death, the émigré political scientist and author of Behemoth, Franz Neumann, identified the transformation of real existing fear (of, for example, economic decline) into a neurotic anxiety of persecution as the main emotional basis of National Socialism. The only way to overcome this neurotic anxiety was through mass identification with the Führer, which then also involved the complete obliteration of an independent self.34 These diagnoses of the emotional basis of National Socialism assumed an important significance for contemporaries’ own desire for emotional (self-) control. Political elites in postwar West Germany, for example, exhibited a deep suspicion regarding the injection of strong emotions in politics and public life. As Thomas Mergel has shown, electoral campaigns up until the 1960s in the Federal Republic cultivated a style of sobriety that rejected American models of more explicit emotional appeal to voters.35 The association of emotionality with political extremism also explains the relative absence and marginal status of emotions in Western social sciences discourses during the 1940s and 1950s.36 To be sure, the “rationalization of feelings” extended back to the turn of the century, when emotions came into the focus of modern sciences.37 But the perception of a close link between the mobilization of emotions and fascism significantly decreased the reputation of emotions as a serious object of study among social scientists after 1945. Histo-

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rians shared these cultural norms of sobriety and detachment and displayed, in Jakob Tanner’s words, a widespread “ignorance toward the emotional dimension as well as the affective involvement of man in society.”38 In the case of the West German historiography on the Holocaust, the scholarly habitus of distance and objectivity may well have reflected, as Nicolas Berg has argued, a distancing mechanism toward highly emotionally charged topics.39 Writing in the early 1980s, historian Hans Ulrich Wehler retroactively confirmed this emotional regime when he underlined how, for “those generations which had lived through the Second World War, flight, and the postwar period, the control of affects” had constituted an “indispensable precondition for physical and psychic survival.”40 While the reconstruction of emotional regimes is a central task for a postwar history of emotions, this notion also lends cultural norms an all-determining and pervasive force. In this view, emotions largely respond to changing external circumstances but usually do not appear as historical forces on their own. Against such a social deterministic view, historian William Reddy has developed a framework for the history of emotions that seeks to address the deficits of a purely constructivist view of emotions. According to Reddy, emotional regimes do not fully determine the speech acts by which emotions are articulated, what he calls “emotives.”41 While conventional emotives are an essential part of an emotional regime, these emotional utterances are also always provisional and in flux. They “aim at briefly characterizing the current state of activated thought material that exceeds the current capacity at attention.”42 In so doing, emotives are not only descriptive (by describing an emotional state) and relational (by referring to an object) but also self-altering and self-exploring. As a result, the articulation of an emotion may alter, in often unpredictable ways, the emotional experience itself. In addition, emotional regimes impose distinct emotional goals that individuals need to “navigate.” If these goals are too rigid or contradictory, individuals experience “emotional suffering” and seek to strive for greater “emotional liberty.” For Reddy, emotional change does not result from changing external factors alone but also from the imperfect functioning and inherent contradictions of the emotional regime itself. Reddy’s conceptual framework sheds light on one of the central paradoxes of the postwar emotional regime and hence also explains its gradual transfor mation. On the one hand, as an ever-expanding literature on the war’s after math has made clear, Europeans in East and West needed to confront the ubiquitous legacies of unprecedented violence for an extended period of time. At the same time, however, European societies also exhibited an intense desire for “normalcy” and overcoming.43 Both the liberal-democratic West and the communist East propagated forward-looking, optimistic “emotional regimes” that sought to contain the legacies of destruction and mobilize individual and collective energies for the purpose of reconstruction. These high-level goals of postwar emotional management stood in uneasy tension with the persistent

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emotional aftereffects of massive losses, deprivation, and suffering in individual lives. A postwar history of emotions brings into focus the tensions between what Europeans wanted or were told to feel, and the feelings that they actually experienced and articulated. “Emotional suffering” did not just result from the war’s aftereffects but also from the limited discursive space for expressing and articulating feelings of loss, sadness, and depression that was provided by the reconstruction societies in both East and West.44 Of course, this does not mean that expression of emotions was impossible in postwar societies. In fact, the postwar emotional regime also entailed forms of “emotional refuge” that allowed for more open expression of war-related emotions.45 Family and kinship relations more broadly may have served as such a space, even though it is important not to underestimate the extent to which public emotional norms also shaped the very private and intimate expression of emotions. Veterans’ associations and the movie theater also constituted sites for processing the emotional aftereffects of the war. The function of such emotional refuges for the larger emotional regime was double-edged: on the one hand, they shored up the dominant emotional regime of restraint by providing a safe and often private or semipublic outlet for unsettling or potentially disruptive emotions. On the other hand, emotional refuges could also provide alternative sites of emotional expression that gradually began to challenge the dominant emotional regime. As the section on war movies in the present volume makes clear, movies helped to enforce the dominant emotional regime by defining the range of legitimate emotional responses to the war and its aftereffects.46 But the cinema also served as an alternative space, an emotional refuge, for expressing feelings of loss, sadness, and guilt that could not be articulated in the public sphere. In general, the tension between the emotional regimes of the reconstruction societies in East and West on the one hand and the persistent legacies of the war’s aftermath on the other also served as an engine for emotional change in the postwar period. Emotional change then denoted the process by which it became gradually possible to articulate and express the emotional aftereffects of the war. For example, the psychological predicament of former soldiers and POWs in postwar West Germany was often described as one of apathy and emotional detachment interspersed with irritability and sudden outbursts of anger. However, cultural norms or emotional regimes, as they manifested themselves in psychiatric and therapeutic guidelines as well as in hegemonic ideals of masculinity, often denied public recognition to the enduring physical and psychological legacies of war and defeat.47 Along similar lines, postwar emotional regimes largely discounted fear and anxiety as legitimate emotions and hence did not condone their open expression.48 As a result, these emotions often could only be expressed in a veiled, indirect, sometimes displaced manner. In other cases, emotional suffering mani-

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fested itself in fragmented or epileptic emotives or even in complete silence.49 Yet it was precisely these gaps and slippages between emotional norms and emotional expression that eventually also transformed the West German emotional regime. By the late 1950s, psychic trauma began to be recognized among West German psychiatrists, while the emotion of fear was reevaluated and increasingly de-pathologized. Other emotions such as sadness and mourning appear to have followed a similar trajectory.50 The long history of the postwar then also includes the history of changing emotional standards that allowed, gradually and imperfectly, the public recognition and expression of the emotional consequences of war and defeat. A more permissive emotional culture, which took shape by the 1960s, then also created the space for more empathy with the victims of Nazism and thus provided a basis for a renewed prosecution of perpetrators of violence.

Postwar Emotions: From Hope to Fear Emotions contain distinct temporalities. Their cognitive content arrives with a “complex narrative history” that derives from past emotional experience, which then is projected onto the future.51 As such, emotions transform past experiences into expectations of the future.52 The history of emotions is therefore closely linked to the history of memory, since shifting memories of the past inform anticipations of the future. “Hope” and “fear” represented different ways for linking past, present, and future. They constituted alternative and competing political perspectives for envisioning the future in the aftermath of the Second World War. Recent historiographical narratives have often conceptualized the postwar period as a shift from “hope” to “fear,” albeit without engaging in a discussion of the nature and meaning of these emotions.53 “Hope” in the postwar was mainly, though not exclusively, the propensity of the left. What the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch described as the “anticipating consciousness” manifested itself in the widespread hope that the collective energies mobilized in the fight against fascism could be harnessed for building a better future.54 This hope emerged in many different variations. It became apparent, for example, in a genuine enthusiasm for a productivist ethos focused on (re)creating and (re)building in East and West, and it inspired the desires that led to the creation of the postwar welfare state.55 In Western Europe, the anti-fascist resistance movements functioned as the main carriers of hope. Their significance rested not so much on their limited military contribution to the defeat of fascism as in their ability to enunciate an anti-fascist vision of the future “good” society. This vision entailed an extension of democracy as well as economic planning and a mixed economy with significant, if not predominantly, socialist dimen-

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sions. A moral and political reckoning with the past through a purge of fascist collaborators was supposed to pave the way for this anti-fascist remaking of postwar society.56 A different vision of postwar hope was entailed in the Christian notion of “rechristianization,” which would counter the long-term secularization of European societies.57 Hope, finally, also shaped less overtly political yet nevertheless deeply symbolic assertions of alternative futures, such as the baby boom among Jewish Displaced Persons in Allied-occupied Germany, analyzed by Atina Grossmann.58 All of these visions shared a distinct political and personal perspective that asserted the anticipation of a better future in the aftermath of death and destruction. The return of fear, however, quickly tempered this moment of hope and optimism. As Hannah Arendt noted as early as 1946, “the Resistance has not achieved the European Revolution.” What remained, as she explained in the preface to Elements and Origins of Totalitarianism, was the “the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers,” which to her denoted “the calm that settles after all hope has died.”59 Fear, however, did not simply emerge as a result of the failure of hope but rather accompanied the transition from war to postwar from the very beginning. In fact, “fear” and “hope” often coexisted and were produced by the same forces. As a more revisionist historiography since the 1980s has demonstrated, for example, the French and Italian resistance movements were not just shining beacons of morality and hope. They were also lethal forces in a messy and violent civil war that engaged in often rather arbitrary revenge killing of real or alleged fascist collaborators and thus contributed to the spreading of fear.60 Moreover, as Sonya Rose’s contribution to this volume shows, British hopes for the postwar order were inextricably intertwined with increasing anxieties over imperial decline in the age of decolonization.61 The observations of a series of commentators testifies to this ubiquity of postwar fear and anxiety. In his reflections on the “aftermath of peace” in 1946, for example, the psychologist A.M. Merloo identified a “world wide vague fear” and described its overcoming as one of the central educational tasks of the postwar period.62 The postwar German version of this sentiment consisted of a proliferating discourse on what might be called postwar angst. It articulated itself in a multiplicity of commentaries that described fear and anxiety as “the predominant sentiment of today’s man.”63 These diagnoses reflected a strong cultural pessimism that perceived the modern world in general as source of anxiety. They also mirrored the renewed popularity of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy after 1945, which had identified vague anxiety as a basic ontological human condition.64 As the philosopher Aaron Ben-Ze’ev notes, fear and anxiety have assumed an increasingly social meaning throughout the modern period and tended to focus less on identifiable external threats than on concerns over social status and well-being.65 In this sense, postwar diagnoses of

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fear may have reflected an extensive sense of bourgeois social uncertainty and insecurity at a moment when the restoration of a bourgeois lifeworld seemed very much in doubt.66 Despite this tendency toward philosophical abstraction and a more general sense of anxiety, however, the West German discourse on fear also cited more specific memories of a violent past as a specific object of postwar angst. A Christian observer, for example, found the widespread fear only “too understandable” if “one thought of the horrors of the recent past, which may repeat themselves in even worse ways and are already repeating themselves in other parts of the world.”67 Along similar lines, another commentator cited as “sources of fear” the “world wars,” “atomic bombs,” and “the uncovered and continuing atrocities in the torture chambers in the concentration camps … of slave labor, of the ‘annihilation camps’, and the horrors of modern mass migration.”68 These commentaries projected memories of a catastrophic past into the future. In particular, the emerging significance of the victim trope in postwar German (and European) memories also assumed prospective function and thus functioned as a source of postwar angst.69 Since ordinary people genuinely remembered their role in the war as hapless victims of all-powerful and destructive forces beyond their control, they could never be entirely sure that such experiences would not repeat themselves in future. Fear, in this sense, was also fueled by a persistent distrust in the ability of state authorities to provide lasting security for ordinary citizens.70 However, it was not just the passive but also the active experience of violence that could function as a source of postwar fear. Former perpetrators and bystanders of violence, for example, entered the postwar period with a keen sense of how quickly one could become a victim. Jan Gross has emphasized this dimension of postwar fear in his analysis of anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz.71 Polish fears of the postwar period were directed at returning Jewish Holocaust survivors who might not only reclaim their stolen property but also expose Poles who had collaborated with Nazi occupiers. To be sure, as the main site of the extermination centers as well as the site of the largest community of victims, Poland represented a special case. But Gross’s findings might also point to important elements of the postwar emotional economy in other parts of Europe. Massive fears of revenge, for example, also exerted a powerful grip on the postwar German imagination. Overblown and exaggerated German responses to Allied occupation policies such as denazification or decartelization reflected a real fear of retribution fueled by Germans’ own memories as victimizers. Ordinary Germans may have genuinely feared that Nazi warnings of “Bolshevik” and “Jewish” revenge in the case of a German defeat actually would come true in the postwar period.72 This explains why, for example, the Morgenthau Plan always assumed a much larger and more persistent significance in the German imagination than in Allied policies.73 Fears and fantasies

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of retribution thus structured West Germans’ perceptions of what was happening to them and defined their anticipation of the immediate future. Apart from a cognitive and an evaluative component, emotions also contain a motivational component. While it is difficult to correlate specific emotions with specific actions—one can experience fear without immediately seeking flight—the decline of hope and the ascendancy of fear nevertheless informed behavioral patterns during the postwar period. Hope, for example, tends to be directed at a more remote event, whereas fear often concerns the more immediate future.74 As a result, postwar Europeans’ withdrawal from grand and utopian schemes of national remaking to a more limited focus on smaller lifeworlds—especially the family and kinship relations—may have been part and parcel of this larger shift in political perspectives. The prominence of fear also directed the attention to the central significance of the promise of “security” in the politics of the postwar period.75 Finally, while it is difficult to assign a distinct political meaning to a specific emotion, the shift from hope to fear contributed to the decline of the left and the ascendancy of reform conservatism, especially Christian Democracy. To be sure, precisely because of the already existing prevalence of fear and anxiety in postwar society, even conservative governments could not engage in an unabashed politics of fear. Instead, they needed to maintain a careful emotional balance between the mobilization and the containment of popular fears.76 But fear nevertheless legitimized key aspects of the Christian Democratic agenda, such as the renewed militarization of postwar societies and the emphasis on anti-communism. At least in Western Europe, fear was also conducive to the renewed significance of Christianity as a rhetorical framework for making sense out of unprecedented experiences of loss, destruction, and death. The Christian churches functioned both as instigators of fear, which remained present as a central element in Christian theology, as well as alleviators and managers of popular fears, increasingly also with reference to the languages and practices of psychotherapy.77

Emotional Communities: Resentment Emotions also assume a major function in the making (and unmaking) of communal bonds. Lucien Febvre already underlined the “contagious” nature of emotions, their ability to “affect and stir to action not just individuals but entire groups” and to give “greater security and greater power to the group.”78 More recently, the medievalist Barbara Rosenwein has introduced the concept of “emotional communities,” which she defines as “what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affec-

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tive bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.”79 Individuals thus constantly move between such various communities, and they may also internalize the emotional standards drawn from these different communities. The emphasis on emotion’s role in the making of community is highly pertinent for understanding one of the central processes of the postwar war period: the renewed (re)nationalization and (re)ethnicization of postwar European societies. Because of the mass murder of the European Jews as well as the forced population transfers during and after the war, nation states were now more ethnically homogenous than at any time before in European history.80 The reconstitution of postwar national communities, however, was a messy, contentious, and conflict-ridden process. Based on involuntary and violent movement of populations, it also involved the overcoming of bitter and extremely violent internal wartime conflicts that had literally pitted neighbors against each other.81 The war had disrupted horizontal (i.e., among members of a society) as well as vertical bonds (between individuals and governments). The mobilization (and control) of emotions was central to this process of re-forging social bonds, on the national as well as the transnational and subnational levels. The emergence of postwar emotional communities, however, was not rooted only in the gradual overcoming of wartime sentiments such as hatred, fear, and anger. It also entailed the ascendancy of emotions that reflected the aftereffects of past experiences of humiliation and degradation. One such emotion was resentment. Unlike hope and fear, resentment is not primarily directed toward the future; rather, it is founded upon an attack or an injury in the past. As part of a larger, multidisciplinary effort to discern the role of emotion in human life around the turn of the century, the German philosopher Max Scheler developed the most comprehensive phenomenology of resentment in his 1912 treatise.82 According to Scheler, it denotes a “lasting mental attitude that arises from the systematic repression of negative affects and sentiments which would otherwise be essential aspects of human nature.” Scheler identified the “impulse for revenge” as the most important origin of resentment, but also cited other negative emotions such as hatred, malice, and envy. At the same time, resentment is crucially tied to a sense of helplessness and impotence. The inability to act on the experienced emotion derives either from physical or psychological weakness or from fear and anxiety. Resentment also functioned as a historical force in the evolution of nationalism and national identity. According to the sociologist Liah Greenfield, resentment was especially instrumental in fostering “particularist pride and xenophobia” in the formation of “later” nationalisms in Germany and Russia and helped to demarcate them from “earlier” nationalism in Britain and France.83 In the post-1945 period, during another period of nation making, resentment again functioned as an emotional marker of newly constituted communities. It

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was operative especially in defining the relationships between victors and losers. As the sociologist Roger Peterson notes, resentment occurs particularly among “formerly dominant groups newly out of power,” which then often develop “dreams of violent revenge.”84 In postwar Germany, the experience and memory of defeat bred extensive resentment toward the victorious allies, especially in the more immediate postwar period. While former soldiers had been likely to hold resentments throughout the twentieth century, this was all the more true for veterans in postwar Germany.85 They had experienced not just total military but also a total moral defeat that left little space for a positive or heroic self-image. By linking the war effort to National Socialist crimes at the Nuremberg trials and elsewhere, the victorious Allies had deprived German soldiers of a sense of having fought an honorable war.86 This injury translated into a sense of resentment not just toward the Allies but also, as one former soldier described it, toward a “so called democracy, which denied that we participants in the war were good Germans and which denounced us … as war criminals.”87 Precisely because resentment against the Allies and against postwar democracy more generally could not be openly articulated, it proliferated and turned against a more diffuse class of objects. Resentment shaped “suppressed feelings of envy and hatred” toward formerly inferior groups such as DPs or black occupation soldiers who were now perceived to occupy a privileged position thanks to the Allied victors.88 As a “psychic poison” of a “tremendously contagious nature,“ resentment thus functioned as social glue, becoming a major factor in the making of the postwar German emotional community.89 Resentment, moreover, tends to be reciprocal. It therefore also defined relations between former victims and perpetrators. In a 1966 essay, the Jewish Holocaust survivor Jean Améry, for example, articulated his feeling of resentment toward a postwar German society that appeared to be moving relentlessly into a new future of economic prosperity while increasingly forgetting the responsibility for German crimes. Améry defined resentment as a moral quality that blocks “the exit to the truly human dimension, the future.” He juxtaposed the passing of a “social” and “biological” time inevitably moving toward forgetting and reconciliation, with a “moral time” that insists on memory and facing up to the past.90

Conclusion The history of emotions does not offer a panacea for the writing of the history of the aftermath. But, as this essay has sought to illustrate, it might chart new paths of inquiry for isolating and identifying the aftereffects of the Second World War. More specific studies will have to delineate the extent to which

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emotional norms and expressions were also shaped not only by the variables of class, gender, and race but also by religion, age, and nationality. And the political valences of emotions as well as their capacity to shape actual behavior need to be analyzed for specific circumstances and settings. Still, at least in the German case, though with potential implications for postwar Europe as a whole, it is possible to postulate a distinct postwar emotional regime that persisted into the early 1960s. In response to the perceived emotional excesses of the wartime period, this emotional regime was characterized by a deep suspicion toward the open expression of strong emotions and resisted their injection in politics and public. A brief moment of hope was quickly overtaken by more negative sentiments—especially fear and resentment—that reflected the persistent legacies of war and violence. This juxtaposition of ubiquitous and quite strong emotions with a cultural injunction against their open and free expression constituted an essential feature of the postwar emotional regime. A strong dichotomy between public norms and private emotional experience was thus constitutive for the “postwar,” not just in the East but also in the West. At least in Western Europe, the postwar emotional regime began to dissolve by the early 1960s. With the decline of Cold War tensions, the external international situation became less important for shaping postwar Germans’ and Europeans’ emotional experience. The ascendancy of a post-materialist lifestyle went along with an increasing valorization of individual emotional experience. A “new subjectivity,” as it emerged by the 1960s, was defined, at least in part, by the open and increasingly uninhibited expression of emotions. While the inward turn toward one’s own emotionality created new forms of fear and anxiety, these emotions no longer derived only from the aftereffects of the Second World War but also reflected the challenges of an increasingly post-industrial and post-material society.91 In more general terms, the social upheavals of the 1960s might also be understood as the clash of two very different emotional cultures. In his memoirs, the former student activist Peter Schneider diagnosed a peculiar “emotional blockage” (Gefühlsstau) and a general “condemnation of feelings” among the older generation as one of the major sources of generational conflict.92 And while many “68ers” may have taken on more of the “emotional coldness” of their parent generation than they realized at the time, the period nevertheless witnessed the clash between very different emotional cultures—one focused on “coldness” and emotional restraint, the other on “warmth” and emotional expression.93 Ironically, the 1968ers turned not so much against the fascist emotional regime, which, as discussed above, could also be described as one of emotional mobilization, but rather against the postwar and post-fascist reaction of emotional restraint and repression.94 Conversely, postwar critics tended to read the emotionality of the student movement as a symptom of its totalitarian inclinations. While the postwar emotional regime of anti-intensity became thus more contested and lost its hegemonic

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force by the 1960s, its reverberations continued to shape the history of the aftermath virtually up until the present.

Notes 1. For their very useful comments on various drafts of this essay, I would like to thank Uffa Jensen, Judith Hughes, Martha Lampard, Robert Moeller, Mark Roseman, Jan Plamper, and Ulrike Strasser as well as another anonymous reviewer for the press. 2. William Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38, no. 3 (1997): 327–51; Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001); Ute Frevert, “Angst vor Gefühlen: Die Geschichtsmächtigkeit von Emotionen im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Paul Nolte, Manfred Hettling, FrankMichael Kuhlemann, and Hans-Walter Schmuhl, eds., Perspektiven der Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Munich, 2000), 95–111; Ute Frevert, ed., Vertrauen: Historische Annäherungen (Göttingen, 2003); Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying About Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002); Peter Burke, “Is There a Cultural History of Emotions?” in Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills, eds., Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine (Aldershot, 2005), 35–57; Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2006); Birgit Aschmann, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Emotionen in der Geschichte. Eine Einführung,” in Birgit Aschmann, ed., Gefühl und Kalkül (Stuttgart, 2005), 9–32; Jakob Tanner, “Das Rauschen der Gefühle: Vom Darwinischen Unversalismus zur Davidsonschen Triangulation,” Nach Feierabend: Züricher Jahrbuch für Wissensgeschichte 2 (2006): 129–52; Daniela Saxer, “Mit Gefühl handeln: Ansätze der Emotionsgeschichte,” Traverse: Zeitschrift für Geschichte, no. 2 (2007): 15–29; Daniel Wickberg, “What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007). 3. Richard Bessel, “Hatred after War: Emotion and the Postwar History of East Germany,” History and Memory 17 (2005): 195–216; Frevert, ed., Vertrauen. 4. Peter Stearns, American Fear:The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (London, 2006). 5. It is indicative of the relatively recent interest in the emotional legacies of the war that this topic does not appear in Thomas Kühne’s comprehensive survey of the historiography: see Thomas Kühne, “Der nationalsozialistische Vernichtungskrieg im kulturellen Kontinuum des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts: Forschungsprobleme und Forschungstendenzen der Gesellschaftsgeschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Zweiter Teil,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 40 (2000): 440–86. 6. Martina Kessel, “Gefühle und Geschichstwissenschaft,” in Schützeneichel, ed., Emotionen und Sozialtheorie, 34–35; Ute Frevert, Ehrenmänner: Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Munich, 1991). 7. Catherine Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago, 1988), 53–80. 8. Helena Flam, Soziologie der Emotionen (Konstanz, 2002), 44–60. 9. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages; Rosenwein, “Worrying About Emotions in History.” 10. Peter Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York, 1994). 11. Andreas Reckwitz, Das hybride Subjekt: Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne (Göttingen, 2006), 416–19. 12. Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct:The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, 2002). 13. Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996); Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002). 14. Ron Suny, “Why We Hate You: The Passions of National Identity and Ethnic Violence,” Working Papers, Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (spring 2004).

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15. Claudia Lenssen, “Unterworfene Gefühle: Nationalsozialistische Mobilisierung und emotionale Manipulation der Massen in den Parteitagsfilmen Leni Riefenstahls,” in Claudia Benthien, Anne Fleig, and Ingrid Karsten, eds., Emotionalität: Zur Geschichte der Gefühle (Cologne, 2000), 198–212. 16. Roger D. Peterson, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge, 2002); Suny, “Why We Hate You.” 17. Enzo Traverso, Im Bann der Gewalt: Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1914–1945 (Berlin, 2007), 191–221. 18. Michael Geyer, “’There Is a Land Where Everything Is Pure: Its Name Is the Land of Death,’” in Greg Eghigian and Matthew Paul Berg, eds., Sacrifice and National Belonging in Twentieth Century Germany (College Station, 2002), 118–47; Geyer, “How the Germans Learned to Wage War: On the Question of Killing in the First and Second World Wars,” in Alon Confino, Paul Betts, and Dirk Schumann, eds., Between Mass Death and Individual Loss:The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York, 2008), 25–50. 19. See Mark Roseman, “Beyond Conviction? Perpetrators, Ideas and Action in the Holocaust in Historiographical Perspective,” in Frank Biess, Mark Roseman, and Hanna Schissler, eds., Conflict, Catastrophe, and Continuity: Essays in Modern German History (New York, 2007), 83–103; Klaus Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul, eds., Karrieren der Gewalt: Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien (Darmstadt, 2004). Anthropologists have been in the vanguard of pointing out the significance of emotions for violence, see Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley, 2005). 20. Lucien Febvre, “Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past,” in Peter Burke, ed., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre (New York, 1973), 12–26. 21. See Peter Schöttler, “Marc Bloch at Lucien Febvre face à l’Allemagne nazie,” in Stuart Clark, ed., The Annales School: Critical Assessments. Vol.1: Histories and Overviews (London, 1999), 138–59. 22. Antonio Damasio, Descarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 2005 [1994]). 23. Tanner, “Das Rauschen der Gefühle.” 24. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001), 4. On the development of “appraisal” theory among psychologists, see Nico H. Frijda, “The Psychologists’ Point of View,” in Michael Lewis, Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barret, eds., Handbook of Emotions, 3rd ed. (New York, 2008), 68–87, and Gerald Clore and Andrew Ortony, “Appraisal Theories: How Cognition Shapes Affect into Emotion,” in Lewis et al., Handbook of Emotions, 628–42. 25. Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA, 1990). 26. See, for example, Jan Phillip Reemstma, Vertrauen und Gewalt: Versuch über eine besondere Konstellation der Moderne (Hamburg, 2008). 27. Cultural anthropology provides inspiring models here; see, for example, Eve Monique Zucker, “Transcending Time and Terror: The Re-emergence of Bon Dalien after Pol Pot and Thirty Years of Civil War,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37, no. 3 (2006): 527–46. 28. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 27. 29. See the essay by Katherine Lebow in this volume. 30. This problem is emphasized in Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945– 1995 (New York, 2006). 31. Peter N. Stearns with Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985): 821. 32. Frank Bösch and Manuel Borutta, “Medien und Emotionen in der Moderne: Historische Perspektiven,” in Frank Bösch and Manuel Borutta, eds., Die Massen bewegen: Medien und Emotionen in der Moderne (Frankfurt, 2006). 33. This point is emphasized in Saxer, “Mit Gefühl handeln.”

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34. Franz Neumann, Angst und Politik:Vortrag gehalten an der Freien Universität Berlin (Tübingen, 1954). 35. Thomas Mergel, “Der mediale Stil der Sachlichkeit: Die gebremste Amerikanisierung des Wahlkampfs in der alten Bundesrepublik,” in Bernd Weisbrod, ed., Die Politik der Öffentlichkeit – Die Öffentlichkeit Der Politik (Göttingen, 2004), 29–54; see also Marcus Payk, “Das ‘Pathos der Nüchternheit’? Über Emotionalität, Generationalität und Demokratie in Westdeutschland,” Moderne: Kulturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 2 (2007): 128–141. 36. Flam, Soziologie Der Emotionen, 115. 37. Uffa Jensen and Daniel Morat, eds., Rationalisierungen des Gefühls: Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaften und Emotionen 1880–1930 (Munich, 2008). 38. Jacob Tanner, “Unfassbare Gefühle: Emotionen in der Geschichtswissenschaft vom fin de siècle bis in die Zwischenkriegszeit,“ in Uffa Jensen and Daniel Morat, eds, Rationalisiserungen des Gefühls. Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Emotionen 1880–1930 (Munich, 2008), 35–59, here 47. 39. See Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen, 2003), 569–661. 40. Hans Ulrich Wehler, “Königsweg zu neuen Ufern oder Irrgarten der Illusionen? Die westdeutsche Alltagsgeschichte ‘von innen’ und ‘von unten,’” in Jürgen Kocka and Franz Josef Brüggemeier, eds., Geschichte von Unten, Geschichte von Innen: Kontroversen um Alltagsgeschichte (Hagen, 1985), 17–47, here 30. 41. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 63–111; Reddy, “Against Constructionism.” 42. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 111. 43. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, “Introduction: Violence, Normality, and the Construction of Postwar Europe,” in Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death:Approaches to the Social and Cultural History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003), 1–13. 44. I have tried to show this tension in Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat (Princeton, 2006). 45. On the definition of emotional refuge, see Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 129. 46. See section III of this volume. On war movies, see also Frank Bösch, “Disziplinierung der Gefühle? Krieg und Film im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Bösch and Borutta, Die Massen bewegen, 217–41. 47. Biess, Homecomings, 70–94; Svenja Goltermann, “Psychisches Leid und herrschende Lehre: Der Wissenschaftswandel in der deutschen Psychiatrie der Nachkriegszeit,” in Bernd Weisbrod, ed., Akademische Vergangenheitspolitik: Beiträge zur Wissenschaftskultur der Nachkriegszeit (Göttingen, 2002), 7–19. 48. Frank Biess, “‘Everybody Has a Chance’: Civil Defense, Nuclear Angst, and the History of Emotions in Postwar Germany,” German History 27, no. 2 (2009): 215–43. 49. Svenja Goltermann, “Im Wahn der Gewalt: Massentod, Opferdiskurs und Psychiatrie 1945–1956,” in Klaus Naumann, ed., Nachkrieg in Deutschland (Hamburg, 2001), 343–63. 50. Habbo Knoch, “Mediale Trauer: Bildmedien und Sinnstiftung im ‘Zeitalter Der Extreme,’” in Bösch and Borutta, Die Massen Bewegen, 193–216. 51. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 179. 52. Frevert, “Angst vor Gefühlen,” 102. 53. Compare, for example, the very different syntheses by John L. Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (London, 2005) and Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York, 2000). 54. Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945 (New York, 2003); Mark L. Kleinman, A World of Hope, a World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism (Columbus, 2000); Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, trans. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, 1998). 55. See the contribution by Katherine Lebow in this volume. 56. Eley, Forging Democracy, 287–98.

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57. Damian van Melis, “‘Strengthened and Purified Through Ordeal by Fire’: Ecclesiastical Triumphalism in the Ruins of Europe,” in Bessel and Schumann, Life after Death, 231–42. 58. Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, 2007), 187–235. 59. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), preface, cited in Corey Robin, Fear:The History of a Political Idea (Oxford, 2004), 114. 60. Claudio Pavone, Una Guerra Civile: Saggio Storica Sulla Moralita Nella Resistenza (Torino, 1991); R.J.B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War (London, 1998), 94–141. 61. See the contribution by Sonya Rose in this volume. 62. A.M. Meerloo, Aftermath of Peace: Psychological Essays (New York, 1946). 63. “Die gepaarten Ängste,” Christ und Welt 2, no. 45 (1949): 1. 64. On Heidegger’s popularity, see Daniel Morat, Von Der Tat Zur Gelassenheit: Konservatives Denken Bei Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger Und Friedrich Georg Jünger 1920–1960 (Göttingen, 2007). The popular distinction between fear and anxiety is difficult to operationalize for historical analysis; see Joanna Bourke, “Fear and Anxiety: Writing About Emotion in Modern History,” History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 111–33. 65. Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 480. 66. Manfred Hettling and Bernd Ulrich, eds., Bürgertum nach 1945 (Hamburg, 2005). 67. Frieda Reuschle, “Angst,” Christengemeinschaft 25 (1953): 349–50. 68. “Wider die Angst: Heimsuchung und Heimweg unserer Zeit,” Wort und Wahrheit 5 (1950): 241–44. 69. Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001); Pieter Lagrou, “The Nationalization of Victimhood: Selective Violence and National Grief in Western Europe, 1940–1960,” in Bessel and Schulmann, Life after Death, 243–57. 70. Michael Geyer, “Cold War Angst: The Case of West German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons,” in Hanna Schissler, ed., The Miracle Years. A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, (Princeton, 2001), 376–408. 71. Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Postwar Poland. An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New York, 2006). 72. Peter Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst”: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung (Munich, 2006), 263–96. 73. Jeffrey Olick, In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–49 (Chicago, 2005). 74. Ben-Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions. 75. See, in general, Eckart Conze, “Security as a Culture: Reflections on a ‘Modern Political History’ of the Federal Republic,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, London 28, no. 1 (2006): 5–34. 76. See Biess, “‘Everybody Has a Chance.’” 77. On the latter, see Wilhelm Bittner, ed., Angst und Schuld in theologischer und psychotherapeutischer Sicht (Stuttgart, 1959); see also Benjamin Ziemann, Katholische Kirche und Sozialwissenschaften, 1945–1975 (Göttingen, 2007), 261–314. 78. Febvre, “Sensibility and History,” 14–15. 79. Rosenwein, “Worrying About Emotions in History,” paragraph 35. 80. See Norman Naimark’s essay in this volume as well as his Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2001) 81. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedawbne (Princeton, 2001) 82. Max Scheler, Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (Frankfurt, 1978 [1912]). All following quotations in this paragraph are from this work; see also Matthias Schlossberger, “Max Schelers Theorie der Gefühle,” in Jensen and Morat, eds., Rationalisierung des Gefühls, 119–32.

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83. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992). 84. Peterson, Understanding Ethnic Violence, 49–50. 85. Marc Ferro, Le Ressentiment Dans L’histoire: Comprendre Notre Temps (Paris, 2007). 86. See the essay by Klaus Naumann in this volume. 87. Cited in Biess, Homecomings, 113. 88. Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill, 2002); Grossman, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 112, 163. 89. Scheler, Das Ressentiment, 7. 90. Jean Améry, “Ressentiments,” in Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältgten (Munich, 1966), 102–29; Aleida Assmann, “Two Forms of Resentment: Jean Améry, Martin Walser and German Memorial Culture,” New German Critique 90 (2003): 123–33. 91. See Frank Biess “Die Sensibilisierung des Subjekts: Angst und ‘Neue Subjektivität’ in den 1970er Jahren,” Werkstatt Geschichte 49, no. 2 (2008): 51–71. 92. Peter Schneider, Rebellion und Wahn: Mein 68. Eine autobiographische Erzählung (Cologne, 2008), 35, 55. 93. On the 1968er as “emotionally cold,” see Götz Aly, Unser Kampf: 1968-ein irritierter Blick zurück (Frankfurt, 2008), 195–203; on “warmth,” see Sven Reichardt, “‘Wärme’ als Modus sozialen Verhaltens: Vorüberlegungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte des linksalternativen Milieus vom Ende der sechziger bis Anfang der achtziger Jahre,” Vorgänge 44, nos. 171–172 (2005): 175–87. 94. This argument is similar to the one made by Dagmar Herzog with respect to sexuality; see Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in 20th Century Germany (Princeton, 2005).

[[[ CH AP T ER 3

In the Aftermath of Camps Samuel Moyn

I

TONY JUDT’S POSTWAR, the history of the public memory of Nazi crime is not one topic among others. It is extruded from the various narratives of the mammoth book to provide their unifying epilogue, in an almost idealist gesture: the story of the long transit of postwar Europeans from brutality to civility and from ethnonational destruction to cosmopolitan inclusion—the book’s main concern—is not really complete until and unless a parallel history is narrated explaining how Europeans fitfully gained consciousness of that very transformation.1 The aftermath is not over and done until it is recognized as an aftermath. But the aftermath of what? For Judt, as for most observers, this process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung is essentially the eventual acknowledgment of the Holocaust, as the bleakest moment in the twentieth century, and indeed the nadir of Western civilization. Yet the same history shows that, from another angle, the need to make sense of the postwar era as an aftermath is not really a matter of delayed recognition and slow learning at all, since calls to learn and change were practically coeval with the aftermath itself. What has changed is what evils the past war was thought to involve and what steps were thought necessary to overcome them. The Nazi destruction of millions of Jews in extermination camps—erected for the sole purpose of killing Jews as Jews—remains in the present day the emblem of evil in politics (and perhaps evil as such). This is so in spite of the deaths of others before, during, and since the world war in which the genocide of the Jews took place. But it is also so in spite of all of the other ways Jews died in that genocide. In other words, the extermination camp, where Jews as Jews were taken to be killed, was not just a real place; it has also become an imaginative synecdoche, what rhetoricians call it when a part stands in for a whole. Yet in popular consciousness and even the professional community of historians, the extermination camp or killing center is in fact a relatively new concept. It is far newer than the earlier and more general concept of the concentration camp. Indeed, as a synecdoche, the concept of the extermination camp had to take the N

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place of that of the concentration camp in the history of the aftermath. This substitution took place, except for those few who had been directly involved, only long after the events—decades later, when the notion of the Holocaust came into being. Before, it was the very different institution of the concentration camp, not that of the extermination camp, that controlled perception. This chapter returns to the era of the concentration camp to think about what that concept meant before the extermination camp came to be clearly added to the historical and moral repertory. To repeat my basic premise, such institutions as concentration and extermination camps are not just institutions but ideas. They have to be investigated in their life as ideas because the institutions they can name in a more direct and referential way often stand in for the complex and differentiated reality of Nazi criminality—they are made the emblem of horror, and are put at the very basis of moral intuitions about modernity and politics. They have to be researched, not just as the real things they were, but also as synecdoches that may reveal a lot about how people mentally and ethically organize their worlds, and about alternative ways of doing so. In summary, this is an essay about a move from one aftermath to another.

The Concentration Paradigm The story of “Holocaust memory” is well known in its main outlines. Universally marginalized, except in certain restricted sectors, while and after it occurred, the Holocaust had to wait to occupy historical and moral consciousness in all nations, no matter their exact relation to the events themselves. Aside from Anne Frank’s diary—which gave insight into persecution but not into the details of actual murder—and a few dramatizations of the Warsaw ghetto revolt, what are now taken as the principal masterpieces of the “literature of destruction” either did not exist in the early years after the war or did not sell when they appeared. Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, dating from the immediate postwar period, sold a few hundred copies upon its publication in the UK in the mid 1950s, and it did not appear in the United States until 1959. Elie Wiesel’s Night, published that year in France, did not sell out its first edition there for years.2 Not long after, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, it is generally agreed, set off a series of international events that, by a decade later, had completely transformed the landscape of memory. But it has not been noticed as clearly that this shift both presupposed and promoted the shift in institutional perception from one sort of camp to another. In other words, one crucial element of the story of the postponement of memory is the postponement of understanding of the extermination camp as a site and institution. Why did it happen? One frequently voiced hypothesis posits some level of conscious denial or intentional marginalization, sometimes linked

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to persisting anti-Semitism. But why try to look at the story only in terms of what was absent? It is not as if the extermination camp simply filled a vacuum in perceptions of the war. It replaced something else, some other institution. So the story of the absence of the extermination camp is the also the story of the early creation of a different picture of Nazi criminality, revolving around the concentration camp and the Nacht und Nebel in which people were sent to such a place to be interned and possibly destroyed. Within Nazi terminology, the concentration camp was a specific designation, but starting very early on it came to be generalized to cover a diverse range of institutions, serving as a synecdoche in its own right. The story of how and why that happened—a tale not of what lenses had not yet arrived but one of what assumptions positively shaped perception—is also important to tell and to try to understand. Begin with a few obvious and important facts. In the first place, concentration camps, as places for permanent or semi-permanent detention outside the legal order, preexisted the Holocaust and the war. Indeed, they preexisted the Nazis, and historians have reconstructed the history of the institution itself from its 1896 origins through its colonial implementation to its internalization in Europe during World War I and the Spanish Civil War, even though little so far is known systematically about the terms in which concentration camps were thought about in this early period.3 Once the Nazis came to power, they immediately erected early concentration camps (beginning with Dachau, in March 1933).4 One can hardly overstate the importance of the fact that the Nazi concentration camps existed for about a decade longer than the much later and more evanescent death camps, and in a much larger and better publicized network. Much recent research has clarified this system, which had its own stages of development and local variety. Beginning haphazardly in the service of political repression, the network both mushroomed and became an essential tool in the Nazi project of social transformation.5 At times even a source of pride for the Nazi state (unlike the extermination camps, kept almost completely secret), the concentration camps were also a staple of anti-Nazi denunciation for years. This discourse provided a baseline from which the idea of the concentration camp, the number of which eventually surpassed 10,000, would develop from the end of the war. Further, interned figures began to reflect on the novelties of camp life. In the late 1930s, for example, Bruno Bettelheim spent about ten months in Buchenwald and Dachau; he published his “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” in 1943.6 Second, there was the process of the liberation. In contrast to the vast concentration camp network, as soon as the small number of extermination camps had made their brutal appearance in European history and done their grim work, the Nazis razed their sites. The concentration camps were there to be discovered, with large populations, while the extermination camps were wiped away. The only exceptions were those killing centers that also included a smaller

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or larger work or concentration camp component: Majdanek and, of course, Auschwitz. More important, these latter camps were liberated by the Soviets. Though much more work remains to be done on the Soviet liberations, it is already known that the camps liberated by the US and British armies were highly publicized—spectacularly so—in their liberations and in the documentations immediately produced graphically (often photographically) illustrating their horror.7 These liberations were ones that often understandably avoided the emphasis on Jewish victimhood that analysis of the extermination camps absolutely requires. It is often forgotten that four fifths of the prisoners at Buchenwald, for instance, were gentiles, even though it became perhaps the most emblematic camp for Americans in particular, thanks to Edward R. Murrow’s radio reporting and Margaret Bourke-White’s photography. But the liberations also blurred the forms of victimhood under Nazi rule and the very different means of persecution in the Nazi repertory. The horrors of those famous concentration camps, for example the piles of corpses or the emaciation of the prisoners so photographically familiar then and now, were so dramatic and climactic that it could easily have seemed morally obtuse to say that these horrors were, compared to what took place at the extermination camps, relatively benign. One should note in passing that a full story here of liberation would have to include much more detail, about the individual camps themselves and also about significant questions that arise in studying the history of how they were perceived (for example, the role of gas chambers and crematoria in some concentration camps, or the arrival of Jews on death marches to the West not long before the gates were thrown open). Such facts would not affect the larger point about the liberations’ contribution to the creation of the image of the concentration camp. Third, and perhaps most important, concentration camps produced witnesses. The comparatively lower death rate at concentration camps meant the physical presence of survivors. But next to no one, in 1945, had survived the extermination camps, notably the “pure” extermination camps where more or less nothing else occurred (Chelmno and then the Aktion Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka). This generalization includes the smaller class of Jewish survivors, very few of whom were from those sites. The return of the deported thus involved non-Jews out of all proportion to the original rates of deportation; as scholars like Pieter Lagrou and Annette Wieviorka have demonstrated, the consequences of this disproportion for public memory were staggering.8 In France, for example, while roughly equivalent numbers of Jews and non-Jews were deported during the war, nearly all of the former perished during the war whereas about half of the latter survived. The Jewish deportee and later French government minister Simone Veil reports that “we had the feeling that our lives did not count; and yet there were so very few of us.”9 But even among those few returning Jews, a minuscule number had survived the death camps.

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Fourth, there was Nuremberg. The pedagogy of postwar trials confirmed the trends so far mentioned. A central outcome at Nuremberg, of course, was the creation of a specific picture of the nature of Nazi criminality as the work of a “conspiracy” of fiendish arch-criminals. While its charter introduced the new concept of crimes against humanity to cover events like the Holocaust, such crimes were, for legal and ideological reasons, subordinated to the primary charges of crimes against peace and war crimes. And even when the trials focused on crimes against humanity, they did so by dramatizing the concentration camp. As the historian Donald Bloxham has shown, the Nuremberg trials created an “enduring camp trope.”10 Such a focus was in part a conscious strategy to detract from the Jewish experience, in part due to the maximization of the horror at concentration camps—not so hard to do—to the point at which enough seemed enough. It also followed from ignorance of the horrors of extermination camps. Thus, for example, the prosecution film shown at Nuremberg, Nazi Concentration Camps, mentioned the word “Jews” once and left their disproportionate victimhood out. Auschwitz got attention in the trials of several criminals and the testimony of a few witnesses, but the net effect seems to have been its portrayal as an exceptionally bad version of the concentration camp. Meanwhile, the pure extermination camps were not mentioned in any proceeding. As if these factors were not enough, one must never forget to include, fifth and finally, homogenizing ideological commitments amongst Jews across the globe, which led them either not to recognize or simply to marginalize the disproportionate victimhood of their group and the fact that the Nazis had specifically targeted it. Such commitments included liberal assimilationism and political leftism. It this context, it should not be too hard to understand that in his Destruction of the European Jews, published first in 1961 in great obscurity, the major historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg could decry (in his words) “the constant emphasis in the literature and in speeches upon ‘concentration camps,’ often including the epitomization of Dachau and Buchenwald but rarely embracing any mention of Auschwitz, let alone the faraway camps of Treblinka and Sobibor or Belzec.”11 For such reasons (and this is quite interesting), he refused even to use the phrase “extermination” or “death camp,” preferring “killing center.” Belzec and Sobibor and Treblinka were not camps, Hilberg was suggesting, of any kind. They were simply places were Jews were slaughtered.

David Rousset and Hannah Arendt Existing analyses of immediate postwar memory give a simple response to the absence of the extermination camps, and therefore the special Jewish fate, from the overall picture. Psychic inability or political distortion is to blame for the

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dogged focus on the concentration camp. In the case of the communist world, notable studies have remorselessly criticized the anti-fascist variant of political leftism for failing to see the extermination camps.12 Workers and humanity as the true victims were substituted for the Jews, whose specific plight then took decades to emerge. This analysis is mostly unimpeachable, though it always bears remembering that everywhere, whether or not anti-fascism reigned supreme, the concentration camp took pride of place. The United States, Britain, and France proved no better, in these early years, at seeing things more truly. Yet there was a tradition that put the concentration camps at the focus, in a powerful synecdoche, for reasons that are potentially more plausible and powerful. I can begin with the sadly neglected figure who, for intellectuals, was perhaps the single most important interpreter of the camps for a long time, a Frenchman named David Rousset. Born in 1912, Rousset became best known for his book L’univers concentrationnaire (in English, something like “the concentration camp universe,” published in the United States as The Other Kingdom and in England as A World Apart).13 The book was one of the first postwar reports on the camps to be published and became, without question, the internationally foundational text on the subject; it was rivaled in these years perhaps only by the German Eugen Kogon’s work Der SS-Staat (still available in English as The Theory and Practice of Hell).14 To be sure, Rousset did not coin the expression “concentration camp,” but he popularized it; and in the title of his best-known book he inaugurated the notion of a separate and isolated world constituted by the network of exclusionary institutions constructed by the Nazi regime to contain their enemies. As historian Annette Wieviorka puts it, Rousset introduced to the larger public the idea of a “concentration camp,” no longer simply a repressive tool like a prison, but a world apart governed by its own laws. He thus allowed the concentration camp system to be conceived globally, and made it possible—going beyond the testimonies on the Nazi camps published already before the war and, in numerous quantities, after 1945—for common principles of organization to be perceived.15

Like Kogon’s book, L’univers concentrationnaire was written by a non-Jew and extrapolated from personal experience in different Western camps, notably Buchenwald, to dwell more generally on the system as a total phenomenon. The point was no longer to look at personal situations, or simply to demonize the Nazis; it was to comprehend what was radically new about what they had done. Rousset’s work influentially described the camp experience as absurd and fictitious. The closest parallel he found to the camp was in Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play Ubu the King: “Ubu and Kafka lost their original literary association,” Rousset wrote, “and became component parts of the world in which we live.”16 He introduced terms that became central to both contemporary (and—I will show a bit later—very recent theoretical) interpretations of the camps. Rousset emphasized the prisoners as not only literally but also exis-

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tentially naked as a result of their internment: reduced to nothing more than their skins. For Rousset, concentration camps coerced their victims into a life no different from death—on the border between them. Rousset admitted differentiation amongst the camps, but insisted that in the end they had to be seen as a unified phenomenon. “The camps,” he wrote, “were not all identical or equivalent. The univers concentrationnaire was organized on different planes. … Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, each and all fitted into the same plan, and were types of the ‘normal’ camps that made up the essential framework of the concentration camp world. In utterly different latitudes lay the reprisal camps … for Jews … in the shape of Auschwitz … The camps for Jews … were a large-scale industry for torture and extermination.” But, he concluded, “[b]etween these extermination camps and the ‘normal’ camps there was no fundamental difference: only a difference in degree.”17 In part, this conclusion followed from basic ignorance and political commitments. But Rousset’s core theory of the camps also promoted this result. The erasure of the distinction between life and death in concentration—emphasized in the phrase Les Jours de notre mort (The Days of Our Death), the title of his next and almost as influential book—led him to see camps devoted to actual killing as fundamentally similar.18 Rousset’s conception of a unified system of Nazi criminality that combined concentration and extermination had an enormous impact. Indeed, though her many commentators have failed to note it, Hannah Arendt depended very largely on Rousset’s interpretation as a source on the nature and significance of the camps in The Origins of Totalitarianism (notably in the chapter “The Concentration Camps,” which originally appeared as an article in the Partisan Review under that same lapidary and significant title).19 And though Arendt did not adopt his anti-fascist political inclinations, she followed Rousset in elaborating the concentration camp optic. Arendt praised Rousset for perceiving the radical systemic novelty of the camps in European history. There was indeed a caesura in modern history to be recognized, but it was the camps as a whole and not simply the particular fate of the Jews in them. They believed, as we do, in extreme evil, only they found it incarnated institutionally in the camps as an overall system. Ordinary social life excluded the terrifying fact that Rousset had been (Arendt said) “the first to understand” that “everything is possible.” Far from denying the extremity of Nazi crime, Rousset first, Arendt suggested, captured its dimensions. Fiction, she repeated from Rousset’s presentation, had become reality. (Arendt herself used the word “fictitious” several times to describe the world of the aims and achievements of totalitarian regimes.) She also repeated his analysis of nudity. Most important, Rousset’s analysis pushed Arendt to a striking and explicit argument that the suffering of the Jews in the extermination camps needs to be understood as continuous with the rest of the Nazi camp system, its natural outgrowth or furthest consequence rather than a phenomenon in a different

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and alternative category. Even though she knew a lot more about Jewish victimhood and may have been more sensitive to it than Rousset, Arendt followed him in softening or abolishing any distinction between concentration and extermination. In her review of an early work on the Nazi genocide, for instance, she comments: “[c]oncentration and extermination camps are the most novel and most significant devices of all totalitarian forms of domination … The differences between [the Nazi and Soviet camps] are real but not radical; both systems result in the destruction of people selected as ‘superfluous.’”20 She could say so by extending Rousset’s depiction of living death into a full-blown theory. As Arendt put matters in The Origins of Totalitarianism, it is the camp system, rendering human beings superfluous through killing them juridically and morally, that deserves the most attention. When humans become “living corpses,” it is as if they are already dead. Only a regime that produces living death, she suggested, can reach the last consequence of producing actual death. Thus the concentration camp in a sense entails the extermination camp. Arendt knew well who exactly had suffered worst in the Nazi system: “others were persecuted; only the Jews were exterminated,” she wrote at one point.21 But for her, as for Rousset, the thesis of continuity coexisted perfectly well with that of epitome: as Rousset put it in an early postwar article published in the Jewish journal Évidences, funded by the American Jewish Committee, the Jews’ fate in the genocide epitomized the horror of the more general univers concentrationnaire.22 It showed the need for more change to avoid, in the present and for the future—and for others—what the Jews had suffered in the past. The moral outcome of the Jews’ death (when recognized in its disproportion) remained universalistic vigilance so that new camps would not crop up. And indeed, Rousset formed an international Commission for the Extirpation of the Concentrationist Phenomenon that was one of the first, amongst notoriously dilatory French intellectuals, to decry Soviet camps past and present, even though no exterminatory project occurred or was occurring there. Rousset, and Arendt following him, were, in making such arguments, not suppressing the Holocaust or postponing its recognition. Their aftermath involved recognizing something else—or more exactly, the Holocaust as part of something else.

The Extermination Paradigm This discourse lost its dominance, in both its crude and evasive anti-fascist form and the more sophisticated form that Arendt, above all, elaborated. There is much more to be done to understand this institutional dimension of Holocaust memory. In a recent book, I took a kind of sounding of a particular place and time—France in 1966—to attempt to understand how and when that fall

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happened, how and when and why the extermination camp first became, to many people, perceptible in its own right. This chapter cannot enter into the case study in detail, except to mention that the very title Treblinka: The Revolt of an Extermination Camp, used by Jean-François Steiner to name the text whose reception my book analyzes—a title referring to a site that was basically unknown at that time—suggests the relevant part of his agenda. For Steiner, the extermination camp had to be singled out. Why he himself was pursuing that agenda, whether and how he succeeded in advancing it, what David Rousset himself—still very much active—had to say in opposition to the proposed focus on the death camps, why large numbers of Jews took Rousset’s side—these are all matters I have tried to cover elsewhere.23 Few if any other events placed the contest between concentration and extermination camp center stage in so vivid a way, yet it was only one among a great many contributions to the shift from one aftermath to another. However it happened, the ultimate outcome of the shift seems clear, forty years on. The concentration camp has been displaced by the extermination camp in perception. To be sure, the phrase concentration camp persists, but often it is used interchangeably with its competitor, mistakenly annexed to it to mean extermination camp, the place where Jews as Jews died. In the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s, no one bothered to try to return to the older frame: the most noted proposals simply equated the exterminatory enterprise with other victimhood (Andreas Hillgruber) or saw it as an understandable answer to a prior but also exterminatory threat (Ernst Nolte).24 Though attempting to undercut the Holocaust’s singularity in these ways, the conservative German historians operated fully within the extermination paradigm. But because the shift had radically restricted the possible comparisons with Jewish death, such figures had to strain implausibly to find them. In the earlier era, as Kirsten Fermaglich has interestingly shown, when Americans (and Jews) like Stanley Elkins and Betty Friedan decried the evils of slavery or domesticity, they were able to analogize the Southern plantation or suburban household precisely to concentration camps (albeit “comfortable” ones, in Friedan’s description of the bourgeois home).25 The rise of the extermination camp, from this perspective, made critique of the present as an aftermath much more difficult, because it made the notion of evil in politics so extreme that other cases could hardly measure up. A more dogged challenger to the centrality of the extermination camp as such, ten years after the historians’ debate, wanted to marginalize it not because it made too much room for Jewish suffering but because it obscured too many German participants. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen observed, for the benefit of his readers, that “not only Jews inhabited the concentration camp system.”26 Apparently he feared (plausibly so) that his popular audience might otherwise identify all camps with the extermination

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he was otherwise discussing. Yet Goldhagen argued that the synecdoche privileging killing centers itself erred in its own ways: he worried that the new emphasis excluded other institutions of killing Jews, like the Einsatzgruppen or the order police, the study of which (Goldhagen insisted) “would reveal more about the central questions of the period.” “[T]he death camps have been the overwhelming focus of popular and even scholarly attention,” Goldhagen complained. “The monstrous gas chambers and crematoria have become the star villains.”27 The new emphasis allowed too many perpetrators to escape scot free, occluded the grim reality of face-to-face slaughter, and propagated fantasies of impersonal technique. The familiar perception of the Holocaust’s “modernity” in the horrid perfection of the extermination camps minimized the awesome scope of Jew-hatred. Yet there is much historical irony, from the perspective of the story told here, in the fact that Goldhagen could oppose the focus on the extermination camps because it did not allow the full dimensions of the Holocaust to be measured. After all, in the beginning it was the focus on the extermination camps that allowed the Holocaust, the murder of Jews as Jews, to be seen at all, when the era of the concentration camp omitted it or folded it into Nazi criminality in general.

Giorgio Agamben and the Return of the Concentration Camp And yet, one cannot say that even today the idea of the concentration camp that emerged from the Second World War and received such influential elaboration by Rousset and others has totally disappeared—to the contrary, in certain respects it is on the way back. This is notably true in Europe, where recent debates on Soviet crimes have often seen them put on a par with Nazi evil, when they are not made to seem even more terrible.28 In these attempts, it has been convenient to pose the problem as if the judgment involved were one between rival camp systems, a comparison between the Nazi univers concentrationnaire and the gulag archipelago. But perhaps the most prominent and influential revival of the synecdoche of the concentration camp today is by an Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben—a figure of extraordinary prestige in the humanities of late. After the death of figures like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Agamben has ascended, especially since 11 September 2001, to the level of status and influence, in Europe and even more in the US, that those figures once boasted. Before 9/11, he had already revived the theme of the concentration camp, and in 1998 he published a book entitled in translation Remnants of Auschwitz, to which this chapter can turn in conclusion—not because it offers a profound meditation on the Holocaust but because it strives to breathe new life into an earlier and only apparently defunct paradigm of the Second World War’s aftermath.29

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Agamben’s work takes the form of a commentary on Primo Levi as a witness. In its focus on Auschwitz and on one of the principal new symbols (Primo Levi) of the contemporary era of focus on the genocide, it might seem implausible to see Agamben as returning to the old synecdoche of the concentration camps. But since Auschwitz was a concentration camp as well as an extermination camp, it is possible to discuss it in very different ways. Indeed, one might argue that the preeminence of Auschwitz as the new epitome of evil—as the new synecdoche privileged even amongst extermination camps—remains in certain respects continuous with the concentration camp emphasis it displaced. Of course, the primacy of Jewish victimhood in the war remains a sure acquisition in the historical and the popular imagination. Yet Auschwitz came to stand out in memory thanks to its massive scale, its death toll in absolute numbers, and its technical perfection of the industrial killing, but also, without doubt, because non-Jews died there too, because its victims came from all over Europe, because its many parts and subparts allowed it to be different things to different people, and because it allowed for survival thanks to its several purposes. The pure extermination camps that were most intense in their single aim, geographical focus, and basically complete lethality, even in the age of the extermination camp, have not received similar attention. Agamben’s work makes this partial continuity between concentration and extermination graphically clear, for he interprets (or more accurately, interprets Primo Levi interpreting) Auschwitz as a forum for concentration camp life, rather than Jewish death as such or directly. Agamben uses Levi to focus on the figure from survivor accounts of the Muselmann—the “Muslim” figure, chosen no doubt by Agamben for emphasis in part for contemporary political reasons. For many camp witnesses this was a figure driven beyond the boundaries of humanity, whose life could no longer be distinguished from death. Though Rousset did not dwell on the Muselmann, to enumerate some of the elements of the camp stressed by Agamben is nevertheless to see in his work a revival, and renovation, of Rousset’s old paradigm. Agamben agrees with Arendt (he seems unaware of his debt to Rousset through her, even when he quotes him) that the concentration camps showed that “everything is possible.”30 And Agamben begins with the premise, familiar from before, that it is possible and useful to speak and write about “the camps” as a unitary phenomenon, following through to specific themes revealing their true essence: the existential nudity of what Agamben calls “bare life,” for example, and the superficiality of the distinction between living and dying in the camps. Above all, there is the claim he inherits from the tradition reviewed above that an analysis of a concentration camp or some element of it explains in a significant sense the extermination of the Jews in the death camps. Muselmann-like figures appeared in many camps that were not, like Treblinka or even Auschwitz, so focused on Jewish extermination. Yet in Agamben’s writing, it

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turns out that an analysis of this concentration camp figure is a key to understanding the exterminatory project directed at the Jews alone, at Treblinka and elsewhere. For such reasons, Agamben, citing testimonies from many different camps, throughout the long period of Nazi rule, discussing Bettelheim and other witnesses, can say that Muselmann is “the perfect cipher of the camp.” He has “touched bottom” and reveals the “core” of the camps that “no one wants to see at any cost.”31 Now, there is potentially great merit to such a view. From a very different background and at a different moment the great Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim analyzed the Muselmann as “the most truly original contribution of the Third Reich to civilization.”32 Yet as we have seen, an alternative and now more familiar, indeed normative, interpretation of Nazi criminality might place the immediately exterminated, rather than the interned and still living Muselmann, at the center—but that choice would force more emphasis on where, precisely, such immediate extermination occurred and who, precisely, suffered it. In other words, it would require the less homogeneous vision of “the camps” that Hilberg’s emphasis on killing centers and the rise of Holocaust memory first seemed to demand. For Agamben, however, the Muselmann is the central figure, and he goes so far as to say that “the Jews knew that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews,” but rather as “Muslims,” figures to whom in principle all people could find themselves reduced.33 (In actual fact, Jews had no monopoly on this sort of victimhood.) As with Rousset, and even Arendt, the effect of Agamben’s comparatively homogenizing interpretation of Nazi criminality is to displace analysis from the immediate death that most Jews suffered upon entry into death camps, to the terrible but real survival those allowed to live in concentration camps were granted—even if such survival was no more real or lasting than the pathetic Muselmann could claim. Agamben contends, to be sure, that he is going beyond all known paradigms of interpreting the significance of the Nazi era. And undoubtedly he has, in many ways. But from another point of view, he is in several ways a revivalist. An emphasis on the blurring in the Nazi camps of the distinction between life and death involves a prior assumption, as in Rousset’s work, that analysis of what Agamben calls “bare life” in such generalized camps can serve by proxy as an analysis of immediate extermination in the killing centers that targeted Jews specifically. And so it must be remarked that Agamben’s new paradigm shares much with one version of the paradigm it supposedly is introduced to go beyond. Far from moving to a new theory, one might well then argue, Agamben is renovating an old one: precisely the paradigm of the univers concentrationnaire, the oldest and most durable optic in the history of understanding Nazi criminality. As with Rousset, and Arendt who drew on him, there is a generous interpretation according to which, as all these authors urge, there is a continuity, not a caesura, between concentration and extermination, such that understand-

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ing the former provides the key to understanding the latter. Agamben means something along these lines when he says that “the camps in the system of Nazi biopolitics” are “not merely the place of death and extermination; they are also, and above all, the site of the production of the Muselmann … Beyond the Muselmann lies only the gas chamber.”34 The analysis of the concentration camp, he is saying, does not displace understanding Jewish extermination. Indeed, it provides insight into the deepest significance of that extermination. In Agamben’s influential theory of the living dead Muselmann, an older framework of the concentration camp lives too, notwithstanding its apparent death.

Concluding Thoughts The foregoing is a mere story of intellectuals—but it is remarkable how closely it overlaps with (even if it is not wholly identical to) the developing perception of a larger transnational public. As a transnational account, it is not intended to grasp local peculiarities. But again, certainly for Western Europe and the United States, the similarities are remarkable. I will end with two sets of questions: one about the representational advantages and drawbacks of synecdoche, one about its moral pros and cons. Historical synecdoche—making one or some subset of crimes, or one or the other kind of camp, stand for the totality of Nazi evil—may irritate historians. But is there anything to it? Is the emphasis, from Rousset to Agamben, on the continuity between concentration and extermination right or wrong, true or false? Is the rival emphasis on the extermination camp in itself preferable because it is more accurate factually? Or are both simply interpretations, to be accepted or rejected purely on moral or political grounds? And is synecdoche going to happen anyway? Historians have only recently learned to acknowledge the huge diversity of Nazi crimes against Jews and others. Is it likely that popular culture will ever head in the same direction? And is not the very prominence of the Holocaust today dependent not just on the factual but also on the imaginative isolation of the extermination camp from Nazi crime in general? It does seem obvious that historians have learned and taught the general public too much about the particularities of the Nazi war against the Jews— and the priority of extermination—to allow the concentration camp optic to be easily disinterred. Yet it is too easy to conclude by indicting its representational failures, well-established though they are. For this reason, moral and political questions ultimately press on what one might be tempted to treat as simple factual or more broadly epistemological concerns.35 What, one might ask, are the “ethics” of synecdoche? By singling out different past crimes for attention, or representing different aspects of them as the central ones, its rival

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forms encourage different sorts of attention in the present. Heroically for some, problematically for others, Agamben has since 9/11 vilified the United States, most notably such institutions as the Guantanamo site, on the grounds that the concentration camp universe of extralegal power has never truly disappeared (the war on terror only makes its presence glaringly obvious).36 An emphasis on the death camp, and the particularist killing that took place there, might instead lead to a focus on Darfur today. It is tempting to respond that all suffering needs to be singled out and denounced, to resist the impulse to rank horrors or choose amongst them in the way synecdoche encourages or even forces people to do. Is synecdoche’s problem that it is morally selective in its representation of evil, one way or the other? Like it or not, selectivity seems like an inevitability. Much arguably depends, therefore, on what institutions are chosen to make the epitome of the evil in whose aftermath everyone now lives. After all, this choice determines the deepest nature and possible endings of that aftermath: as with all relational terms, what an aftermath is understood to involve depends wholly on what exactly it is thought to follow.

Notes 1. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2005), esp. the epilogue. 2. Jérôme Lindon, the late publisher of Éditions de Minuit, told me this in person. 3. The consensus is that the institution itself dates from 1896, while the phrase “concentration camp” appears to date from 1901. See Andzrej Kaminski, Konzentrationslager 1896 bis heute: Geschichte, Funktion, Typologie (Munich, 1990) and Joël Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot, Le siècle des camps: détention, concentration, extermination: cent ans de mal radical (Paris, 2000). Cf. Anne Applebaum, “A History of Horror,” New York Review of Books, 18 October 2001, and Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York, 2003), xxxiii–xl. 4. Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933– 2001 (Cambridge, 2001). 5. On the inception of the camps, see Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel, eds., Geschichte der Konzentrationslager 1933–1945, vol. 1, Terror ohne System: die ersten Konzentrationslager im Nationalsozialismus 1933–1935 (Berlin, 2001) and Jane Caplan, “Political Detention and the Origins of the Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany,” in Neil Gregor, ed., Nazism, War and Genocide: Essays in Honour of Jeremy Noakes (Exeter, 2005). From a large literature on the network in general, see Martin Broszat, “The Concentration Camps, 1933–1945,” in Helmut Krausnick et al., Anatomy of the SS State (New York, 1968); subsequent volumes of the Benz and Distel, Geschichte der Konzentrationslager series as well as Benz and Distel, eds., Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, 6 vols. (Munich, 2005–2007); and Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, and Christoph Dieckmann, eds., Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1998). See also the famous sociological study by Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton, 1997). 6. Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 38 (1943): 417–52. On the circumstances of its composition, see the illuminating study by Christian Fleck and Albert Müller, “Bruno Bettelheim and the Concentration Camps,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 33, no. 1 (winter 1997): 1–37. 7. The camps purely for extermination were razed by the Nazis upon their departure in order to prevent discovery of what had transpired there. The Soviets liberated Majdanek (Lublin),

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which like Auschwitz had a labor component, before the Nazis were able to destroy it. On the Western liberations, see Robert Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York, 1985). On photographs, but without the necessary distinction between concentration and extermination camps, see Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago, 1998). 8. See Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 2000), esp. chaps. 2, 6, and 13, and Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide: Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris, 1992). 9. Quoted in Judt, Postwar, 805. 10. Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial:War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford, 2001), 95. 11. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), 681. 12. See, for example, Antonia Grunenberg, Antifascismus: Ein deutscher Mythos (Reinbek, 1993), and Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, MA, 1997). 13. David Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire (Paris, 1946). For translations, see The Other Kingdom, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New York, 1947) and A World Apart, trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse (London, 1951). 14. Eugene Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, trans. Heinz Norden (New York, 1950). 15. Annette Wieviorka, “L’expression ‘camp de concentration’ au 20e siècle,” Vingtième siècle 54 (April–June 1997): 4–12 at 10. 16. Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire, 185; The Other Kingdom, 172; A World Apart, 111. 17. Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire, 48–51; The Other Kingdom, 58–61; A World Apart, 25–27. 18. David Rousset, Les Jours de notre mort (Paris, 1947). 19. Hannah Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” Partisan Review (1948) and reprinted in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York, 1958), chap. 12, esp. 436–37 and 441, n. 125; see also Arendt, “Social Science Techniques and the Study of the Camps,” Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950), rpt. in Arendt, Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 1994). 20. Arendt, “The History of the Great Crime,” Commentary 13, no. 3 (March 1952): 304. This passage now also appears in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York, 2007), 461. 21. Arendt, “Remarks to European Jewry” (1946), as cited in Martine Leibovici, Hannah Arendt, une Juive: Expérience, politique et histoire (Paris, 1998), 147, the most judicious treatment of this whole question. Cf. Jean-Michel Chaumont, “La singularité de l’univers concentrationnaire selon Hannah Arendt,” in Anne-Marie Roviello and Maurice Weyembergh, eds., Hannah Arendt et la modernité (Paris, 1997). It is also important to remark, in Arendt’s case, that the continuity between concentration and extermination is balanced by a separate argument (absent in Rousset’s work) about why Jews in particular ended up the victims of the latter rather than simply of the former. A revised version of her overall view has most recently been presented by Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York, 2003). 22. Rousset, “Les menaces ne sont pas mortes,” Évidences 1 (March 1949): 17–19. 23. Samuel Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham, MA, 2005). 24. Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Berlin, 1986) and Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917– 1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Berlin, 1987). 25. Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (Hanover, NH, 2006). 26. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996), 330.

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27. Ibid., 165. 28. See esp. Stéphane Courtois, ed., Le Livre noir du communisme: crimes, terreurs, repression (Paris, 1997), in English as The Black Book of Communism: Crime,Terror, Repression, trans. J. Murphy and M. Kramer (Cambridge, MA, 1999), and the debate provoked by it. In this context, several writers suggested in the 1990s that the focus on Jewish extermination had not only served to obscure what Nazism and Stalinism shared but had also led to a minimization of the suffering under communist regimes (and perhaps elsewhere as well). See also Catherin Coquio, ed., Parler des camps, penser les genocides (Paris, 1999), but cf. Henri Raczymow, “D’un detail qui masque le tableau,” Le Monde, 21 January 1998. See also Alain Brossat, L’Épreuve du désastre: le XXe siècle et les camps (Paris, 1996), and, for a critique, Robert Redeker, “Un autre révisionnisme? Alain Brossat et les camps,” Les Temps modernes 53, no. 596 (1997): 125–32. 29. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York, 2001). For broader but comparably critical evaluations of Agamben (my present concerns are merely to fit him into a tradition), see Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, and Critical Theory (Ithaca, 2004), chap. 4; and Philippe Mesnard, “The Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Evaluation,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5, no. 1 (summer 2004): 139–57 and esp. 145–54. 30. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1998), 170. 31. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 34, 48, 51. 32. Emil Fackenheim, “Holocaust,” in Michael Morgan, ed., A Holocaust Reader: Responses to the Nazi Extermination (New York, 2000), 125. 33. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 52, 45. 34. Ibid., 85. 35. As Mark Mazower writes of Agamben, “That this makes for bad history may not matter very much.” Mazower, “Foucault, Agamben: Theory and the Nazis,” Boundary 2 35, no. 1 (spring 2008): 23–34 at 32. 36. Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Atell (Chicago, 2005).

[[[ PA RT II

Public and Private Memories

[[[ CH AP T ER 4

Nothing Is Forgotten Individual Memory and the Myth of the Great Patriotic War Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

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OVIET DIRECTOR ELEM KLIMOV’S 1985 film Come and See (Idi i smotri), a generally unsparing account of World War II atrocities in Belarus, includes a lighthearted scene of forest partisans posing for a group portrait. The photographer curses and cajoles as he struggles to get the ragtag crew—too old, too young, too drunk—into their places in front of the brigade’s armored vehicle. As the partisans line up for the camera, the surging strains of the wartime anthem “Holy War” (Sviashchennaia voina) eventually drown out the jokes and insults. The very act of photographing—of commemorating—seems poised to transform the irregulars into heroic and stoic warriors, but the visuals continue to underscore the ironic contrast between the humble partisans and the “declamatory” lyric—“This is a people’s war/ This is our holy war.”1 The juxtaposition of the “real” partisans and the music from outside the story creates an ambiguity that invites us to reflect on the meanings of wartime representations of war and their role in shaping and verifying both participants’ memories and official histories. In this case, the ambiguity is particularly poignant, as the partisans themselves are responsible for making the photographic image that appears to summon “Holy War,” a song that during the war could reputedly “bring tears or bursts of martial valor to hardened partisans.”2 Of course the film’s partisans, like the film’s audience, may remember the slightly off-color language that preceded the shutter’s snap and the brutal realities that follow it. We can imagine one of the participants pulling out the photo long after the war’s end and recounting the less-than-glorious scene we have just witnessed and, perhaps, the horrors portrayed in the rest of the film. But the photograph—staged, after all, with the complicity of the partisans themselves— can also insist on an alternative “reality”: here is a group of guerrillas, merciless

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“people’s avengers,” exactly as described in the wartime media and glorified by the post-Stalin “cult” of the war.3 The film, written by Ales’ Adamovich, a veteran of the Belarusian front, suggests that even for those who were there and who thus know the limits of the myth it was—at least by 1985—impossible to look at a photograph of a partisan brigade without hearing the soaring music of wartime.4 The photograph’s—and the film’s—ability to at once document truths and perpetuate myths underscores the difficulty of drawing sharp distinctions between the allegedly “raw,” “unvarnished,” “real” memories of those who experienced war and the presumptively politicized myths—or lies—created by the state.5 For historians interested in “true war stories,” the overlap of individual memory and public myth is an inconvenient problem.6 Thus Catherine Merridale, who interviewed about two hundred veterans for her account of the average “Ivan’s” war, admits with some frustration that “they tended to adopt the language of the vanished Soviet state, talking about honor and pride, of justified revenge, of motherland, Stalin, and the absolute necessity of faith.” Despite her best efforts to elicit “true” stories, “there was no blood, no shit, no nervous strain” in the tales told by veterans.7 In view of such complications, she turns with relief to “the only evidence that has not changed,” the archives, which contain “authentic voices from the past, the idiom of soldiers and their government as it was recorded in the very midst of the war.” She understands that while political police (NKVD) reports are hardly repositories of straightforward truths, they offer a “welcome corrective to the prim reverence that seems to surround most public discussion of the war in Russia.”8 As evidenced by Merridale’s remarkable account, using archival evidence to “correct” the too-rosy remembrances of soldiers can be an effective means of reconstructing the experience of the war. She recovers largely untold stories of everything from punishment battalions, theft, and corruption to rape. However, opposing private (purportedly true and authentic) memory to public (politicized, mythologized) memory offers little insight into the connections between the two—both during and after the war. Merridale presents the “glittering and specious edifice of myth” as the state’s creation, a ready-made story that veterans repeated because it provided psychological support and material benefits.9 She also offers a more sinister explanation: “The mythic wartime solidarity that everyone remembers was another sleight of Stalin’s hand.” 10 Or, as she puts it more bluntly: “Censorship worked.”11 Emphasizing Stalin’s powerful magic, these formulations suggest a myth—albeit a sometimes useful one—foisted on veterans that effaced, but did not interact with, their individual memories. Explanations of the veterans’ stories that imagine some authentic truth hidden beneath the turgid language of the great victory also imply—although I would like to stress that Merridale demonstrates sincere respect and admiration for the people she interviews—that when veterans parrot the slogans of a dead state,

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they are self-consciously sparing—or deceiving—the interviewer and perhaps themselves: “the notion of the brave and simple rifleman gave them dignity … whatever private stories they kept to themselves.”12 An alternative approach would accept that even when veterans speak in Soviet clichés, they tell their stories in good faith, and would resist the temptation to dismiss or correct even stories that shade into kitsch (memorably defined by Milan Kundera as “the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word.”)13 I do not mean to suggest that the myths of the people’s war proffered by the Soviet media during the war and still repeated by veterans—the stories, poems, songs, and posters that told of heroic civilians under fire, partisan avengers, and good-hearted, patriotic soldiers—should be accepted as true representations of the realities of the war. But they can be accepted as authentic components of veterans’ understandings and memories of the war. Both during and after the war, public stories provided compelling templates for understanding and remembering personal experiences. Moreover, because the tellers of war stories in the Soviet media often had experience at the front lines, individual memory informed official narratives, even as official narratives worked to sanitize, co-opt, and contain certain sorts of memory. Thus, rather than focusing on omissions, silences, and distortions, I would like to follow the stories themselves and trace how they shifted over time, how different individuals or groups made the same stilted words mean different things. My work has focused on narratives of the siege of Leningrad, one of the most tragic and well-known episodes of the Soviet war.14 Like the veterans Merridale interviewed, the survivors of the blockade, the blokadniki, continue to draw liberally on the images, tropes, and stories of the so-called Leningrad epic. My interest is not in debunking or correcting memories that, in the words of one blockade survivor, “throw out the gloom,” but rather in emphasizing, as Malcolm Smith does in his study of the London Blitz, that myths “are important historical events in their own right.”15 Moreover, a study of the construction, repression, reinvigoration, and reconfiguration of the myth of the Great Patriotic War calls attention to a key feature of the Soviet “aftermath”: the delegitimizing potential of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union’s chief legitimizing myth. Tracing the Soviet myth of the war to its origins reveals the multivalence of Soviet platitudes that has been central to their longevity. During the war, and particularly during its first disastrous years, the Soviet media propagated what the historian Jeffrey Brooks has called a “counternarrative” of individual initiative and private motives.16 By celebrating the resourcefulness, self-sacrifice, and self-reliance of heroic Soviet citizens, the wartime counternarrative created a useful myth of the people’s—not Stalin’s or even the party’s—holy war. The myth reflected something of the average citizen’s understanding of the war. As the literary critic Lidiia Ginzburg noted of besieged Leningrad, during the war it was possible to overhear “a real grandmother talking like a granny in

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the articles and stories. That’s never happened before.”17 The myth also raised expectations that victory would redeem the losses, triggering everything from the elimination of collective farms to the final end of Stalinist terror. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Stalin worked to quash this counternarrative as soon as it became clear that the war would be won and his state would survive.18 After Stalin’s death in 1953, his political heirs, in search of their own legitimizing myths, turned the story of the Great Patriotic War into a state cult. In newly constructed monuments and museums and in elaborate rituals of remembrance, they revived wartime language in an attempt to reestablish the wartime mood of unity and shared purpose. However, the resurrected language also contained reminders of the unfulfilled expectations inspired by the war. As Boris Pasternak observed in the epilogue to Doctor Zhivago—a production of the post-Stalin thaw that failed to clear the Soviet censor and was published abroad in 1957—the war raised brittle hopes that the “reign of the lie” had finally ended.19 Ludmilla Alexeyeva, who was fifteen in 1941, credited the wartime press’s account of “Partisan Tanya tortured to death by the German fascists in the village of Petrishchevo” as providing a new and liberating sense of the possibility of taking “real” action “as an individual.”20 However pompous its clichés, however much it omitted, the war cult had the unintended consequence of stirring up such memories. Its productions could support the sort of party-minded Soviet patriotism Nikita Khrushchev and later Leonid Brezhnev had in mind, but it could also point away from the party and toward the achievements and responsibilities of ordinary Soviet citizens.

“Nothing Is Forgotten” Perhaps nothing better illustrates the multiple meanings embedded in the language of the war cult than the maxim that became its slogan: “Nothing is forgotten.” The phrase comes from the verses that poet Olga Berggolts composed for Piskarevskoe Memorial Cemetery, one of the first memorial complexes constructed during the post-Stalin thaw. Containing the communal graves of perhaps half a million Leningraders who died during the blockade, the cemetery itself is often described by critics of the war cult as something of an anomaly—an exceptionally affecting Soviet memorial. Its vast horizontal expanse makes palpable the enormity of Leningrad’s loss.21 For surviving Leningraders who had been unable to bury their loved ones or to visit any sort of grave, the cemetery, dedicated on Victory Day (9 May) 1960, offered a place to mourn the dead.22 On official holidays, blokadniki gathered not only, or primarily, to listen to the speeches, but to take part in informal reunions, to recall personal experiences.23 At the same time, the purposes of the state were very much in evidence. An enormous tomb of the unknowns, presided over by a towering figure of the

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Mother-Motherland (Mat-Rodina), Piskarevskoe Cemetery constructed an account of the siege that remembered personal tragedies even as it fit them into the grand narrative of collective heroism and sacrifice. Berggolts’s own wartime experiences, which blurred the boundaries between the personal and the official, recommended her as the poet who “would be able to find the right words” for the memorial.24 She had been the beloved voice of Radio Leningrad during the blockade and had lost her husband to starvation. In order to persuade her to provide the poetic centerpiece of the Piskarevskoe memorial, one of the architects took her to visit the site. She was moved by the expanse of the still largely unimproved cemetery. In an autobiographical sketch written in 1972, she remembered that “an inexpressible feeling of grief, sorrow, of total alienation” overtook her as she “walked along that planked footway, though that awful earth, among those huge hills of graves, toward that blind and silent wall … it was such a foul Leningrad fall, and it seemed to me that already not much time remained.”25 She recalled that looking at these “awful and heroic graves,” the words for the wall suddenly came to her. The reality was probably somewhat less spontaneous, as she had to meet strict requirements regarding the number of characters per line and the number of lines. Still, the deep connection she felt with the site suggests that the construction of the Piskarevskoe memorial, a state project of massive dimensions, also held emotional significance for the people—many of them veterans or survivors of the blockade—who helped produce it.26 Berggolts’s poetry, which, together with Vera Isaeva’s Mother-Motherland statue, stood at the center of the memorial, can be understood as both a mythic whitewash and a call to remember. The verses echoed her most declamatory works of the war years.27 An epitaph for the unnamed dead, the poem began: Here lie Leningraders Here lie the men, women, and children of the city. And alongside of them, Red Army soldiers. With all their life They defended you, Leningrad, The cradle of revolution. We are not able here to enumerate their noble names, So many are beneath the eternal protection of granite. But know, as you consider this stone, No one is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten.

In these few brief lines, Berggolts managed to stir a sense of hometown patriotism—“Here lie Leningraders”—and to connect local sacrifices to the national cause. They defended the city, the poem suggested, as native sons and daughters and as the heirs to the Revolution that was also born there. Berggolts’s dictum “no one is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten,” removed from the context of the cemetery, became during the 1960s and 1970s the watchword of the war cult, and as such, suggested that a grateful, victorious nation

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remembered. The phrase can thus be read, as the historian Nina Tumarkin has noted, as a galling bit of hypocrisy, since the war cult effaced, ignored, and distorted so much of the Soviet war experience.28 However, even as they voiced (and constructed) the verities of the war cult, the verses called attention to the fact that the official monument—and official accounts of the war more generally—did not tell the whole story. In the context of the cemetery, the phrase “no one is forgotten” summoned personal and individual operations of memory, as well as the consoling power of myth. Providing what any survivor would recognize as an attenuated description of the city’s sufferings, the poem pledged that the horrors would not be forgotten—“neither the hungry, cruel, dark / winter of forty-one-forty-two, / nor the savagery of the shelling, / nor the terror of the bombs in forty-three.” Berggolts’s verses, indeed the memorial as a whole, prompted survivors themselves to fill in the unspoken details—the bodily sensations of starvation, the names of the dead. Leaving much unsaid, but not, it asserted, unremembered, the poem assured veterans and survivors that their personal experiences were meaningful and that, evoking the state’s implicit wartime promises of a better future, “together with the fatherland, the victory is yours.” The state-sanctioned slogan lent legitimacy to what Mark Edele has identified as the veterans’ “widely shared sense that the enormity of the wartime sacrifice entitled soldiers to special treatment by the society they had defended”—special treatment that they won only in 1978.29 Thus “nothing is forgotten” could be used, as it was in a 1974 letter to Panteleimon Ponomarenko, the former head of the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement, by veterans demanding that their service and sacrifices be remembered and honored.30 If the aphorism “nothing is forgotten” worked to deny that state monuments and histories forgot a great deal, it also offered a means of challenging the state’s monopoly on the memory of the war.

Individual Memories and the Cult of the War The flood of published memoirs and oral histories that accompanied the burgeoning cult of the war in the 1960s and 1970s aimed, like the new memorials, to recreate the moment when, to return to Ginzburg’s image, real grandmothers sounded like grannies in the press. Emphasizing the genuine popularity of wartime patriotism that focused on hearth, home, and native land (rodina), the historian Geoffrey Hosking argues that “even at the height of the war” the regime itself had done much to squander this “newfound national cohesion.” Among the state’s “serious mistakes,” he counts the abandonment of prisoners of war, the mistrust and often imprisonment of citizens returning from German prisons or occupied territory, the wholesale deportations of minority ethnic

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groups from the Soviet borderlands, and Stalin’s postwar prohibition of wartime memoirs.31 The stories of the war cult sought to repair this last error by encouraging veterans to tell emotional, personal, tragic tales, and by positioning such war stories in an overarching narrative of the unity of the party and the people. It is thus tempting—but, I would argue, ultimately inadvisable—to dismiss the stories, memoirs, and films of the war cult that appeared up to 1985 as a species of what Kundera calls “totalitarian kitsch.” Certainly the war stories of those years were rife with sentimental clichés and prepackaged emotions. Nonetheless, the war cult stories often managed to communicate a sense, however diluted, of unredemptive loss and of the irony of victory. As the literary historian Denis Kozlov has noted, “officially sanctioned” interest in the history of the war “offered a legitimate, fertile ground for postwar contemplation and collective doubt.”32 Of course the state that authorized and funded the emerging cult of the war never intended to provide ground for contemplation and doubt. The war cult, and particularly post-Stalin histories of the war, clearly celebrated the party as the “organizer and inspirer” of victory.33 The editors at a Belarus publishing house made state priorities clear in the late 1960s, when they rejected the revised version of former partisan commander A. V. Romanov’s 1962 memoirs for, among other things, failing to discuss the essential role of party organizations. Romanov’s contention that his small, personal story was valuable as a representation of the “tragedy of millions of others” did not, apparently, prove successful in his own case.34 Nonetheless, by the late 1970s, the cultural productions of the cult often focused on precisely the representative personal sacrifices that Romanov had called for and confronted the war’s horrors to an unprecedented degree.35 The trend is perhaps clearest in films such as Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1976) and Come and See. It is also visible in collections of oral histories such as Adamovich and Daniil Granin’s A Book of the Blockade (Blokadnaia kniga), first published in 1979 and substantially expanded in 1982, and Belarusian journalist Svetlana Aleksievich’s War’s Unwomanly Face (U voiny – ne zhenskoe litso), originally published in 1985, as well as Lidiia Ginzburg’s “quasifictional” “Blockade Diary” (Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka, 1984).36 These brutal portrayals of the war suited the needs of a state that traced its current economic problems to the destructiveness of the war and that represented the sacrifices that led to glorious victory as proofs of its popular support.37 They also served a crucial pedagogical purpose. As the editors of A Book of the Blockade emphasized: “it is absolutely vital that the postwar generations should know as much as possible [about the war], in all its details.”38 Paradoxically, narratives that provided such details largely wrote the state and the party out of the story of the war. One of the central accounts included

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in the 1982 edition of A Book of the Blockade was the diary of Iura Riabinkin, who turned sixteen shortly after the blockade closed. The diary was essential to the editors’ task of impressing upon the younger generation the tragedy and momentousness of the blockade. They deemed it “very important for the younger readers to know more about the life of a teenager during the blockade.”39 The diary’s power stemmed in large part from Riabinkin’s moving, personal descriptions of previously taboo subjects: the inadequacy of efforts to evacuate children, the effects of starvation, the strain and breakdown of family relations. It told one boy’s harrowing story and revealed the psychological state, oscillating between suicidal and defiant, of the starving. The editors tracked down his sister, who painfully recounted how she and her mother had had no choice but to abandon Iura, who was too weak to walk, when they were evacuated in January 1942. He apparently died of starvation in 1942.40 The story of Iura Riabinkin, who “passionately wanted to live,” raised, even if unintentionally, questions about the disproportion between the sacrifice and what had, by 1982, been won.41 The deeply personal stories presented in War’s Unwomanly Face likewise raised doubts about the cost and consequences of the war. In her introduction, Aleksievich duly notes the role of party organizations in drawing young women into the war effort: “The Leninist Komsomol [Young Communist League] alone managed to mobilise about 500 thousand girls for the army, including 200 thousand Komsomol members.”42 Nadezhda Anisimova, a teenager at the beginning of the war, seems to offer living proof. She told Aleksievich that after reading about the partisan Zoia Kosmodemianskaia in Pravda, she and her girlfriends resolved to go to the front. “The Party,” Anisimova recalled, “taught us that there was nothing dearer than the Motherland.”43 But Aleksievich’s real interest is “lives mutilated by war,” the stories often screened from view by the well-known statistics.44 Albina Gantimurova, who served as a scout at the front, recounted that for fifteen years after the war, she “continued ‘going on missions’ … Every night I dreamt that either my submachine gun got jammed or that we found ourselves in an encirclement… I used to wake up with teeth chattering.”45 Maria Matusevich-Zaiats joined the partisans early in the war for just the sorts of reasons the histories of the war lauded. “I was a Komsomol member,” she explained, “and could not remain passive.” But hers is hardly a story of communist heroism and redemptive victory. While she was with the partisans, her son “was burnt together with my mother. … All that I managed to find was a few grammes of bone ashes … I had already known how they looked.”46 For medical orderly Tamara Umniagina, victory meant an assignment clearing mines. One soldier in her unit “went to clear his collective farm of mines, his own fields, and was killed there. … He had fought from the first day, gone through the entire war and then, after it was over, had been killed in his own home district, his home fields.”47

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Stories such as these employed the clichés of the war cult while also suggesting the limits of the heroic myth of the people’s war. Accounts that centered on children and women in particular could expose the war’s unhealed wounds. As Aleksievich repeatedly asserts: “Women’s memory retains that realm of human emotions which usually escape men.”48 Such perhaps questionable distinctions notwithstanding, the forthright accounts of women and children who fought, suffered, and survived were as much a part of the war cult as stoic male partisans defying all odds and physical pain.49 Rooted in the wartime rhetoric of motherhood and motherland, love and sacrifice, loss and revenge, the platitudes of the war cult distorted and omitted a great deal even as they allowed veterans to express something of the trauma—and hopes—of the war years.

“The Union Is Gone, But Its Heroes Live On” The freer atmosphere created by the era of glasnost in the late 1980s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 expanded the limits of the speakable and challenged the verities of the war cult. Glasnost made it possible to question the purity of the Soviet Union’s heroic victory over fascism—to blame both Hitler and Stalin for the horrors of the war. The Soviet authorities finally acknowledged and published the secret protocols of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact and admitted the Soviet murder of some 15,000 Polish military officers at Katyn Forest in 1940. Unlike Khrushchev’s attacks on the myth of Stalin’s military genius that had helped to stimulate the emergence of the war cult, the glasnost-era criticism of the war, and especially the equation of the two totalitarian states, posed a clear threat to the myth of a holy war that united people and party. As in so many areas of Soviet life, openness, which was supposed to restore the party’s credibility, ended up weakening the legitimizing myths upon which the regime depended.50 In the immediate post-Soviet period, the devaluation and denigration of both the war and the people who fought it pervaded the media and politics. Boris Yeltsin’s government turned its attention to righting the wrongs of the war—for example, returning to Germany artworks removed during the Second World War, which the Soviet regime had long denied that it had expropriated and still possessed. In the press, the former heroic veterans became “victims,” whose victory had succeeded only in prolonging an evil regime.51 Nonetheless, reverence for the war survived. By the mid 1990s, a reconfigured but still recognizable and increasingly “Soviet” myth of the war had emerged. This reconfiguration appeared quite early in Leningrad, where blokadniki and the local cult had long emphasized the uniqueness of the city’s wartime experience and the “heroic defense of Leningrad”—of the “cradle of Revolution” rather than the “first socialist state.” The rebaptism of the city as St. Petersburg

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in 1991 further distanced the city’s epic from the defunct and discredited Soviet state. Liberal politicians in St. Petersburg, where the debate on renaming the city had hinged on the wartime associations of “Leningrad,” quickly grasped the tenacity of the Leningrad epic and learned the political advantages of endorsing some version of the city’s heroism, exceptional virtue, and special national— even international—mission.52 On the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the blockade, the newly elected Mayor Anatolii Sobchak explicitly linked the war generation’s virtues to the city’s “organization and unity” during the “difficult August days” just past—in other words, linked the cult of the war to the anti-Soviet cause.53 Yeltsin, casting the war as a Russian victory, managed a similar shift in emphasis at the national level a couple of years later.54 As a 1994 headline marking the forty-ninth anniversary of victory noted: “The Union is gone, but its heroes live on.”55 The reconfigured myth of the war often combined the veneration of heroes with contempt for the state that had mythologized them. In 1992, when Adamovich and Granin revisited the portions of A Book of the Blockade that had been cut by the censor, they had no compunctions about revealing the crimes of the former regime, specifically the “postwar repression affecting the former defenders of the city.” But they expressed hesitation about publishing interviews that talked of cannibalism. They feared that stories about cannibalism would make it impossible “to talk and write about the heroism of the blockade, about the exceptional virtue with which [Leningraders] held out and died in unbearable conditions, about the high cultural level [intelligentnosti] of this city.” They ultimately decided to publish their lost chapter “On Cannibalism,” allaying their concerns by emphasizing the crime’s relatively limited scope.56 Exposés of repression and cannibalism thus did not displace stories of virtue and heroism but endowed them with renewed believability.57 As Granin noted on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, “up until now victory was enmeshed with lies.” But revealing the lies did not necessarily undermine the power of the myth of the Great Patriotic War. On the contrary, “[o]ur Victory is greater and loftier, because it was a Victory in spite of ” the lies, the cover-ups, the crimes.58 Taking the productions of the war cult seriously opens up new understandings of multiple, interconnected Soviet aftermaths: the aftermath of the war, of Stalinism, and of the Soviet state itself. In the wake of the war, Stalin calculated that the counternarrative of the war years constituted a threat. Victory Day became an ordinary workday; the construction of memorials and the publication of memoirs ceased. While the thaw that followed his death is often defined in terms of (partial) revelations of the Stalinist terror and the gulag archipelago, it may also be understood as an effort to create an alternative postwar, one in which the contributions of Soviet citizens were recognized and the wartime unity of party and people persisted. Indeed Khrushchev’s decision to lift the ban

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on war stories that focused on something other than Stalin’s military genius constituted the most durable, if least sensational, part of the de-Stalinization process, expanding even as Khrushchev’s successors curtailed disclosures of Stalin’s crimes. A generous reading of state-sanctioned war stories—one that resists the impulse to correct them—also reveals that the state’s reinvigoration of the wartime language of personal and local loyalties worked not only to sentimentalize the memory of the war but also potentially to subvert narratives that emphasized the role of the party over the experiences of individuals. The war cult’s unintended perpetuation of nostalgia for the postwar-that-might-have-been complicated, perhaps doomed, the Soviet state’s effort to manage memory. When in the late 1980s and early 1990s it became possible to tell all, veterans remained committed to maintaining the myth of the war that they had helped to create, the war that had allowed them to be “citizens in the full and authentic sense of the word.”59 “Combat experience,” veteran Dmitrii Loza remembered almost sixty years later, taught him “to act not by rote but by giving thoughtful consideration of all nuances of a developing situation.” Emphasizing that Soviet people acted on their own initiative, he told his story—in 1998—in the language of the war cult: “The song ‘Sacred War’ became our hymn, the oath of our national community [Loza is from Ukraine]. The people put up a wall against suppressers, aggressors, thieves, debauchers, and fascist scum, the dregs of humanity.”60 It was this war, represented as the embodiment of all that was noble and pure and removed from crass politics, that politicians attempted to co-opt. Addressing veterans in January 1994 on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the blockade, Sobchak discounted the strong showing of nationalist and communist parties in the previous December’s election, noting that Leningraders, especially those who had lived through the blockade, “understood particularly well that fascism, totalitarianism, and nationalism are the chief enemies of humanity.”61 Even the imperial and religious motifs that have become part of the war cult in post-Soviet Russia—the statue of Saint George slaying a dragon that graces Moscow’s Poklonnaia gora memorial, the so-called Blockade Cathedral in St. Petersburg—have roots in the wartime counternarrative. It was during the war, after all, that the Soviet state appropriated the military legacy of the medieval prince (and Orthodox saint) Aleksandr Nevskii along with that of the imperial generals who defeated Napoleon.62 The war years also saw a rapprochement with the Orthodox Church and the emergence in popular culture of a “quasi-religiosity.”63 Imperial symbols were a part of the war that veterans remembered. More recently, a less liberal Russian state has rehabilitated distinctively Soviet symbols related to the war. The 2005 celebrations of the sixtieth anniversary of victory provided an extravagant example of the political and personal

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meanings of this reclamation project. For the presidents of Estonia and Lithuania, the Russian state’s desire to disavow the darker sides of the Soviet war was unmistakable. They refused to attend the Moscow festivities and, along with the Latvian leader, demanded an apology for the Soviet occupation that began in 1940. For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that Russia had already apologized and called the demand “downright senseless.”64 The parade, which included soldiers in both period and contemporary uniforms as well as Second World War and current military hardware, offered an equally unsubtle demonstration of nostalgia for the Great Victory and the superpower status that followed it. The demonstration of Russian power, like demonstrations of Soviet power before it, relied for its emotional resonance on the individual stories and memories of veterans. The parade began with the quintessential relic of the Soviet war cult, a replica of the red banner that in May 1945 flew from the Reichstag. Its presence connoted renewed respect for the Soviet state and, perhaps even more, for the veterans, who had viewed the absence of the banner in early post-Soviet Victory Day celebrations as a personal affront.65 Putin recognized the degree to which veterans took the Soviet symbols personally when, in 2000, he defended the adoption of the old Hymn of the Soviet Union (with new lyrics) as the Russian national anthem, arguing that to oppose it meant admitting “that our mothers’ and fathers’ lives were useless and meaningless, that their lives were in vain. Neither in my head nor my heart can I agree with this.”66 The war cult’s most durable legacy may be the impossibility—for veterans and for politicians—of separating the individual’s war from the images, symbols, and sounds of the war cult. The myth of the war was not the “true” war, but it was a vital part of the Soviet experience of the war and thus of individuals’ war stories. It was remembered and in part constructed by the veterans themselves, who, as one soldier told Berggolts shortly after the victory, wanted stories not about their own war, but “a real war that has heroism and brave deeds.”67

Notes 1. The description and the translation are from Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (New York, 1992), 106. The song dates to 1941, with music by A. Aleksandrov and lyrics by V. Lebedev-Kumach. 2. Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 106. 3. On the “cult” of the war see Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994). On the partisan movement see Kenneth Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II (Lawrence, 2006). 4. For a somewhat different analysis of the film that emphasizes its role in “returning to the Soviet people an authentic memory of the conflict,” free of “cant and bombast,” see Denise Youngblood, “A War Remembered: Soviet Films of the Great Patriotic War,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 855.

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5. Tumarkin emphasizes the disjuncture between the survivors’ “raw” memory and the state’s “myth.” Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 188. Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina argue that “only with the advent of glasnost” could “unvarnished” accounts of the war “appear in print in the USSR.” Simmons and Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh, 2002), xxxi. Geoffrey Hosking contrasts “real memory” and “the mythologized substitute.” Hosking, “Memory and a Totalitarian Society: The Case of the Soviet Union,” in Thomas Butler, ed., Memory: History, Culture, and Mind (Oxford, 1989), 118. 6. Catherine Merridale defines her project in Ivan’s War as “reaching beyond the myths in search of … ‘true war stories,’” a phrase she borrows from one of the Vietnam stories in Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston, 1990), 67. Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York, 2006), 7. 7. Merridale, Ivan’s War, 387. 8. Ibid., 380. 9. Ibid., 375. 10. Ibid., 226. 11. Ibid., 189. 12. Ibid., 373. 13. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York, 1984), 248. Jochen Hellbeck’s discussion of the tendency to “think that in their private core Soviet citizens differed qualitatively from the way they presented themselves ‘officially’” is pertinent here. Citing Hannah Arendt, he calls for an analysis of the “testimony of totalitarian subjects” that accepts “statements as what they seem to express.” Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind:Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 3, 11. See also Carmen Scheide’s thoughtful analysis of how two memoirs utilize and deviate from the norms of Soviet commemoration. Scheide, “Kollektivnye i individual´nye modeli pamiati o ‘Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine’ (1941–45 gg.),” trans. I. Dvornichenko, Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2004): 211–36. 14. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1945: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (New York, 2006). 15. Lev Markhasev, “Po sravneniiu s nyneshnim – eto bylo chistoe vremia,” Anichkov most, no. 4 ( January 1991): 3. Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth, and Popular Memory (New York, 2000), 6. 16. Jeffrey Brooks, “Pravda Goes to War,” in Richard Stites, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington, 1995), 14. The first years of the war have been characterized as a period of “spontaneous de-Stalinization” in which life and literature were freer than they had been before the war or would be after 1943. Lazar Lazarev, “Russian Literature on the War and Historical Truth,” in John Garrard and Carol Garrard, eds., World War 2 and the Soviet People: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies (New York, 1993), 29. See also Bernd Bonwetsch, “War as a ‘Breathing Space’: Soviet Intellectuals and the ‘Great Patriotic War,’” in Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds., The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana, 2000), 137–53. 17. Lidiia Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, trans. Alan Myers (London, 1995), 56. 18. I discuss shifts in the Soviet media more fully in “‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families’: Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda,” Slavic Review 59, no. 4 (winter 2000): 825–47. On postwar expectations, see Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY, 1998), 31–39; E. S. Seniavskaia, Frontove pokolenie, 1941–1945: Istoriko-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie (Moscow, 1995), 91–92. 19. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari (New York, 1958), 507. 20. Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the PostStalin Era (Boston, 1990), 19. Alexeyeva is referring to Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, a young partisan executed behind German lines, whose nom de guerre was Tanya. In the 1990s, the Kosmodemi-

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anskaia myth was debunked as largely a creation of the press; see S. E. Seniavskaia, “Geroicheskie simvoly: Real´nost´ i mifologiia voiny,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 5 (1995): 38–39; translated as “Heroic Symbols: The Reality and Mythology of War,” Russian Studies in History 37, no. 1 (summer 1998): 61–87. More recently it has been defended as largely grounded in fact; see M. M. Gorinov, “Zoia Kosmodemianskaia (1923–1941),” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 1 (2003): 77–92. 21. W. Bruce Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia (New York, 2002), 318; Michael Ignatieff, “Soviet War Memorials,” History Workshop, no. 17 (1984): 159–60; Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 31–32. 22. On the poor state of the cemetery before 1960, see “Spravka o Piskarvskoem kladbishche v g. Leningrade” (9 October 1953), Tsentral´nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga f. 7384, op. 37, d. 1197, l. 24. 23. F. F. Grachev, Zapiski voennogo vracha (Leningrad, 1970), 137–39. 24. E. Levinson, “Piskarevskoe memorial´nyi ansambl´,” Sovetskaia arkhitektura, no. 19 (1970): 148. 25. Ol´ga Berggol´ts, “Popytka avtobiografii,” in M.F. Berggol´ts, ed., Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, vol. 1 (Leningrad, 1988), 44. 26. The architect Evgenii Levinson spoke of the site in similarly emotional terms. Levinson, “Piskarevskoe memorial´nyi ansambl´,” 148. 27. Katharine Hodgson, Voicing the Soviet Experience:The Poetry of Ol´ga Berggol´ts (New York, 2003), 72–78. 28. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 134–35. She emphasizes in particular Soviet silence regarding the Holocaust and the contributions of Jews to the war effort. On the distorting influence of the cult on histories of the partisan movement, see Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerrillas, 282–87. See also Ignatieff, “Soviet War Memorials,” 160; Amir Weiner, “In the Long Shadow of War: The Second World War and the Soviet and Post-Soviet World,” Diplomatic History 25, no. 3 (summer 2001): 455–56. 29. Mark Edele, “Soviet Veterans as an Entitlement Group, 1945–1975,” Slavic Review 65, no. 1 (spring 2006): 137. 30. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii, f. 625, op. 1. d. 10, ll. 12–14, cited in Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerrillas, 286. 31. Geoffrey Hosking, “The Second World War and Russian National Consciousness,” Past & Present, no. 175 (May 2002): 179, 180–86. 32. Denis Kozlov, “The Historical Turn in Late Soviet Culture: Retrospectivism, Factography, Doubt, 1953–91,” Kritika 2, no. 3 (summer 2001): 585. 33. F. I. Sirota, “Voenno-organizatorskaia rabota leningradskoi organizatsii VKP(b) v pervyi period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (1956): 31. 34. Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerrillas, 284–85. 35. Boris Gasparov, “On ‘Notes from the Leningrad Blockade,’” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 28, nos. 2–3 (summer-fall 1994): 217. 36. The description of Ginzburg’s work is from Judson Rosengrant, “L. Ia Ginzburg: An International Chronological Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Works,” Russian Review 54, no. 4 (October 1995): 587. Ales’ Adamovich and Daniil Granin, Blokadnaia kniga (Moscow, 1979, 1982), published in English as A Book of the Blockade (Moscow, 1983). Svetlana Aleksievich, U voiny – ne zhenskoe litso (Minsk, 1985), published in English as War’s Unwomanly Face (Moscow, 1988). Lidiia Ginzburg, “Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka,” Neva, no. 1 (1984): 84–108. 37. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 133. Alexei Yurchak, “The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Language, Ideology, and Culture of the Last Soviet Generation” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1997), 172–73. 38. Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 29. 39. Ibid., 486. 40. Ibid., 329–33, 343–46, 349–50, 353–58, 386–96, 401–17, 483–94. Aleksandr Rubashkin, “O podvige i tragedii Leningrada (Razmyshleniia o ‘blokadnoi’ literature),” in Zakhar Dich-

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arov, ed., Golosa iz blokady: Leningradskie pisateli v osazhdennom gorode (1941–1944) (St. Petersburg, 1996), 429–30. 41. Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 496. A similar sense of the exorbitance, if not the meaninglessness of the losses is central to the reminiscences of child survivor A. Lugovtsova, “Istoriia odnoi fotografii,” in Anna Lazarevna Moizhes, ed., Deti goroda-geroia (Leningrad, 1974), 235. 42. Aleksievich, War’s Unwomanly Face, 7. 43. Ibid., 33. 44. Ibid., 7. 45. Ibid., 36. Second ellipses in original. 46. Ibid., 40. Second ellipses in original. 47. Ibid., 245–46. 48. Ibid., 10. 49. Boris Polevoi, Do Berlina – 896 kilometrov: Iz zapisok voennogo korrespondenta (Moscow, 1973), 158–61. 50. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 174–88; John Gooding, “Lenin in Soviet Politics, 1985–1991,” Soviet Studies 44, no. 3 (1992): 413; Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (New York, 2001), 67–73. 51. Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory during the Yeltsin Era (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 57–77; Anna Krylova, “Dancing on the Graves of the Dead: Building a World War II Memorial in Post-Soviet Russia,” in Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer, eds., Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (Durham, NC, 2004), 86–87. 52. “Ob uvekovechenii pamiati pogibshikh v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny i pri geroichskoi oborone Leningrada i sozdanii leningradskoi Knigi Pamiati,” Vestnik Lensoveta, no. 25 (August 1991): 56–57. 53. A. A. Sobchak and A. N. Beliaev, “K leningradtsam,” Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 7 September 1991. 54. This shift is explored in Krylova, “Dancing on the Graves.” 55. Alla Malakhova, “Soiuza net – ego geroi zhivy,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 7 May 1994. 56. Ales’ Adamovich and Daniil Granin, “Blokadnaia kniga: Glavy, kotorykh v knige ne bylo,” Zvezda, nos. 5–6 (1992): 8. 57. Jennifer Dickinson, “Building the Blockade: New Truths in Survival Narratives from Leningrad,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 13, no. 2 (1995): 21. 58. Tat´iana Chesanova, “Daniil Granin: ‘Nasha Pobeda bol´she i vyshe, potomu chto eto Pobeda vopreki …,’” Chas pik, 9 May 1995. See also Malakhova, “Soiuza net.” 59. V. Kondrat´ev, “Ne tol´ko o svoem pokolenii: Zametki pisatelia,” Kommunist, no. 7 (1990): 113. 60. Dmitrii Loza, Fighting for the Soviet Motherland: Recollections from the Eastern Front Hero of the Soviet Union, ed. and trans. James F. Gebhardt (Lincoln, 1998), 4, 211. 61. Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 28 January 1994. See also Krylova, “Dancing on the Graves,” 96. 62. David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 118–20. On the Moscow memorial see Nurit Schleifman, “Moscow’s Victory Park: A Monumental Change,” History and Memory 13, no. 2 (2001): 5–34. 63. Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 100. 64. Quoted in “Open Letter Denounces Russian ‘Mockery’ of Victory Day Celebrations,” Mosnews.com (http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/05/09/wwiimocking.shtml, accessed 29 December 2006). See also Eva-Clarita Onken, “The Baltic States and Moscow’s 9 May Commemoration: Analysing Memory Politics in Europe,” Europe-Asia Studies 59, no. 1 (January 2007): 23–46. 65. Krylova, “Dancing on the Graves,” 99; Smith, Mythmaking, 85–91.

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66. Quoted in Patrick E. Tyler, “Soviet Hymn is Back, Creating Much Discord,” New York Times, 6 December 2000, A1. 67. Berggol´ts cited in Musya Glants, “Images of the War in Painting,” in Garrard and Garrard, World War 2 and the Soviet People, 111. See also Carin Tschöpl, Die sowjetische Lyrik-Diskussion: Ol´ga Berggol´c´ Leningrader Blockadedichtung als Paradigma (Munich, 1988), 189, 193–94.

[[[ CH AP T ER 5

Neither Erased nor Remembered Soviet “Women Combatants” and Cultural Strategies of Forgetting in Soviet Russia, 1940s–1980s Anna Krylova

I

1944, COLONEL PODZHIDAEV, commander of the 907th infantry regiment, signed a petition to posthumously award Valeriia Gnarovskaia, a female infantry private and medical orderly, with the highest Soviet title of military distinction, “Hero of the Soviet Union.” As the petition traveled up the military ladder from the regiment to division, army, and front headquarters, it acquired the signatures of male generals of different rankings. Along with Podzhidaev, the names of the division commander, the army commander, the army political department head, and, finally, the signature of the commander of the Third Ukrainian Front, General Malinovskii, were featured on the second page of the petition. By June 1944, the petition had worked its way through the military, party, and state establishments, and Gnarovskaia was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Preserved in Gnarovskaia’s personal file at the Russian State Archive of Social Political History, the petition and accompanying materials presented a typical generational and educational profile of a Soviet young female volunteer. Seventeen years old in 1941, Gnarovskaia had just graduated ten years of schooling when the war began. Having turned eighteen, she volunteered to join the troops and earned her first medal, “Medal for Valor,” by the fall of 1943. The 1944 petition for the highest Soviet title of military distinction offered a concise description of Gnarovskaia’s character and heroic conduct in combat: N EARLY

During her service in the regiment, medical orderly private V. O. Gnarovskaia has shown herself as a fearless soldier of the Red Army, a soldier infinitely devoted to her Motherland. As a result, she enjoyed deserved prestige with soldiers and officers and was an example of fearlessness and valor. Always at the front lines, Gnarovskaia saved the soldiers and officers. In just one battle near the town of

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Dolinu at the North Donets River, she carried forty-seven soldiers and officers together with their weapons from the combat field. At critical moments in combat, she personally led soldiers from her unit toward heroic deeds. Altogether, as a combatant, Gnarovskaia exterminated twenty-eight German soldiers. During the fighting for the collective farm Ivanenkovo-2, the enemy’s three Tiger tanks broke through our defense line and headed for the regiment headquarters. The situation became critical when the tanks were just 60–70 meters away from the headquarters. Gnarovskaia grabbed a bunch of grenades and rushed toward the approaching tank. Sacrificing her life, she threw herself underneath the tank. The explosion stopped the tank, and one more tank was shot by our soldiers. Because of Gnarovskaia’s heroic deed, the enemy’s counterattack was stopped, and the threat to the regiment headquarters was liquidated. The military task set for the regiment was fulfilled. Fearless medical orderly comrade Gnarovskaia died heroically, on the battlefield, fighting against German tanks. Posthumously, she deserves the government title ‘Hero of the Soviet Union.’1

The petition’s language captured cultural developments that had taken place at the Soviet front since the beginning of the war. By the fall of 1943, the Soviet military had at its disposal a bureaucratic language to address the phenomenon of the female combatant without resorting to the familiar gendered paradigms that portion the landscape of wartime society by hierarchizing and opposing between male and female spaces and identities. Given the fact that such a standard gendered perspective as well as its creative metamorphosis were readily available in wartime Soviet society—in the press, literature, film, songs, and posters—it should not have been difficult for Gnarovskaia’s regiment to tell a story about her heroic deed by utilizing binary gender oppositions in relation to combat, i.e., to present her heroism as an extraordinary and inspiring act of female sacrifice on the male territory of combat, for example. The trope of the “extraordinary sacrifice” could have effectively reaffirmed the male nature of combat and the female foreignness to it. Such an interpretation could have been especially easily adapted to Gnarovskaia and could have presented Gnarovskaia as a female medic saving male lives by sacrificing her own. However, Gnarovskaia’s regiment did not utilize this gendered option. Instead, the petition’s authors and co-signers drew on other cultural resources that existed at the Soviet front and within Soviet official culture. In their petition, they offered an alternatively gendered landscape of the Soviet war effort in which female soldiers shared combatant personality and combat skills with their male peers and commanders. Positing Gnarovskaia as an “exemplary fearless soldier of the Red Army” and presenting her leadership in combat as her signature behavior, the petition explicitly shared her makeup as a soldier with her male “soldiers and officers.” Without counterpoising Gnarovskaia with her male comrades-in-arms, the petition also did not hierarchize Gnarovskaia’s fighting with weapons over her providing medical assistance in combat. It presented the two as routine activities of Gnarovskaia’s military position. Being a combat

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medical orderly was tantamount to being a regular infantry soldier with a specialized military skill. Granovaskaia’s petition, thus, introduces us to male commanders who managed to avoid oppositional gender binaries and presented Gnarovskaia the woman and the combat medic without depriving her of her combatant character. Gnarovskaia’s sacrifice, in particular, was not that of a woman martyr but of a “woman soldier”—an alternatively gendered category of identification that brought together “woman” and “soldier” in a non-conflicted duet. Fighting “fearlessly” and proactively in general, Gnarovskaia died protecting her commanders against the tank attack and ensured the overall success of the operation. As such, she embodied the splitting of the soldier identity into male and female incarnations and the emergence of a female identity that was no longer unequivocally counterpoised to combat and violence. During the thirty years after the war, between the 1950s and 1970s, the story about Gnarovskaia’s heroic deed enjoyed continuous coverage in the Soviet central press. It resurfaced in the nationwide youth journal Smena, women’s journal Krestianka, and medical newspaper Meditsinskaia gazeta. In the process of being told and retold by journalists and historians of postwar generations, it lost many of its original facts as well as the alternative gender language that Colonel Podzhidaev used in his 1944 petition. This loss of narrative details was consequential. The story lost Gnarovskaia’s twenty-eight “kills,” her exemplary and fearless combat performance, and her inclinations toward leadership in combat. The regiment headquarters endangered by the three German tanks, which constituted the main reason for Gnarovskaia’s combat sacrifice, were also gone. In the freed space, the story acquired new, imaginary details. By the mid 1960s, Soviet journalists had supplied Gnarovskaia with a new identity and a new setting. She became a medical nurse left alone with wounded soldiers at a medical station behind the lines. Historian M. Kuzmin told the rest of the new story in a May 1965 issue of Meditsinskaia gazeta: “September 23 1943, there was fierce combat … The enemy’s tanks broke through our defense line. One of them, firing from the cannon and machine gun, headed for the medical station. At this critical moment, V. O. Gnarovskaia threw herself underneath the tank with a bunch of grenades in order to save the lives of heavily wounded soldiers.”2 Having lost her “woman soldier” identity due to this new representation, Gnarovskaia “died in order to save people,” concluded another journalist in his article for Krestianka in 1974. Building on each others’ stories, postwar historians and journalists gradually got rid of things that made Gnarovskaia a “woman soldier” and turned her into a classical maternal figure driven by her instincts to save people.3 The metamorphoses in the representation of Granovsksaia’s heroic personality offer an unusually broad conceptual scope that Soviet society had at its dis-

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posal for thinking about female combat participation. In wartime documents, Gnarovskaia is presented as a “woman soldier,” the identity that contains an alternatively gendered map of combat violence, encompassing both male and female combatants. Postwar accounts, on the other hand, offer an interpretation of Gnarovskaia’s heroic deed that is thoroughly deprived of its wartime alternative connotations. In them, traditional gender oppositions—between maledefined combat and female innate foreignness to it—enjoy a totalizing presence. Gnarovskaia is no longer a “woman soldier” but a noncombatant woman who, having found herself in the midst of combat by accident, opposed violence by sacrificing herself for the sake of wounded soldiers. Gnarovskaia’s thirty-year episode in print perfectly illustrates a subtle historical erasure. Preserving the name of the female hero and the basic outline of her heroic deed, the postwar journalists and historians unanimously mistook the female soldier for a female medical worker and erased the alterative identity of the woman soldier that informed the 1944 petition. In this chapter, I explore the cultural steps that Soviet society took, between 1941 and the 1980s, to turn Gnarovskaia and over 120,000 more young women combatants and commanders of the Second World War into self-sacrificing noncombatant nurses.4 I am particularly interested in cultural processes that made alternative gender discourses of the war period incomprehensible to Soviet postwar generations. What informs my inquiry here is the mechanism of cultural erasure that does not entail the complete disavowal of a fact but hinders the possibility of perceiving it on its own historical terms. I begin my analysis in the center of official culture of Soviet wartime society—its central press, which featured contributions by Soviet journalists, frontbased professional and amateur correspondents, writers, and male and female combatants writing from the trenches. It is in the war years that I situate the origins of the public discourse that informed the failure of the postwar generation to conceive of the female combatant outside of conventional narratives about heroic female victimhood. The wartime story about the young woman volunteer and partisan fighter Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, who died at the hands of the enemy without a chance for combat, constitutes the starting point in the public construction of the female volunteer as a failed combatant but a triumphant martyr. Taking my analysis into the postwar period, I foreground another crucial cultural development in the public re-imagination of the “woman soldier”—the appearance of a counternarrative about female victimization in the Second World War authored by the war generation of Soviet intelligentsia. According to this largely male cohort of much-acclaimed veteran writers and film directors, the “woman soldier” of the Second World War was no longer a triumphant martyr but an unnecessary victim of the Stalinist state and her own ignorance of essentialist gender differences. I argue that the postwar cult of Zoia and the veteran literature constituted the cultural context in which young

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women combatants like Gnarovskaia lost their alternative combatant identity of the war years. A crucial step in my analysis is to add, to my story about the Soviet public discourse on female combatants, yet another layer: the continuous presence, in the wartime and postwar Soviet society, of the option to think about female soldiers from an alternatively gendered point of view. In the second part of my article, I return to the war years and reconstruct the prevalent use of alternative gender languages in press coverage of “women soldiers” like Gnarovskaia. I argue that, during the war, the story about the heroic victimization of Zoia and the story about the “woman soldier” as an alternative category of identification shared the spotlight in the Soviet press, competed for public attention, and relied on active use by Soviet journalists, wartime correspondents, and male and female combatants. After the war, the option not to perceive identities of the soldier and the woman as a contradiction of gender terms underwent two changes. The identity of “woman soldier” was forced out of the center of public remembering by the victimization paradigm but acquired a new phase of elaboration in postwar literature authored by a cohort of female veterans. Writing between the 1960s and 1980s, this cohort of writers created an alternative veteran prose and made a major effort to write the shared history of violence that did not predictably gender the scenes and identities of the frontline. My analysis of Soviet war and postwar representations of female combatants builds on existing scholarship and also parts with it. I join the recent scholarship in its critique of postwar Soviet society for forgetting its female combatants of the Second World War. However, I question the critique’s implication that this act of forgetting was totalizing and already successful during and after the war.5 More importantly, my argument in this essay deals not with the representation of female combatants per se but with different gender forms of representing the modern combatant that existed in Soviet official culture.

Metaphoric Fighting: Soviet Narratives about Female Victimization and Sacrifice The official wartime story about female partisan fighter Zoia Kosmodemianskaia is well known to scholars of the Soviet culture. It came out of the war years when Soviet society confronted the fact of females volunteering and entering combat. The story about Zoia in the Soviet press was one of early war efforts to address the untraditional female desire for combat within the traditional gendered paradigm of female victimization and sacrifice. The first literary version was written up on 27 January 1942 by two Soviet journalists after they had investigated a case involving the execution of a female partisan fighter.

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The eighteen-year-old female fighter, soon to become known as Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, was captured in November of 1941 in the village of Peterischevo, near Moscow, just before she set a warehouse with ammunition on fire. Before her execution, according to eyewitness accounts, she withstood two days and one night of torture and humiliation. She was severely beaten with birch rods, burned with matches and oil from an oil lamp, and scratched with a saw. When she finally stood in the middle of the village with a hook on her neck surrounded by village dwellers who had been summoned by the German authorities to watch the execution, she declared her fearlessness to die for her people and promised that she would be avenged and that Stalin would come.6 Petr Lidov, one of the two army-based journalists who investigated the case for Pravda and whose 1942 narrative defined the postwar story, presented Zoia as a female victim who fought the enemy metaphorically: not by fighting, but by dying and by enticing the other side of the gendered dyad, the male soldier, to avenge her death. In Lidov’s account, Zoia is specifically marked as a daughter-martyr who brings the Soviet victory closer by her death alone. All her other activities, such as fighting in a partisan detachment, are cast away as inconsequential. At the end of Lidov’s sketch, she performs a classic female role in the traditional gendered war story: male soldiers visit her grave on their way to the front in order to evoke fury and gratitude. “Tania was buried without being honored, behind the village, underneath the weeping birch, and the blizzard hid the small hill of her grave. But soon here came those for whom, one dark night in December, she paved the road toward the West with her chest. Taking a rest, the soldiers will come here in order to bow to the very ground and tell her a heartfelt Russian ‘thank you.’”7 In the winter of 1941 and 1942, the theme of partisan martyrdom in the Soviet press demanded the attention of the Soviet reader. Always among the subjects covered, the resistance and the sacrifice of partisan fighters acquired a formerly impossible depth of detail thanks to the Soviet army’s first successful large-scale offensive operation. Started in early December of 1941 and lasting until April of 1942, the operation, known as the Battle of Moscow, pushed the German troops of the Center group away from the walls of the capital, where they stood in November of 1941, to safer distances of 100 and 250 kilometers. The story that came into circulation in Soviet newspapers at the beginning of 1942 intertwined the celebration of the Battle of Moscow with reportage and witness accounts about horrifying and enraging atrocities committed by the occupying troops against the partisan movement and civilian population. According to this story, the liberated regions around Moscow greeted the Soviet troops not only with tears of gratitude but with shocking accounts and visions of public torture, executions, and intimidation techniques that the enemy had used. The frozen corpse of a partisan fighter, or a row of young bodies still hanging in the freezing air on the gallows in the main town square

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or at the main village intersection, was often the first thing to greet the Soviet units. The corpses preserved a horrific record of what the deceased had gone through before they were put to death. Covered with bullet marks, dark bloody bruises, knife stabs, and burns, and missing limbs, their dead bodies entitled the deceased, according to Soviet journalists, to a particular type of death—martyrdom.8 In January and February, Zoia was among several martyrs—male and female—about whom Soviet journalists wrote feature articles and collected eyewitness accounts. Presented as one among many in January 1942, Zoia in her martyr-style inspiring death had already been singled out by the Young Communist League (Komsomol) and the Soviet government for a nationwide popularization in February 1942. On 16 February 1942, she became the first female Hero of the Soviet Union of the war period. In her new capacity as a Hero of the Soviet Union who stepped into the partisan combat line in order to die and become a muse of male hatred, Zoia’s image outlived other martyr stories of early 1942 as well as subsequent accounts of martyrdom that continuously entered the press and quickly became episodic. The Zoia figure was a product of the specific historical moment—a wartime commentary that addressed, at once, the German atrocities against the Soviet population and the female desire to fight the enemy, fusing the two into a victimization scenario with a powerful emotional charge. Featuring the appropriate feminine loyalty to the Soviet cause and the Stalinist state, the victimization story also participated in the creation of a larger legitimization narrative about Soviet moral superiority and, ultimately, the correctness of the Soviet historical choice. As such a complex public image, “Zoia” remained in the wartime press as a continuous theme, consistently invoked and remembered. She also stepped outside the press into everyday routines of frontline and home front living. Frontline soldiers named their units after Zoia while home front brigades competed to be named after Zoia. After the war, the story about Zoia resided in the center of the official celebratory narrative about the Second World War. Directly targeted at postwar generations through youth organizations and schools, “Zoia” simultaneously provided lessons in patriotic loyalty and identified the female participation in combat with a metaphoric, physically and personally devastating, but morally and nationally revitalizing struggle with the enemy. By the late 1960s, the official victimization story about women’s role in the war effort as embodied by Zoia faced its most consequential public critique in the form of a competing victimization story that came from the desk of Soviet writer-veteran Boris Vasiliev. Forty-five years old in 1969 and a member of a large cohort of Soviet writer-veterans, Vasiliev published his short novel At Dawn, It Is Quiet Here that year. As a result of this publication Vasiliev became a nationally known writer, launching a prolific and influential literary career.

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Directly engaging with female volunteers recruited and trained by the Soviet state for combat, the novel and a film that quickly followed in 1972 became two major cultural events of the 1970s. The novel told a story about five female combatants through a radically changed trope of female victimization, once again demonstrating the popular appeal of the image of the female victim, now used in a new historical context and for new reasons. The particular cultural milieu of the 1960s Soviet literary and artistic intelligentsia that Vasiliev entered after his long military career had been engaged in a critical rethinking of the war experience since the mid 1950s. The official Soviet narrative, which affirmatively posited the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War as unequivocal justification of the historical choice Russia made in October of 1917, came under nuanced and merciless investigation in novels and films by the wartime cohort of Soviet intelligentsia. Born in 1924, a high school graduate and volunteer in 1941, Vasiliev captured the veteran and wartime profile of his intelligentsia cohort, which brought ethical questions about the price of the war and the means of victory into the center of Soviet postwar public discourse. Turning to literature and film, veterans Vasil Bykov, Iurii Bondarev, Grigorii Baklanov, Ales Adamovich, and Bulat Okudzhava, together with writers, directors, and script writers of the younger generation that had missed the war by a few years, such as Valentin Rasputin, Aleksei German, and Larisa Shepitko, complicated the war story by voicing concerns about tremendous Soviet casualties, state emergency measures against the army and society, the unforgiving cruelty of wartime Soviet patriotism, and partisan warfare. Soon to contribute to all of these issues, Vasiliev marked his entrance into the public discussion by addressing a question that, so far, had not been directly dealt with: the necessity and price of female participation in combat. In his At Dawn, It Is Quiet Here, he radically revised the victimization paradigm and used it to implicitly question the celebratory official narrative about female sacrifice, and about a society that uses its future wives and mothers in combat. Vasiliev’s novel features five young women volunteers in their late teens and early twenties from the point of view of a junior officer, Vaskov, who is in his early 30s. By the will of the author, the main male hero finds himself in a situation where he and the five young women trained to be antiaircraft fighters encounter sixteen well-trained German paratroopers. The five young women are by no means flat or unremarkable characters. Five different and well-crafted portraits, they are smart, educated, talented, in love, or already mourning lovers killed by the war. When necessary, they can be courageous and strong-willed. However, in a state of war with the well-trained male enemy, they die pointless deaths in quick sequence despite Vaskov’s attempts to save them. Vasiliev explicates the reasons for such a total female failure to fight and to die meaningful soldier-like deaths. The young women’s failure comes from their

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essential, i.e., nature-given, incompatibility with war and combat. They are “future mothers,” according to the main male character, and they are doomed as soldiers because “nature itself implanted into them a hatred of murder.” Though the young women do not recognize their nature-given limitations, their true maternal nature manifests itself every time they have to fight, kill, or witness killing and death. They die too fast to derive lessons from their lives in combat. The last scene in the novel and the movie shows the aged officer Vaskov, standing with a young man whom he adopted after the war, over the grave of the young man’s mother. The dead mother is one of the five young women that Vaskov did not manage to save. The scene represents a fracture in the natural order of life. The dead mother in the grave is not a patriot of the Zoia type. Having died pointlessly, she did not leave an affirming message. Thus turning female combatants into pointless victims of war, and of their own and society’s own erroneous imagination, Vasiliev produced a new variation on the victimization narrative that, instead of legitimizing and celebrating, rebuked Soviet society for violating gender norms. Through multiple reprints and regular television broadcasts over the following two decades, Vasiliev’s story fixed another legitimate image of female combatants for Soviet society. Vasiliev’s novel was the most pointed, devastating, and tradition-asserting critique of the female presence in combat that the Soviet intelligentsia produced. But by no means did it stand in a category of its own in Soviet postwar literature. Different aspects of Vasiliev’s essentialist critique and plot structure had been present in Soviet literature and film since the late 1950s. In Soviet postwar novel and film, young women combatants, usually presented as medics, routinely died inconsequential deaths at the front without being given credit for their combat deeds.9 Starting in the 1970s, the public imagination of female participation in combat was thus shared between the two dominant visions: the Zoia story, with its affirming and patriotic intonations, and Vasiliev’s young women, who died without purpose. The two constituted the cultural context in which Gnarovskaia’s combat career was re-imagined and cleansed of its alternative relationship to war and violence. Out of the two, the Vasiliev version has enjoyed a longer life as a legitimate and socially necessary narrative. It informed the perestroika years and passed over into the post-Soviet period through multiple appropriations.

“Fighting” in the Literal Sense of the Word The Soviet official and popular effort to interpret female combatants out of their combatant identities never achieved a totalizing embrace of Soviet official culture, either during the war or afterward. A parallel wartime discussion of the female volunteer and actual soldier shared the same cultural spaces with

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discourses that accounted for female volunteers through narratives of female martyrdom and heroic victimization. In the wartime press, Soviet journalists, writers, and poets placed alternative images, life stories, and family situations of “women soldiers” next to traditionally gendered images of women-martyrs, mothers, wives, and beloved girls, the images that represented the everyday reality of the vast majority of Soviet women. The parallel discourse about female volunteers and actual soldiers drew upon a broad writing community. Together with professional journalists, writers, and poets, it also included self-appointed amateur male writers who reported from the trenches and often introduced female combatants to the Soviet reader. Central newspapers such as Pravda, Komsomolskaia pravda, Krasnaia zvezda, and Izvestiia also reprinted letters and diaries written by female combatants who described their combat life and combat collectives. Thanks to this diverse and active writing constituency, the elements and languages of frontline spaces of shared combat became a focus of the wartime press and formed a consistent presence there. Already a known dimension of the Soviet war effort in 1941, the “young woman soldier” began her en masse entrance into the Soviet central press in 1942 and 1943, a development that was linked to the nationwide state effort to recruit young women volunteers for the military. During the later period of the war, from 1944 till 1945, by which time the Soviet government had stopped its mobilizations of young women, the coverage of female combatants did not disappear from the press. It was devoted to those young women combatants who had gotten to the front and fought there as specialized and hightech soldiers and commanders, thanks to state-run mobilizations and training. Far from being silenced, underreported, or erased, as scholars have suggested earlier, I argue that female frontline combatants and commanders, in their still comparatively small numbers in Soviet combat formations, occupied a disproportionate position in Soviet wartime press coverage in relation to the Soviet population at large. Just as important as extended coverage of female combatants was the particular language that Soviet journalists, amateur frontline correspondents, and male and female combatants used to account for the female presence in combat. The introduction of the identification category of “woman soldier” into the wartime Soviet press marked a consequential cultural development. It was accompanied by an elaborate and multifaceted discourse that presented combat spaces and combat profiles of the modern soldier as no longer belonging exclusively to the domain of masculinity but instead being shared between men and women. As a result, in addition to leaving a rich public record of young women’s participation in combat, Soviet central newspapers offered their readers a well-articulated and alternatively gendered national narrative that told a story about the Soviet experience in the Second World War without resorting

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to conventional gender stereotypes.10 Let us then go back to the war period and add yet another layer of cultural representation to our discussion of female volunteers and combatants. During the war, the story of Zoia Kosmodemianskaia did not monopolize the representation of female heroism. In Soviet newspapers, female heroes of Gnarovskaia’s profile kept close company with Zoia in the most literal sense: Zoia’s and their names stood next to each other in celebratory and policy-explicating editorials and feature articles that demanded the attention of the reader. In its 1943 special issue devoted to International Women’s Day, Komsomolskaia pravda, for example, featured six female Heroes of the Soviet Union: “During the days of the Great Patriotic War, young women brought up by the LeninStalin Young Communist League joined the glorious family of Heroes of the Soviet Union. Here are their names: courageous female partisans Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, Elizaveta Chaikina, and Antonina Petrova, and Red Army soldiers Mariia Polivanova, Nataliia Kovshova, and junior sergeant Mariia Baida.”11 The featured six female heroes were evenly divided into three martyrs of the partisan movement—Zoia and the two young women who also died at the hands of the enemy—and three combatants of the frontline units. It was no accident that Komsomolskaia pravda treated both groups of young women as well-known public figures without need of special introduction. Given the preceding coverage in four major Soviet newspapers, the Komsomolskaia pravda editorial board was right to assume that Mariia Polivanova, Nataliia Kovshova, and Mariia Baida were no less known to their readers in spring of 1944 than the three female martyrs. Especially Polivanova and Kovshova, together with several more celebrated female combatants such as pilot Marina Raskova, sniper Liudmila Pavlichenko, and machine gunner Nina Onilova, constituted continuous themes in the Soviet press. Like Zoia, they were recognizable public figures about whom the reader was periodically reminded. Polivanova and Kovshova became Heroes of the Soviet Union in February of 1943. Friends and students at Moscow Aviation University before the war, they volunteered in October 1941, having completed sniper courses before the Central Women’s Sniper School was organized. They fought as a sniper pair and as regular infantry soldiers until August 1942. According to a feature article that introduced the two female combatants to the readers of Komsomolskaia pravda, after a year of fighting Polivanova and Kovshova had more than 300 kills and were decorated with the Order of the Red Banner. Describing their last “very difficult battle,” the author used a complex system of identification categories to talk about the two young women, categories that did not keep good company with national coverage of female martyrs. The author thus referred to Polivanova and Kovshova as “young women” and “brave daughters” while at the same time it included them in the ranks of “brave soldiers” who waged combat in its most literal sense. “Young women,” “brave daughters,” and “brave sol-

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diers” were merged into an alternative female identity that encompassed the conventionally incompatible. With fury, Germans were fighting their way forward. But the ranks of the brave soldiers were shrinking. Soon, only three were still alive: Nataliia Kovshova, Mariia Polivanova, and sniper Novikov. The three were wounded. There were no more bullets … The Germans were approaching. The young women threw two grenades. When the fascists came up closely, the brave daughters of Moscow blew up the last two grenades. They died but the splinters of the grenades killed a few more Germans.12

Unlike Polivanova and Kovshova, junior sergeant Mariia Baida was a living Hero of the Soviet Union in 1944 and for many years after the war. As a young woman volunteer in her early twenties, she fought in a navy reconnaissance unit and storming detachments as an automatic hand machine gunner. As the first young woman to be awarded the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union for her conduct in combat in defense of Sevastopol, 20 June 1942, she appeared in the central military newspaper Krasnaia zvezda in a feature article, “Heroine of Sevastopol,” a week later on 27 June 1942. The same day, the national trade union newspaper Izvestiia also ran a detailed piece by a war correspondent who interviewed Baida about the day of combat for which she received the honor. Both the Krasnaia zvezda and Izvestiia articles featured combat heroine Baida in the midst of a day-long battle, fighting among male combatants with her automatic hand machine gun. The detailed and dynamic description of Baida’s deeds—holding the defensive line together with a male soldier, killing four Germans with one long and precise burst of fire, saving a soldier with her automatic machine gun in a face-to-face skirmish—took the reader into the heart of the routine defensive action that Baida shared with her fellow combatants that summer of 1942 at Sevastopol.13 Contrary to all sacred taboos of conventional womanhood, the two journalists celebrated Baida as a combat heroine who combined expert killing in combat with an unconventional means of saving fellow soldiers’ lives—her automatic hand machine gun. Unlike Zoia, who was a hero and a martyr, these and other female combatants who appeared in Soviet newspapers on a monthly basis were specifically and unambiguously referred to as “women soldiers” (zhenshchina-boets or zhenshchina-voin). As such they were differentiated from women-martyrs, women-laborers, and women-patriots, the identifications pertaining to women who lived and performed conventionally female wartime roles and duties. To avoid possible confusion with figurative understanding of such notions as “soldier,” “combat,” and “frontline,” which were widely used in the representation of women-laborers and women-partisan martyrs, professional journalists and amateur correspondents who wrote about young female combatants pointedly stressed that they used military terms in their “literal sense” (v bukvalnom smysle).14 The novel identity of the “woman soldier” existed in an alternative

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discursive universe of the war press, where the notion of “woman” did not conflict with the notion of combat as a skill, civic responsibility, and identity. In fact, by combining “woman” and “soldier,” Soviet journalists set themselves onto a discursive slope at the bottom of which the very meanings of “woman” and “soldier” had to take on new non-oppositional connotations. We can trace one such process of reinterpretation and creation of alternative social identities in young women’s writings that found their way into central press during the war. Like many young women combatants, Nataliia Kovshova, for example, left behind an extended collection of letters written to her mother, aunt, and her large family. After Kovshova’s death in August 1942 and the subsequent conferral of the “Hero of the Soviet Union” title, Komsomolskaia pravda began to publish her letters, which had been sent to the newspaper by her mother and aunt. Altogether, eleven letters were published as a sequence in May 1943. In each issue they took up more than half of a newspaper page.15 Kovshova’s and other young women’s letters, which continuously circulated through Soviet newspapers, offered the Soviet reading public an identity-focused angle on female combatants and their relationships to their families behind the lines. They spectacularly captured the ongoing reinterpretation of such gender-specific identifications and characteristics as “woman,” “daughter,” and “womanliness.” In her letters, Kovshova unproblematically moved among several wellcrafted and passionate self-representations: a merciless and eager soldier longing for her regiment, a gentle, loving, and homesick niece, cousin, daughter, granddaughter, and sister. For example, writing to her aunt’s family on 9 June 1942 from behind the lines, where she was recovering from wounds sustained two months earlier, she presented herself as a woman soldier who strove to go back into combat and, at the same time, collected forest flowers in order to make her front hospital dugout a “cozy” and “beautiful” place: I came here not to sit behind the bushes but to fight the Germans, did I not? So, I am sure that the issue [her unhealed wounds] will be taken care of and soon I will be back in combat in order to beat the damned insane dogs … and to chase them until there is no place for them to go and, there, to crush them down out of existence. Dearest, how are you? Why have you been writing so seldom to your Natka? … That is not good!!! I miss you so much that I can hardly bear it. I wish I could fly to you, embrace you all tightly and kiss you gently and passionately … Nowadays, we live in a dugout. It is not bad. There is a stove, plank beds, even a table and a shelf. And of course, a bunch of forest lilies, and the coziness and aroma that they create. So beautiful! “Beauty” is a good thing, no doubt. But I am dying to get back to my regiment.16

Kovshova thus included her female combatant self, with its eagerness, hate, and determination, into a larger military entity—her regiment. Neither her

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passionate homesickness nor her love of flowers and attention to coziness took away from or belittled her militant combatant identity, as this and other letters indicate. Her female-specific behavior, in particular caring for and admiring flowers, was neither perceived by her, nor presented, as devaluing her as a “soldier.” This combination of the military and the feminine as mutually compatible and not contradictory is a crucial moment in the reinterpretation of the “woman” and the “soldier,” and of gender differences that are constitutive of these two identifications outside oppositional and hierarchal connotations.17 During and after the war, Kovshova’s way of being a Soviet young woman soldier was actively supported and promoted by her mother and aunt. Both longtime members of the Communist Party, the sisters Aralovets upheld their daughter and niece’s claim to combatant personality and alternative womanhood. Interviewed for the initial February 1943 article in Komsomolskaia pravda, Kovshova’s mother, Nina Aralovets, told the journalist that she “recognized” her daughter “even in the way she chose to die”: like a soldier who did not allow the enemy to “rejoice even for one instant.”18 Kovshova’s home front addressees thus embodied, as vividly as her letters, a set of new relationships to the home front and to the family that female combatants had initiated and realized. In relation to her extended family, which included eight women and one man, she was a new type of a daughter, niece, and sister whose civic and military rights and responsibilities stretched into the space of combat. A broader scope of public coverage of female combatants features a consistent journalistic effort to keep both female combatants and alternative forms of re-gendered representation of them and their family arrangements in the press throughout the war. The collective image of these young women lacks homogeneity and exhibits creative possibilities for thinking about gender in a society that actively operates with more than one gender system. Among young female combatants who contributed to this continuous wartime discourse either as subjects of feature articles or as writers about themselves and other combatants were anti-tank infantry soldier Liubov Zemskaia, fighter pilot Liliia Litviak, air regiment commanders Marina Raskova, Valentina Grizodubova, and Evdokiia Bershanskaia, tank driver Ekaterina Petliuk, machine gunner Nina Onilova, and nine female night-bombers who became Heroes of the Soviet Union in February 1945.19 In the Soviet war press, such radical reinterpretations of meaning and place of gender in key wartime identities such as the modern soldier, the citizen, and the woman did not constitute a free-floating and unmediated discourse. Radical reinterpretations had distinct discursive limitations—themes and actors that could not be raised and featured in relation to women’s entrance into the armed forces. One such glaring omission in the wartime public coverage of women soldiers was the central role that the Stalinist government played in the mobilization and training of female volunteers. The tremendous scale of the

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operation, which involved Soviet party and military leaders as well as bureaucratic institutions, was systematically and carefully kept out of the public eye throughout the war. The prevalent representation of young female combatants in terms that did not utilize oppositional and hierarchal notions of gender, thus, did not automatically include the acknowledgment of the main institutional actor that enabled the practical realization of this vision. This and other limitations, however, do not cancel out the fact that the Soviet society not only went beyond contemporary existing European models of women’s incorporation into the armed forces but also used alternative discourses on gender to account for the phenomenon. Nor do they diminish the extreme self-contradictory representation of wartime womanhood that catered to the contradictory social policies and military needs of the Soviet government. As a result, the side-by-side celebration of women laborers and “women soldiers” created a profoundly ambiguous national narrative of Soviet participation in the Second World War. After the war, the alternative story of the Soviet war effort that featured female combatants as sharing combat with men and thinking about themselves without the use of conventional gender oppositions was not discontinued. However, it did relocate into more marginalized cultural spaces than the central press. Despite the marginalization, it was during the postwar years that female veterans turned their prewar lives, war experiences, and alternative understandings of “woman,” “combatant,” and “citizen” into autobiographies, fiction, and memoirs. Women veterans waited until the mid 1960s to begin their efforts to write themselves into war history on their own terms. Until then, the majority of female veterans, following the postwar trajectory of veteran prose as a whole, had kept silent. In the late 1940s and 1950s, future key participants in the public discussion about women’s participation in combat in the Second World War went back to school, began their working careers, were sick, and spent time recovering from the physical and psychological hardships of the war. The vast majority of female combatants who later became active literary and public figures were married, often to male veterans whom they had met at the front. The en masse appearance of female veteran prose and recollections about the war coincided with the beginning of the official Soviet campaign to memorialize the war history and the Soviet intelligentsia’s challenge to the resulting official story. The most prolific and accomplished among the female veteran writers were night-bombers Marina Chechneva, Nataliia Kravtsova, and Larisa Litvinova, infantry and artillery commanders Valentina Chudakova, Tamara Sycheva, and Zoia Medvedeva, and tanker Irina Levchenko. Having turned their autobiographies into subject matter for their literary works, they alone authored over thirty titles. Nataliia Kravtsova’s From Sunset to Dawn (1969) was issued in more than ten editions, reaching over a million copies.20

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Another significant group among former female combatants, including chief of staff of a night-bomber regiment Irina Rakobolskaia, dive-bomber Galina Markova, head of the Political Office at the Women’s Central Sniper School Ekaterina Nikiforova, and snipers N. Solovei and E. Uspenskaia, who had been involved in women’s military institutions and fought in women’s formations, became amateur historians, record keepers, and editors of innovative volumes of documents and sketches by women that told a multilayered story inside a larger narrative authored by the editor.21 The largest group of female combatants authored memoirs. Yet another essential actor, in this effort to remember the war without relegating female combatants to roles of either heroic or misled victims, was the Soviet state and its publishing houses. Between the 1950s and 1980s, Soviet publishing houses printed and reprinted millions of copies of novels, volumes, and document collections written by and about female combatants. This prolonged, prolific, and purposeful effort on the part of women veterans over three decades formed an alternative stream in postwar veteran literature. It developed in critical dialogue with both the official war narrative that focused on the Zoia cult and the main stream of veteran prose that used the victimization narrative to criticize the official cult of heroic female martyrdom. The consciousness of being “first in history” to enter combat as combatants and the intention to write a frontline history as a shared experience between men and women marked women’s postwar literary undertakings as a radically different agenda. Focusing on challenges and possibilities of intergender frontline situations, women veterans created literature that was acutely attentive to traditional gender norms and their deep presence in the human psyche, while at the same time they also articulated an alternative discourse that they used to argue, reason, and act so as to preserve in their minds the image of the front and combatants as not being completely consumed by traditional gender scripts.

Conclusion This account of women veterans’ active pursuit of their war past on their alternative terms does not end happily. Women veterans’ writings did not secure them and their story a postwar public acknowledgement. The women veterans’ story failed to make a deep impact on the way the postwar generation of Soviet intelligentsia imagined female participation in combat. The 1985 Soviet and post-Soviet bestseller War’s Unwomanly Face by female journalist Svetlana Aleksievich, born three years after the war, vividly captures her generation’s inability to conceive of female combatants like Gnarovskaia, Kovshova, and Baida without inserting them into the victimization paradigm. Having built her book on interviews with women veterans, Aleksievich explained her interviewees’

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decision to fight as being ultimately a departure from their womanly maternal essence. Aleksievich’s book is deeply contradictory and unaware of its contradictions. On the one hand, Aleksievich carefully writes up interviews with women veterans who explicate their alternative profiles to her. One woman veteran, combat pilot Antonina Bondareva, for example, attempts to explain to Aleksievich that, for her generation of young women, “family and children” were not “the most important thing in life” while being a “good mother” did not exclude being a good soldier. On the other hand, between the interviews Aleksievich in turn writes her own story about women’s essential foreignness to combat and their unavoidable sacrifice at the front without recognizing that her account stands in open contradiction to the majority of her interviewees.22 Thus the place that postwar society assigned to women veterans’ voices and books existed far away from recognized and admired bestsellers and novelbased films. Women veterans, meanwhile, simultaneously preserved and advanced wartime redefinitions of the identity of the soldier and woman and attested to postwar Soviet society’s inability to acknowledge the presence of this alternative story in its midst. Competing with parallel narratives of victimization, their story, which during the war had stayed in the center of public attention, dramatically lost out to victimization accounts. The best way to end this chapter seems to be to raise more questions about the Soviet case of forgetting and remembering. How does a society achieve such a profound erasure of a reconfigured gendered point of view after keeping it in the center of public attention for four years of war and in the presence of female veterans who consistently spoke and wrote publicly after the war? Unless we assign to the victimization paradigm an inexplicable power to triumph unconditionally, the Soviet postwar situation, in which the female veterans’ story was neither technically erased nor, at the same time, understood when encountered, awaits further investigation beyond the realm of official and popular discourses. Our fuller understanding of this case will concern social policies and generational changes that must have informed and ensured female combatants’ popular reinterpretation as victims.

Notes 1. Russian State Archive of Social-Political History, fond 7 M, opis 2, delo 319, list 1–2. 2. M. Kuzmin, “V gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Meditsinskaia gazeta, 12 May 1965. See also I. Pikkiev, “S granatami pod tank,” Smena, 8 October 1950; V. Ginzburg, “Devushka s granatoi,” Meditsinskaia gazeta, 9 May 1969; V. Malyshev, “Podvig ‘Lastochki,’” Krestianka, December 1974. 3. Ginzburg, “Devushka s granatoi.” 4. The number 120,000 includes only young women combatants who served in combatbound troops. The number is calculated by using annual female memberships of the Army Young

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Communist League and by factoring an average casualty rate for the Soviet Armed Forces into each year’s female membership. The statistics for calculations were taken from V. G. Eremin and P. F. Isakov, Molodezh v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow, 1977), 91, and G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Poteri Vooruzhennykh Sil SSSR v voinakh, boevykh deistviiakh I voennykh konfliktakh (Moscow, 1993), 158–59. 5. Susanne Conze and Beate Fieseler, “Soviet Women as Comrades-in-Arms: A Blind Spot in the History of the War,” in Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds., The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana, 2000), 211-34; Barbara Alpern Engel, “The Womanly Face of War: Soviet Women Remember World War II,” in Nicole Dombrowski, ed., Women and War in the 20th Century: Enlisted With or Without Consent (New York, 1999), 138–61; Suzanne Ament, “Reflecting Individual and Collective Identities: Songs of World War II,” in Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux, eds., Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture (DeKalb, 2006), 115–30; Reina Pennington, Wings, Women, and War. Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (Lawrence, 2001); K. J. Cottam, “Soviet Women in Combat in World War II: The Ground Forces and the Navy,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 3, no. 4 (1980); J. Erickson, “Soviet Women at War,” in John Garrard and Carol Garrard, eds., World War II and the Soviet People (New York, 1993), 50–76. 6. P. Lidov, “Tania,” in Pravda, 27 January 1942. According to the article, Zoia Kosmodemianskaia called herself Tania around the German authorities. 7. Lidov, “Tania.” 8. See N. Mikhailov, “O vosmi poveshennykh v Volokolamske,” Pravda, 31 January 1942; “Slava bessmertnym,” Komsomolskaia pravda, 1 February 1942. 9. See Grigorii Baklanov’s Piad zemli, Vecheslav Kondratiev’s Sashka, Bulat Okudzhava’s Bud zdorov, shkoliar! Also see the films Krylia, directed by Larisa Shepitko (1966); Goriachii sneg, directed by G. Egiazariv (1972); V boi idut odni stariki, directed by Leonid Bykov (1973). 10. For alternative representations of modern warfare and combat identities in Soviet society and culture of the 1930s, see Anna Krylova, “Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women Soldiers in 1930s Stalinist Russia,” Gender and History 16, no. 3 (November 2004), 626-53. 11. “Shest geroin,” Komsomolskaia pravda, 7 March 1943. 12.V. Chigashkov, “Docheri Moskvy,” Komsomolskaia pravda, 18 February 1943. 13. S. Galyshev, “Razvedchitsa Mariia Baida,” Izvestiia, 27 June 1942; “Geroinia Sevastopolia – Mariia Baida,” Krasnaia zvezda, 27 June 1942. 14. “Truzhenitsy, voiny, patriotki,” editorial in Komsomolskaia pravda, 8 March 1944; also “Podvig Sovetskoi devushki,” editorial in Komsomolskaia pravda, 23 September 1942. 15. For more publications of letters by female combatants in the central press, see “Dva Pisma,” Pravda, 29 October 1942; V. Bulatov, “Na Krymskoi zemle,” Pravda, 1 November 1942. 16. Letter of 9 June 1942 by Nataliia Kovshova, Komsomolskaia pravda, 25 May 1943. 17. For more examples of reconfigured meanings of “womanly” behavior of women soldiers, see L. Giune and A. Adzhimamudov, “Chizhik i ee podrugi,” Komsomolskaia pravda, 1 June 1943; P. Tronko and V. Zgurskii, “Liliia,” Komsomolskaia pravda, 31 August 1943. 18. Chigashkov, “Docheri Moskvy.” 19. I. Poliakov and A. Rotleider, “Istrebitel tankov Liuba Zemskaia,” Komsomolskaia pravda, 25 March 1942; Al. Khamadan, “Smert Niny Onilovoi,” Komsomolskaia pravda, 8 July 1942; Tronko and Zgurskii, “Liliia”; “Docheri Sovetskogo naroda,” editorial in Pravda, 13 January 1943; “Rech Geroia Sovetskogo Soiuza podpolkovnika Grizodubovoi,” Pravda, 13 January 1943; “Katia Petliuk,” Pravda, 8 March 1944; E. Nikulina and R. Gasheva, “Nash Komandir,” Pravda, 8 March 1945; A. Magid, “Deviatka otvazhniykh,” Pravda, 26 February 1945. 20. Between the 1960s and mid 1980s alone, Irina Levchenko published eight books; Nataliia Kravtsova, five; Marina Chechneva, five; Valentina Chudakova, Tamara Sucheva, Larisa Litvinova, and Zoia Medvedeva, two each. For their main publications, see Irina Levchenko, Povest o voennykh godakh (Moscow, 1961) and Khoziaka tanka (Moscow, 1964); M. I. Chechneva, Nebo os-

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taetsia nashim (Moscow, 1976); V. V. Chudakova, Chizhik – ptichka s kharakterom (Leningrad, 1965); Z. M. Medvedeva, Opalennaia iunost (Moscow, 1967); N. Kravtsova, Ot zakata do rassveta (Moscow, 1968); Tamara Sycheva, Po zovu seedtsa (Kiev, 1989); R. E. Aronova, “Nochnye vedmy,” (Moscow, 1969); L. Litvinova, Ulitsa Tatiany Makarovoi (Moscow, 1976). 21. I. Rakobolskaia, ed., ‘Poka stuchit serdtse.’ Dnevniki I pisma Geroia Sovetskogo Soiuza Evgenii Rudnevoi (Moscow, 1954, 1958, 1995); M. A. Kazarinova and A. A. Poliantseva, eds., V nebe frontovom (Moscow, 1962, 1968, 1971); E. Nikiforova and A. Morozov, Pozhdennaia voinoi (Moscow, 1985); I. Rakobolskaia and N. Kravtsova, Nas nazyvali nochnymi vedmami (Moscow, 2002). 22. Svetlana Aleksievich, U voiny ne zhenskoe litso (Moscow, 1988), 204.

[[[ CH AP T ER 6

Generations as Narrative Communities Some Private Sources of Public Memory in Postwar Germany Dorothee Wierling

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on several interrelated questions: whether, to what extent, and in what form private narratives about the past told by different generations in the two postwar German states correspond to public and official narratives, or rather, become incorporated into them. “The past” here refers to National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Shoah, and Germany represents a unique case within Europe in several respects. Not only is it the nation responsible for the war itself and the atrocities linked to it; it also offers historians a unique opportunity to study how different versions of history develop in two societies and political systems that, while building on the same shared experiences, process these experiences under very different and perhaps even opposing conditions, turning them into meaningful stories for their citizens. The respective politics of memory in the FRG and GDR were supposed to establish versions of the past in which a cathartic founding myth provided historical legitimacy: to Western-influenced democracy on the one hand, to anti-fascist state socialism on the other. In both cases, an effort was made to draw on the personal experiences of the population and incorporate them into the official interpretation. The politics of memory in both German postwar states has been thoroughly researched.1 What interests me in this text, however, is the private perspective on these public interpretations. I would like to concentrate on the interplay between personal and official narratives, and on instances of mediation between these two spheres. One such instance is the concept of “generation.” Three of these generations, viewed as narrative communities, will be examined more closely: the so-called generation of experience (ErlebnisgeneraHE FOLLOWING ESSAY FOCUSES

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tion), the first postwar generation, known as the ’68ers, and—as the most recent phenomenon—a “generation in the making,” the so-called war children (Kriegskinder). With this German-German comparison I would like to pursue not only an empirical differentiation, but also a methodological question about the relation between public and private interpretive claims. The term “memory” is used in reference to both public representations of the past and the individual act of visualizing one’s personal experiences. While theoreticians of memory emphasize the distinction between “cultural” and “communicative” memory, discussions about historical memory often treat these two modes as one and the same; sometimes cultural memory, the form more accessible to historians, is presumed to be a collective, often national expression of individual memories.2 From the field of oral history we know that interviewees do draw on public narratives, but at the same time the interviews are the rather complex and unpredictable result of conflicting frameworks and involuntary memories as well as unconscious selection from an abundance of memories.3 Empirical research on memory is skeptical for the most part about the truth content of personal memories. Hence the group working with the social psychologist Harald Welzer came to the conclusion that there is no simple, unambiguous relationship between an experience and the memory of it. They further concluded that family stories and popular products of the entertainment industry have the greatest influence on shaping personal interpretations of the past, and scholarly or political authorities the least.4 In the following text, my basic interest lies not so much in the gap between private and public interpretations, but rather in the (covert) communication between them. With what content and by what means do the experiences of individual people make their way into stories that are not specific to the individual? The contents of both the politics of memory and private stories about the past have changed considerably in the course of postwar history. This is readily apparent in West Germany, but it can also be seen in the GDR, even though here a seemingly unchanging narrative created in the late 1940s claimed an absolute monopoly on interpretation: the history of fascism as a political instrument of capitalism, and of the GDR as the fulfillment of the anti-fascist promise. The transition that occurred happened below its surface, as the persuasive power of this story dwindled over time, especially among people born after the 1950s in the GDR.5 In recent years, “generation” has become an important category for historians.6 Drawing on Karl Mannheim’s classic text from 1928, “Über das Problem der Generationen,” I use the term to mean more than simple, countable cohorts. It refers more specifically to a group of people who at the same age are subject to the same historical determining factors (generational embedding or Generationslagerung) and therefore potentially have had the same experiences

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(generational cohesion or Generationszusammenhang), and who at least in some cases find a common language and response as a result (generational unity or Generationseinheit). With reference to this last point we speak today of “political generations” that clearly represent only a small part of the entire cohort.7 Three questions arise in connection with the concept of generation. To what extent did generational experiences come to determine patterns for interpreting the past? To what extent did the self-description as a generation help to formulate such an interpretation and make a claim for its validity? And how was the concept of generation ultimately used to endow individual memories with the power to successfully claim public recognition?

Two “Generations of Experience” and Public Interpretations As direct eyewitnesses, the age groups that had consciously experienced the Third Reich and Second World War were also the first authors and recipients of memories and remembrance. Here we need to differentiate between two groups: those people born before, during and shortly after the First World War, who lived through the years between 1933 and 1945 as adults; and those born in the late 1920s, who experienced the Nazi period as children and the war as adolescents. On the whole, Nazi ideology impressed and influenced these younger people more than it did older ones, while the extent to which the older people identified with the Nazis varied more widely, though the majority were indeed blinded by economic and military successes and behaved opportunistically.8 The atmosphere immediately after the end of the war was dominated by an almost manic will to survive and rebuild that was coupled with widespread apathy vis-à-vis the suffering that Germans had both endured and inflicted. Everything was directed toward normalization and forgetting.9 At the same time, in private narratives of the 1950s the war was omnipresent. Although some men remained silent about their experiences, former soldiers typically gathered in families, bars, and trains to tell stories of Russian winters and French wines, while women spoke of nighttime bombings and foraging expeditions. As happy as people were about the end of the war itself, denazification and the 1952 “Law for the Equalization of Burdens” (Lastenausgleichsgesetz)10 were negatively determined. But the survivors often cast their stories as travel adventures, humorous anecdotes, or tales of extraordinary heroic deeds. Told and retold with individual variations, these experiences carried a double message: one of suffering and loss, but also one of strength and perseverance, behind which National Socialism itself seemed to disappear. In West Germany these notes were struck in newspapers, popular magazines, and novels as well, but in political debates and speeches they were always accompanied by a ritualized renunciation of Nazi ideology and especially anti-Semitism, together with the

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positive invocation of democracy and the rejection of Communism as totalitarianism and thus simply a variety of Nazism.11 In East Germany, given the extreme violence experienced during occupation by the Red Army, these stories were able to claim even greater credence, but no legitimate public forum existed where such grievances could be expressed. The tales remained private or untold. While throughout all of Germany the discourse about one’s own victimhood was closely linked to a disavowal of guilt by “innocent victims,” in East Germany the official approach to wartime and postwar suffering picked up on the causal connection between the support or at least tolerance of aggressive Nazi policies, and the cost people now faced in the sense of a bill to be paid.12 In this way the private topos of the victim was officially adopted in both German postwar systems, but in the context of the Cold War it developed into juxtaposed mirror images with regard to “the enemy” in the Second World War. Each system divided its former wartime enemies into those who were now declared protectors, partners, and friends, and those who remained enemies. For West Germans the enemy remained the “Russian Bolshevist”; for East Germans it was the “Anglo-American Terror Bomber.” The concept of restitution or Wiedergutmachung likewise developed in characteristically parallel but separate ways. While in the West the term was used particularly in reference to material compensation for Jewish victims of the Nazis, what prevailed in the East were notions of restoring one’s reputation (Wieder-gut-werden), of anti-fascist reeducation and self-improvement. And finally, in the two systems the term Aufbau developed different connotations: in the West it referred primarily to economic reconstruction (Wiederaufbau), while in the East it also meant political conversion (Umbau). In both constellations, the official consideration of (and reflection on) National Socialist crimes occupied a very limited space, a space that was likewise based on careful distinctions. In the West the persecuted and murdered Jews became the central group of victims, while in official rhetoric the crimes themselves had not been committed by Germans but rather by Nazis “in the name of Germans” (im deutschen Namen); well into the 1960s, commemoration of the resistance was dominated by conservative middle-class groups or individuals. While in the Federal Republic these interpretations were the topic of public debates and also changed over time—e.g., incorporating new groups of victims or heretofore denied resistance activities into official discourse13—the official view that had been developed in the second half of the 1940s in East Germany remained stable. According to this view, National Socialism represented fascist class rule, against which the KPD had battled alone, or at the very least led the fight. Corresponding to the West German focus on the persecution and killing of European Jews, the main groups of victims here were Communist concentration camp inmates and Soviet forced laborers.14 Both of these versions represented potential exoneration for a populace that on the whole had profited

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from National Socialism. Mass support for the NS regime and the tolerance of its crimes were dealt with more or less noncommittally, and even denazification—though it took a more radical form in the East than in the West—did not prove to be a profound social purification process. In the West, pluralistic democracy gained acceptance primarily through its connection with the so-called economic miracle: the discourse of German victimization gradually receded behind the pride in successful reconstruction, while Stalinist-influenced state socialism in the East became firmly established on a foundation that combined Soviet military presence with political repression, a system of granting new privileges to hitherto disadvantaged groups (Gegenpriviligierung), and the call to a kind of heroic anti-fascism. Here, under the conditions of the Soviet Occupation Zone and early GDR, it was primarily the Hitler Youth generation that developed into the genuinely successful, upwardly mobile (social climbing) generation of state socialism. Usually closely identified with the National Socialists and further mobilized ideologically by the war, their feelings of self-worth had been shattered by that war’s devastating end. This made them the ideal target audience for the Communists, who promised them not only forgiveness but also a complete reorientation. This offer proved irresistible to many, especially for members of the lower middle classes, since it was coupled with access to education and career. The new local elites who were recruited from this group represented the majority of Central Committee members at the end of the GDR; a select few had even made it into the politburo.15 They represent the sole legitimate generation of the GDR, and their biographical construction, developed from the key experience of their conversion and salvation after 1945, can be found in resumés (Lebensläufe), speeches, and autobiographies dating from both before and after 1989.16 For the same cohorts of West Germans born in the late 1920s we find no comparable pattern of demonstrative repoliticization. In the 1950s the sociologist Helmut Schelsky coined an extremely apt term for this age group and those born in the years that immediately followed: the “skeptical generation,” who focused exclusively on their personal concerns, career, and private happiness. Schelsky described them as sober and apolitical, whereby he avoided any explicit mention of the fact that people in this age group grew up under National Socialism and in some cases had experienced the war as active-duty soldiers.17 Without the ideologically consistent offer of an institution legitimized by its fight against National Socialism, and lacking the social opportunities that came with an elite exchange (Elitenaustausch), they were in fact dependent on individual strategies, which they developed in the spaces opened up by economic progress. They tended to speak about the past in terms of a seduction that had abused their idealism. Its consequence in the West was that people were determined never again to let themselves be politically seduced, which also meant not letting themselves be converted to a different faith.

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Two Different Postwar Generations Public and official interpretations of the “Third Reich” in both postwar German states were thus marked by similarities and parallels as well as opposites inherent in the systems. Differences were even more readily apparent with regard to economic development and basic material living conditions. The economic superiority of West German capitalism over state socialism with its constant shortages and planning failures was obvious: it could be seen both in public spending on the rebuilding of infrastructure and the housing industry, and in the relative possibilities for private individuals to achieve prosperity, even wealth. Ultimately the mentalities in the two states also diverged, particularly after the Berlin Wall and closure of the western border of the GDR constrained its citizens to live inside their country permanently. The political credo in the West was “freedom,” and the growing political and cultural openness toward Western Europe and the United States made it easier to forget the war.18 It was different in the GDR. The increase in self-confidence in the West had its East German “counterpart” in an ongoing experience of domineering official behavior and potential repression. The political motto used by the leadership in the effort to legitimize itself was “peace.” But invoking peace also meant keeping the threat of war alive, and indeed, especially in East Germany, the fear of war remained an obsession well into the 1960s.19 The first postwar generation grew up in these distinctly different worlds of East and West. Without memories of their own about Nazi Germany and the war, their image of the past was shaped primarily by family stories concerning the family’s losses and suffering at the end of the war and in the early postwar years. In contrast, the 1930s were usually depicted as an apolitical, harmless, and generally good time, when economic prosperity together with initial military successes had deceived people about the true character of the Nazis.20 The openly dictatorial aspects of the regime were often cited as a way of justifying why people had been afraid to protest or resist. This familial memory was quite similar in East and West, as various studies have shown.21 At the same time, however, the scope and degree of this narrative’s credibility were not the same among the younger generation. During the long postwar period in the East, where the material and political consequences of the war were clearly visible, and given the continuity of political immaturity under the conditions of SED rule, these stories functioned much longer than was possible in the West as a family tie that could help ensure that children empathized with parents and their suffering. In the West, in contrast, where material and mental traces of the war gradually disappeared in the face of economic prosperity, these narratives provoked more and more questions, critique(s) and attacks in the 1960s—i.e., they provoked a familial generational conflict centered around the parents’ National Socialist past, a conflict that was almost entirely absent in the East.22

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Admittedly, the function and effect of these family stories can be measured only in the context of the official interpretations that existed alongside them. In the GDR this interpretation was morally strict, enforced by the political elite in an authoritarian way, and unequivocal. The same held true in the West, though in a less apparent and explicit way, for although teachers in school spoke like parents at home, textbooks and documentary films told a different story: one of German perpetrators and crimes as well as fellow-travelers (Mitläufer).23 Neither in the FRG nor in the GDR were there institutions that could mediate between the private and official narratives. As a result, both postwar generations faced the question of how to deal with their coexistence. This situation has been described as the parallelism of photo album and lexicon.24 Yet we also find attempts among those born after the war to relate these interpretive systems to one another, either by making use of pertinent “gaps” and loopholes in the official narrative to develop a view that integrated both versions, or by dismissing the truth claims of one of the versions. In the GDR there was a pronounced difference between official and private realms, which were experienced as polar opposites. Generational conflict within the family, however, would have posed a threat to the shelter of one’s private realm, and we find some evidence of personal efforts to find mediating narratives. These appear to move in two directions. On the one hand, the term “victim” offered by the official version is broadened until it can be applied so that one’s parents—because of their war-related losses and suffering—become “victims of fascism” in a very general sense.25 On the other hand, parents’ stories become reinterpreted as stories of “anti-fascists,” even if this is difficult to prove with concrete examples or stories that can be authenticated. Both of these versions helped people to align themselves with the official one by finding openings for it in their family stories. But for the first postwar cohorts, the state-sanctioned anti-fascist narrative still retained its moral validity and its pathos. In contrast, the so-called ’68ers in West Germany took issue with postwar society’s official and private versions alike where these omitted or glossed over that society’s involvement in the National Socialist regime. It should be noted that the significance of this aggressive questioning on the part of the ’68ers has itself been called into question26 and justifiably relativized,27 but it does seem to have been a widespread phenomenon at least in the West German middle classes, and one that risked opening up serious conflicts within the family. Up until today the members of this last political generation in Germany have made it their special project to come to critically work through the NS past, and in doing so have also fundamentally changed public remembrance and justified it anew. They gradually established new ground rules for society’s engagement with National Socialism and stand guard even today to see that they are enforced.28

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A Generation in the Making: The War Children In recent years an entirely new generation has stepped onto the stage of national “memory”: the war children. Where did this generation come from, and why is it making its public appearance only now? The emergence of the war children generation can be told in two parallel stories. The first story comes “from within” in a twofold sense: as the self-description of war children on the one hand, and on the other as the identification of a damaged inner core in people linked by a shared childhood experience. In the 1990s psychoanalysts noticed an increasing incidence of symptoms of burnout syndrome, depression, panic attacks or other anxieties, flashbacks, and feelings of persecution among their patients. The afflicted patients had been children during the Second World War and had spoken about it in terms of a painful experience, either as a firsthand experience involving violence or fear of death, or as something triggered by the loss of a family member, usually a father. Up until then, most of these patients had lived unremarkable and even successful lives, and they manifested the above-mentioned symptoms for the first time around the age of sixty. Hartmut Radebold, a psychoanalyst, gerontologist, and himself a war child, came to the conclusion that the experience of war during childhood was the cause of the psychic disorders among these predominantly male patients, and that the loss of a father was particularly difficult; in 2000 he published his findings for a more general audience.29 At the same time, historians and other social scientists began to realize for the first time the key role their childhood experiences as war children played in their own biographies. A related critique also developed, aimed at a historiography that to a large extent had suppressed or marginalized wartime childhood from their narratives. The critics dealt with their memories and the psychological consequences of the war in a very personal way by developing an understanding among themselves, and in this narrative community they formulated the essence of what wartime childhood was. The volume Söhne ohne Väter (Sons without Fathers), published in 2002, was the first product of this self-reflection.30 At the same time, a successful popularization of the war children as a generation also began, culminating in a 2005 convention in Frankfurt where a large number of scholars met for several days with an audience of some 600 people—mostly war children themselves—to discuss various aspects of wartime childhood. Not only was the meeting large and attended by prominent scholars; it also received political recognition and wide media attention. Since that time the number of scholarly projects and publications has grown even further. Public events, associations, and internet platforms all complement the communication that marked the beginning of the war children’s emergence as a recognized generation.31 The second story about the genesis of the “war children generation” began as a critique of their appearance that situated the phenomenon within the

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larger framework of renewed and increased German self-victimization. Their youth at the time—the critics claimed—made them seem ideally suited to represent all Germans in (re)claiming an innocent victim status.32 According to this critique, the emergence of the war children generation came out of a need for public recognition of Germans as victims that was seized on and reinforced by the media. Harald Welzer drew a specific connection between the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war and the longing for a historical reinterpretation that shifted the focus back onto Germans themselves, which among other things made the children of war a corresponding offer they readily accepted, since it simultaneously provided the reconstruction of biographical meaning. According to this view, then, the war children generation developed not out of a collectively shared personal experience, but instead from a delegation by the national collective whose innocent suffering they were supposed to represent.33 Before looking for ways out of the dilemma posed by these opposing stories, we need to clarify who belongs to the group of war children, and what qualitative determinations unite them. A look at the affected cohorts shows that while the year 1945 marks a relatively clear cutoff date for “wartime childhood” on the one end, it is more difficult to set a corresponding limit when looking in the other direction at the prewar years. Children born in the late 1920s, otherwise counted as part of the Hitler Youth generation, are occasionally grouped together with the war children. Usually, however, the term refers to those children born starting in the early 1930s, that is, those who were still children in the narrower sense when the war began and ended, and who were not called into active service as flak helpers or late recruits. In any case, the concept of war children covers age groups with widely varying types of experience, ranging from children who were too young to have memories of 1945 to those already entering puberty at that time. More interesting, however, is the application of the label “generation” to the war children. The fact that the concept of “wartime childhood” (Kriegskindschaft) encompasses age groups that in other contexts belonged to both the so-called Hitler Youth generation and those that count as part of the ’68er generation is a further indication that the concept of “generation,” rather than cohort, can provide various biographical and historical meanings for the same age groups. In this connection, two aspects of the concept “generation” should be mentioned that can be clearly seen in the emergence of the war children generation: first, a reference to the past as shared experiential background (in this case, one of silent suffering); and second, a view of the future as a form of shared potential or even mission (in this case, peace).34 The claims laid on both past and future give a generation its most conscious form, its generational unity. In the discourse on war children, as in other contexts, the distinction between “generation” and “cohort” is often blurred. It is generally accepted that an estimated 50 percent of the cohorts in question were directly affected by the

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war, be it due to the (temporary) loss of a father or other causes that included bombings, flight, violence, or witnessing death.35 Notably, research to date has focused on this 50 percent of the war children, while the other half has encountered disinterest and occasionally has been suspected of denying its suffering. For the topic of wartime childhood, therefore, cohort is a meaningless category, whereas generation has a recognizable, meaningful shape (Gestalt) that allows it to displace and represent (the) cohort. A thorough study focusing on the experiential history of the cohort might well produce results that run contrary to its generational form (Generationsgestalt). The problem is further complicated because the term “generation” is not only an analytic category, but also an agenda of cultural politics, since the war children intervene as a generation in present-day Germany and Europe by insisting on recognition of their experience in a twofold sense: an acknowledgment of their suffering, but also an acknowledgment of the learning process they have undergone, which above all means that they are willing and able to promote peace. The generation of war children is represented in the public sphere by a relatively limited number of spokespersons. This group consists of an estimated fifty people, who for the most part know one another and work together: historians, psychologists, physicians, journalists, educators, literary scholars, and theologians. A distinction can be drawn between those who actually belong to the cohort of war children and a younger age group born in the postwar years, but what unites them—without exception—is their academic background. Men dominate the group of speakers, especially among the cohorts of war children. The group contains only three East Germans, all of whom belong to the postwar cohort.36 In other words, it is a fairly homogenous group that represents the war children in public. Some of these findings are unsurprising or easily explained. First, they confirm the notion that “generation” in Mannheim’s sense is a middle-class male phenomenon, at least for those age groups still shaped by sociocultural determining factors prior to the 1960s; this also helps explain the small number of women, which probably corresponds in large part to their numbers among academics in this cohort. This correspondence is confirmed by the higher percentage of women among spokespersons born in postwar years, i.e., those who speak not out of, but for the generation of war children. It is also possible that male dominance among older spokespersons has been reinforced by the “inner” context sketched out above: therapeutic—and especially psychoanalytic—findings initially focused almost exclusively on fatherlessness as a particularly significant phenomenon for male children of war. Only recently has more systematic research been done on the question of how fatherlessness also affected daughters.37 It is also easy to explain why the spokesperson positions are held exclusively by people with academic training. Academics realize the importance of

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the public and seek it for their work, even if their audience is usually quite small. They also know that the public sphere is a place for promoting one’s interests, and that “generation” is an accepted category of classification. Though perhaps trivial, it should also be noted that academics have the easiest access to medial publicity: they are used to speaking in public and live in a world of publications, conferences, and research projects, to which the internet has recently been added. In addition, an “inner” explanation can be given. The momentous “discovery” of the psychic consequences of wartime childhood took place primarily in the communication between academically trained members of the cohort who, as psychoanalysts and patients or in a circle of friends or colleagues, developed interpretations of this experience and formulations for their narrative that together became the frame of reference for the generation. This master narrative developed on a foundation of biographical patterns that seemed typical (and hence also acceptable) for members of the educated middle class, and more specifically, the academically trained successful professionals in the war child cohorts. According to common criteria, this group represents remarkable biographical success, if not the elite. It therefore comes as no surprise that this select group of spokespersons gained the approval of even war children with totally different biographies. The almost complete absence of former GDR citizens from the speakers’ group is more difficult to explain. Apparently, no “generation of war children” exists in East Germany in the emphatic sense of self-conscious generation building. East Germans appear to have very little interest even in speaking as war children in biographical interviews.38 Here too a number of explanations can be suggested. First, the concept of “generation” played no significant role in the official discourse of the GDR. It was an illegitimate category, since class membership alone was granted the power to determine consciousness and differentiate between groups. As a result, the GDR lacked the public realm to create and reflect on such notions as generational affiliation (Generationszugehörigkeit) and generational form (Generationsgestalt). Such a space appears to be a necessary precondition for self-constitution as a generation. In addition, certain contents of war children’s experience were in fact taboo. This did not hold for the bombing experience, which of course could be blamed on the Western Allies; nor did it apply to the issue of human casualties as such. In the official narrative, the suffering of the German people was a logical consequence of the fascist war, which affected even those who had not wanted it: hence, the greater the guilt of the others. In contrast, official silence prevailed about the violent excesses of the Red Army during occupation and about flight and displacement, which also affected some four million people in the GDR. It was not until 1985 that an autobiographically colored book entitled Wir Flüchtlingskinder (We Refugee Children) was published. Many such refugee children wrote to the author after reading the book, and their letters were included in

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an appendix to the second edition, published after 1989. What received more immediate attention in these letters, however, was the fact that flight and displacement, a source of great sorrow and bitterness among older GDR citizens, had been allowed as a topic for publication at all.39 By no means did the end of the GDR lead to a reorientation centered around generational belonging, especially one whose point of reference was the Second World War. Instead, the year 1989 is the reference year for everyone, and it refers not to generation but to family on the one hand or to an imaginary East Germany on the other as communities of belonging.40 A generation is always interested in getting its particular narrative publicly accepted, if not as the dominant narrative, then at least as an essential element of the collective interpretation of the past. This also applies to wartime childhood (Kriegskindschaft) as public narrative. The narrative model offered by the spokespersons of the war child cohorts is defined by the tension between biographical success on the one hand and the now emerging suffering concealed within that success on the other, seeking acknowledgment from within and without. Both in terms of the politics of history and the history of mentalities, the issue in question is: out of the entire experiential and interpretational spectrum of wartime childhood (Kriegskindschaft), to what extent does one particular version, and which one, become the established one that in the future will stand for all of them—for all war children and as an integral part of our history? In the struggle for interpretive dominance, the war children have taken a stand. Yet their example also shows that shared experience alone does not constitute a generation. Rather, this process is accompanied by a quest for meaning that takes shape—as in this case—only at a considerable temporal remove from the generation-defining event. A critical analysis of this process, however, would have to entail the historical reconstruction of not only the touchstone experience itself 41 but also the history of interpretations as the prehistory of generation formation, i.e., the entire picture of the event and its processing, war and postwar. It is by no means the case that “experiencing the war” simply stopped at the end of the war, disappearing completely to reemerge only now. The role of wartime childhood and of the war children should be treated as an integral part of postwar history, namely, as an indicator of the German (especially West German) postwar societies’ shifting self-image(s). Here questions posed by political historians intersect with those of social and economic history as well as the history of science: the early postwar view of war children as not only the most innocent, but also those most likely and able to forget and overcome; the manic fixation on rebuilding, which would supposedly benefit children in particular; an optimistic sociology that in the 1950s viewed the problem of fatherlessness primarily as one of temporarily overwhelmed mothers and uncontrolled sons. In the 1980s a leftist-anti-authoritarian variation

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also appeared. According to this version, the absent or overextended parents of the early postwar period created a “control gap” in which young people created the basis for autonomy—one partial explanation of this generation’s power to liberate itself.42 In the 1990s Heinz Bude also defined the ’68ers as war children who had made it their task to compensate for their parents’ biographies of loss, and who had used an advantageous structural opportunity in the 1960s for their own biographical success(es).43 In other words, up until fifteen years ago the story of the war children was told as different versions of the same basic success story, each specific to its own time. I therefore advocate a thoroughgoing investigation of the entire story of these war children in its full length and breadth, and in not only a biographical but also a societal context that should include the history of interpretations. Such a history, resolutely pursued, could be more than just another aspect of German postwar historiography: namely, it could be an intervention with the potential to question the success story of the Federal Republic that has become such a dominant narrative, especially since 1989. This cumulative success, an accomplishment stemming from democratic, economic, and political coming to terms with the past, had its grand finale in German reunification. The “arrival in the West” had now been achieved by everyone.44 At first glance the war children, and especially their spokespersons, seem to provide a perfect biographical illustration of successful rebuilding—which is why they insist on its personal toll—and they have prompted the accusation that they are interested only in reclaiming for themselves a discourse of self-victimization. This accusation is refuted by a careful reading of source materials. First, the so-called German victim discourse reveals itself to be closely linked to (some might even say completely dominated by) the notion of perseverance, and thus success.45 Second, the paradigm of a German “community of success” (“Erfolgsgemeinschaft” following the Volksgemeinschaft)46 ignores all those groups who achieved only partial or belated success, or never attained it at all. Examples of such groups include GDR refugees, a percentage of whom lived in refugee camps well into the 1960s, and Russian Germans (Russlanddeutsche), whose story we have only grudgingly acknowledged.47 Third, even the successful war children help us recall the enormous magnitude of violence that formed the mental basis of the German postwar societies: violence that was endured, inflicted, and tolerated. For people growing up in postwar Germany it almost went without saying that their own fathers—not as war criminals, but as ordinary soldiers—had been involved in incidents of mass killing. One of the most astonishing phenomena of the early postwar years is the apparently complete disappearance of this extreme and enduring experience of violence. For historians, the search for the traces of this experience is an effort that has not yet been completed and only barely tested.

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Conclusion Three points are of central importance for a provisional answer to the question about generational memories. First, official and in particular national interpretations of the past serve to integrate diverse groups and their experiences into a shared, common narrative while at the same time excluding others. The official narrative thus illustrates what can be said about the past and how publicly it can be said, as well as what must be glossed over or even kept secret; it is therefore an instrument for the production of positive meaning and political legitimacy. But this official interpretation of the past can only fulfill its mission if it is capable of tapping into personal experiences and popular narratives of the majority in a society. In modern societies and political systems built on their citizens’ consent, cultural memory therefore depends on communicative memory if it wishes to shape and safeguard “collective memory,” which would mean more than just a metaphor. If this connection succeeds, chances are good that private narratives will in turn use the public interpretations with their reduced complexity and their offer of integration, and will align themselves with them as far as possible. This process can be seen in both German postwar states despite all their differences in terms of the contents and character of the public, which in the GDR took the form of a highly controlled official sphere. The difference between East and West Germany is particularly obvious if we look at the first postwar generation: in the Federal Republic this generation helped bring about a breakthrough in the 1960s, enabling people to take a more critical stance toward efforts to deal with the past, whereas in the GDR the official appropriation of an uncompromising anti-fascism blocked any such public or private debate. The Wehrmacht exhibit controversy that began in 1995 shows that the conflicts about the past continued to swirl past 1989, especially in the West.48 Second, personal remembrances and private stories develop inside a framework of social units of affiliation and interpretation: families, circles of friends, and political movements as well as other groups sharing memorable formative experiences. Here, interpretations of the past are communicated, formulated, and believed. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the nation also assumes an increasingly important role as an overarching interpretive unit that draws on people’s ostensible shared suffering and triumph.49 In the two postwar German states, very different elite groups tried to control the national discourse about the past by using very different means. Even so, the suffering incurred during and due to the war represents a real link between them; it also serves as the most important bridge between their respective official and private interpretations. In both states we admittedly also find attendant if not predominating interpretations: in the West the official line about economic prosperity and

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freedom, and in the East the one about political conversion and peace. Both are echoed in the multiple meanings of the key term “(re-)construction” or (Wieder-)Aufbau, used throughout Germany. Third, “generation” seems to be an ideal instrument for negotiating between private stories and public histories about the past, since it connects the individual biography to an imagined community of the whole cohort, even in the absence of direct personal communication. To date, generations that identify themselves publicly as such and aspire to gain public influence have usually been a bourgeois male phenomenon. Generations understood in this more specific sense always refer to both the past and the future. The case of East Germany also shows, however, that “generation” by no means represents the sole or even a necessary category of individual and collective placement in history. Instead, people here identify primarily with the imagined community of East Germans in order to set themselves off from the West, their ever present “other.” Generally speaking, the formation of a generation requires a public forum where shared experiences can be communicated and given an appropriate form. Generations are in this sense a result of the communicative production of meaning among people who are the same age. There can be generational stories and perhaps even generational memories, but neither collective memories nor generations can be created in opposition to individuals and their experiences. It is precisely where we as historians discover the constructedness or even the artificiality of generations that we are referred back to the experiences that lie behind the “generation.”

Notes Translated from German by Elizabeth Bredeck 1. On the early postwar years Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory:The Nazi Past in theTwo Germanys (Cambridge, MA, 1997). On the GDR Alan Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic 1945–1989 (Ann Arbor, 1999). Sabine Moller gives a brief summary of the research in Vielfache Vergangenheit: Öffentliche Erinnerungskulturen und Familienerinnerungen an die NS-Zeit in Ostdeutschland (Tübingen, 2003), 42–81. On West Germany see Norbert Frei’s Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich, 1997) and 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewusstsein der Deutschen (Munich, 2005); also Edgar Wolfrum: Geschichtspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Der Weg zur bundesrepublikanischen Erinnerung (Darmstadt, 1999). 2. The notion of cultural memory as distinct from communicative memory was developed by Aleida and Jan Assmann. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 2000). Pierre Nora addresses national memory in his three-volume work Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris, 1984–1992). The volumes edited by Hagen Schulze and Etienne Francois, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Munich, 2000), represent a similar project. More emphasis on the individual in the theory of memory, and also a clearer methodological integration of cultural and communicative memory into the theory of memory, are found in in two essays in AHR 102, no. 5 (1997): Susan Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” 1372–85, and Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” 1386–1403.

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3. Dorothee Wierling, “Oral History,” in Michael Maurer, ed., Aufriss der Historischen Wissenschaften Bd. 7 (Stuttgart, 2003), 81–151. On the contradiction between social screenplay and individual experiences see Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Amy Gutman, ed., Multiculturalism (Princeton, 1994), 149–63. 4. Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, eds., “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Tübingen, 2002); Harald Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung (Munich, 2002). 5. See Jürgen Danyel, ed., Die geteilte Vergangenheit: Zum Umgang mit Nationalsozialismus und Widerstand in beiden deutschen Staaten (Berlin, 1995). 6. Mark Roseman, ed., Generations in Conflict:Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770 to 1968 (Cambridge, 1995); Jürgen Reulecke, ed., Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2003); Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt, eds., Generationen: Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs (Hamburg, 2005); Annegret Schüle, Thomas Ahbe, and Rainer Gries, eds., Die DDR aus generationsgeschichtlicher Perspektive: Eine Inventur (Leipzig, 2006). 7. A brief critical evaluation of Mannheim’s concept of generation in historical research is found in Bernd Weisbrod,“Generation und Generationalität in der Neueren Geschichte,” in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B 8/2005(21. 2. 2005): 3–9. 8. Recent scholarship stresses the importance of “Volksgemeinschaft” for the coherence of German society in Nazi Germany more than older approaches did. See Michael Wildt, Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen, 2008). 9. Impressive on this subject is Hannah Arendt, “A Report from Germany” Commentary 10 (October 1950): 342–53. 10. The law regulated special taxes to be paid by those Germans who had suffered few or no material losses in favor of those who had. See Michael L. Hughes, Shouldering the Burdens of Defeat: West Germany and the Reconstruction of Social Justice (Chapel Hill, 1999). 11. Robert Moeller, War Stories:The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001); Frank Stern, The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany (Oxford, 1992). 12. This interpretation is reflected, for instance, in the narrative of a higher management official in Wolfen (GDR) who originally came from Breslau: see “Die Quittung,” in Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and Dorothee Wierling, Die Volkseigene Erfahrung: Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR (Berlin, 1991), 429–40. 13. Though the SPD formed and cultivated its own traditions vis-à-vis resistance, in the 1950s it had very little influence on the official image; communist resistance was by and large ignored. For an introduction and overview, see Peter Steinbach, Widerstand gegen die nationalsozialistische Diktatur 1933–1945 (Bonn, 2004). 14. Lutz Niethammer, “Juden und Russen im Gedächtnis der Deutschen,” in Walter H. Pehle, ed., Der historische Ort des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 114–34. 15. Dorothee Wierling, “The Hitler Youth Generation in the GDR: Insecurities, Ambitions and Dilemmas,” in Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience (New York and Oxford 1999), 307–24; Mary Fulbrook, “Generationen und Kohorten in der DDR,” in Schüle, Ahbe, and Gries, Die DDR aus generationengeschichtlicher Perspektive, 113–30. Fulbrook is currently working on a book about the historical experiences of different social generations in Germany from WWI to 1990. 16. Christian Jung, Geschichte der Verlierer: Historische Selbstreflexion von hochrangigen Mitgliedern der SED nach 1989 (Heidelberg, 2007). This dissertation contains an almost complete record of all available autobiographical texts from this group; in the analysis, unfortunately, the author quickly moves away from the biographical dimension to give a critical commentary on the authors’ interpretation(s) of the GDR. 17. Helmut Schelsky, Die skeptische Generation: Eine Soziologie der deutschen Jugend (first published Düsseldorf, 1957); Heinz Bude, Deutsche Karrieren: Lebenskonstruktionen sozialer Aufsteiger aus der Flakhelfergeneration (Frankfurt am Main, 1987).

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18. Axel Schildt, Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und “Zeitgeist“ in der Bundesrepublik in den 50er Jahren (Hamburg, 1995); Michael Wildt, Am Beginn der Konsumgesellschaft: Mangelerfahrung, Lebenshaltung,Wohlstandshoffnung in Westdeutschland in den fünfziger Jahren (Hamburg, 1995). 19. This statement is supported by official GDR propaganda as well as biographical interviews with the first cohorts born after the war, who spoke about how they experienced the building of the Berlin Wall and the summer of 1968 in Czechoslovakia: Dorothee Wierling, Geboren im Jahr Eins: Der Geburtsjahrgang 1949 in der DDR, Versuch einer Kollektivbiographie (Berlin, 2002), 171ff., 295ff. In regard to “freedom” and “peace” as opposing concepts in the two German states see Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “Der Kampf um ‘Frieden’ und ‘Freiheit’ in der Systemrivalität des Kalten Krieges,” in Frank Möller and Ulrich Mählert, eds., Abgrenzung und Verflechtung: Das geteilte Deutschland in der zeithistorischen Debatte (Berlin, 2008). 20. Ulrich Herbert, “‘Die guten und die schlechten Zeiten’: Überlegungen zur diachronen Analyse lebensgeschichtlicher Interviews,” in Lutz Niethammer, ed., “Die Jahre weiß man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll”: Faschismuserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin and Bonn, 1983), 76–96. 21. Harald Welzer, “Familiengedächtnis. Über die Weitergabe der deutschen Vergangenheit im intergenerationellen Gespräch,” WerkstattGeschichte 30 (2001): 49–52; Moller, Vielfache Vergangenheit, 106–75; Wierling, Geboren im Jahr Eins, 24–59. 22. Wierling, Geboren im Jahr Eins, 77f., 130ff. Various indicators suggest, however, that schoolchildren viewed their teachers, who were often the same age as their parents, quite critically as former Nazis; especially when these teachers, as converts to Stalinism, treated their students in ways that seemed authoritarian, unsure of themselves, and hostile: ibid., 134f. 23. Ulrike Weckel, “Nachsitzen im Kino: Anglo-amerikanische KZ-Filme und deutsche Reaktionen 1945/46: Über Versuche kollektiver Beschämung,” Berliner Debatte Initial 17, nos. 1–2 (2006): 84–99; Ulrike Weckel, “The Mitläufer in Two German Postwar Films: Representation and Critical Reception,” History and Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past 15, no. 2 (fall/winter 2003): 64–93. 24. Sabine Moller, “Vielfache Vergangenheit,” in Schüle, Ahbe, and Gries, Die DDR in generationengeschichtlicher Perspektive, 399–410. 25. Dorothee Wierling, “Nationalsozialismus und Krieg in den Lebensgeschichten der ersten Nachkriegsgeneration der DDR,” in Elisabeth Domansky and Harald Welzer, eds., Eine offene Geschichte: Zur kommunikativen Tradierung der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit (Tübingen, 1999), 35–56. 26. This was done recently in a particularly aggressive way by a former leading figure of the ’68ers, Götz Aly. In his provocatively entitled memoir Unser Kampf (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), Aly contends that this generation did just the opposite, cloaking itself in ideology but living out the Nazism of its parents’ generation once again. Reception of the book has been largely critical; for a selection of reviews see . 27. Annette Leo, “Das Problem der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit,” in Bernd Faulenbach, Annette Leo, and Klaus Weberskirch, eds., Zweierlei Geschichte: Lebensgeschichte und Geschichtsbewusstsein von Arbeitnehmern in West- und Ostdeutschland (Essen, 2000), 300–340; Axel Schildt, “Die Eltern auf der Anklagebank? Zur Thematisierung der NS-Vergangenheit im Generationenkonflikt der bundesrepublikanischen 60er Jahre,” in Christoph Cornelißen, Lutz Klinkhammer, and Wolfgang Schwendtker, eds., Erinnerungskulturen: Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), 317–32; Detlef Siegfried, “Don’t Look Back in Anger: Youth, Pop Culture and the Nazi Past,” in Philipp Gassert and Alan Steinweis, eds., Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict (New York, 2006), 144–60. 28. Konrad Jarausch, “Critical Memory and Civil Society: The Impact of the 1960s on German Debates about the Past,” in Gassert and Steinweis, Coping with the Nazi Past, 11–30; Ulrike Jureit, “Generationen als Erinnerungsgemeinschaften: Das Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas als Generationsobjekt,” in Jureit and Wildt, Generationen, 244–65.

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29. Hartmut Radebold, Abwesende Väter: Folgen der Kriegskindheit in Psychoanalyse (Göttingen, 2000). 30. Hermann Schulz, Hartmut Radebold, and Jürgen Reulecke, Söhne ohne Väter: Erfahrungen der Kriegsgeneration (Berlin, 2004). 31. The proceedings of the Frankfurt congress have now been published in two volumes: Hartmut Radebold, et al., eds., Kindheiten im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Kriegserfahrungen und deren Folgen aus psychohistorischer Sicht (Munich, 2006); Hans-Heino Ewers, et al., eds., Erinnerungen an Kriegskindheiten: Erfahrungsräume, Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich, 2006). Two websites focus on war children: that of the organization “Kriegskinder für den Frieden e. V.” and . 32. On the Germans’ presentation of themselves as victims see Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, 2006). 33. Most recently Harald Welzer, “Die Nachhaltigkeit historischer Erfahrungen: Eine sozialpsychologische Perspektive,” in Hartmut Radebold, et al., Transgenerationale Weitergabe kriegsbelasteter Kindheiten (Munich, 2008). 34. In contrast, Lutz Niethammer, in his oral presentation at the Frankfurt congress, denied the existence of this or any other mission, and thus dismissed the war children’s claim to being a generation. This seems, however, to contradict the fact that the congress ran under the official heading of the war children’s “message for Europe.” At least the speakers (see below) had a political agenda. 35. All these estimates are more or less wild, and it is often unclear if they refer to experiences, mild symptoms, or traumatization in the clinical sense of the word. Thus, a recent article in Der Spiegel states that 14 million Germans spent their childhood in misery and fear (that is, during WWII), later claims that a third show posttraumatic symptoms, and further on comes up with an estimate of 5 percent with manifest PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder): Hanno Charisius, “Die Kinder des Krieges erinnern sich,” Der Spiegel online, 1 November 2009. Thanks to Frank Biess for referring me to the article. 36. This information is based on a review of scholars working on relevant research projects and authors of publications on this topic, association presidents and spokespersons, and contact persons on the internet. These are often people fuctioning as spokespersons in multiple contexts. My thanks to Marie Schenk for research support. 37. Lu Seegers of the Universität Gießen is working on such a project using German-German as well as Polish comparisons: Lu Seegers, “Vaterlosigkeit als kriegsbedingte Erfahrung des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland,” in Lu Seegers and Jürgen Reulecke, eds., Die “Generation der Kriegskinder”: Historische Hintergründe und Deutungen (Gießen, 2009), 59–83. 38. This impression is confirmed by Lu Seegers in her current project (see above). 39. Ursula Höntsch, Wir Flüchtlingskinder (Halle, 1985). 40.This is at least the (necessary?) conclusion drawn from all post-1989 projects that explore issues concerning the history of interpretations (Deutungsgeschichte) of the Second World War in East Germany. The most detailed is Moller, Vielfache Vergangenheit. 41. Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (New York, 2005). 42. Gerhard Baumert, Deutsche Familien nach dem Kriege (Darmstadt, 1954); Ulf PreussLausitz, Kriegskinder, Konsumkinder, Krisenkinder: Zur Sozialisationsgeschichte seit dem Zweiten –Weltkrieg (Weinheim, 1983). 43. Heinz Bude, Das Altern einer Generation: Die Jahrgänge 1938 bis 1948 (Frankfurt am Main, 1995). 44. Axel Schildt, Ankunft im Westen: Ein Essay zur Erfolgsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt am Main, 1999). 45. Frank P. Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, 2006); Svenja Goltermann, Die Gesellschaft der Überlebenden: Deutsche Soldaten und ihre Erinnerungen an den Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2009).

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46. Malte Thiessen, Eingebrannt ins Gedächtnis: Hamburgs Gedenken an Luftkrieg und Kriegsende 1943–2005 (Munich, 2007). 47. Charlotte Österreich, Die Situation in den Flüchtlingseinrichtungen für DDR-Zuwanderer in den 50er und 60er Jahren: “Die aus der Mau-Mau-Siedlung” (Hamburg, 2008); Dorothee Wierling, Heimat finden: Lebenswege von Deutschen, die aus Russland kommen (Hamburg, 2004). 48. Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, ed., Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1944 (Hamburg, 2004). 49. Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation? Talk Paris 1882” (online under wikisource).

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Mass-Mediating War: How Movies Shaped Memories

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“When Will the Real Day Come?” War Films and Soviet Postwar Culture Denise J. Youngblood

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the “most important” of the Soviet arts from the state’s inception until its very end. As I have argued in previous work, war films were exceptionally important in the history of Soviet cinema because of the pivotal role wars played in buttressing the ideological authority of the Soviet state.1 There were wars to glorify, like the Russian Civil War and the Second World War; wars to vilify and then ignore, like the First World War; and wars to forget, like the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Winter War with Finland, and Afghanistan. But no war, not even the revolution and the apocalyptic civil war that followed it, was more ingrained in twentieth-century Russia’s public imagination than the Russo-German War of 1941–45, dubbed the “Great Patriotic War.”2 The cycles of repression and relaxation that punctuated Soviet culture after 1945 contributed to a continuing, corrosive dialogue about the meaning and legacy of the Second World War.3 The war was kept front and center in public consciousness through propaganda and art long after it had faded to nostalgia in other, more “normal” European countries.4 This characteristic is deeply rooted in Russian culture. In 1860, for example, in an essay titled “When Will the Real Day Come?” the influential social and literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov wrote about the relationship between art and society: “We have no other way of knowing what is defeated, what is victorious … in the moral life of society but literature, and mainly through its artistic productions.”5 It is my contention that in Soviet culture, films were as important as (if not more important than) literature as a vehicle for telling “what is defeated, what is victorious” about the war.6 For the past sixty years, constructing, reconstructing, and deconstructing the cult that developed around the Great Patriotic War has fascinated Soviet and post-Soviet Russian filmmakers alike, producing some of the most politically subversive work in Soviet film history. INEMA WAS ENTHRONED AS

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For the past decade my scholarship has focused on Russian war cinema—as a genre, as a “historiophoty” of Russian wars, and as a vehicle to examine the complex relationships between filmmakers and the state. In these pages, I shall reframe this material in quite a different way by exploring the extent to which directors of war films promoted the development and overlong life of a postwar society by refusing to allow the war to be forgotten or its victims to rest in peace until all the “true stories” about the war had been told. Through this examination of representative Soviet movies about the Great Patriotic War, I shall also suggest a framework for defining and periodizing “postwar” in Soviet cinema.

Postwar I: 1945–1957 The Russo-German war ended on 9 May 1945, but “peace” was elusive as the exhausted Soviet people faced the ruins of their country and the consequences of unparalleled demographic catastrophe.7 Although historians usually define the Soviet “postwar” period as the twelve years from 1945 to 1957, this is really a period of physical, not psychic, reconstruction. The direction for the future that is part of our definition of “postwar” is completely absent. In the Soviet case, we see regression on all levels. Stalin quickly moved to denigrate the war’s military heroes and to reestablish harsh prewar controls over Soviet society. With its famines, purges, shortages, ominous cultural campaigns, and the ignominy of the ruinous currency reform in 1947, the bleak first postwar decade left many Soviet citizens asking “when will the real day come?” If the Second World War was a turning point in European history, it looked as though the USSR had failed to turn, at least not until de-Stalinization accelerated following Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. In cinematic terms, the public began receiving mixed signals about their future late in the war. The independent-minded heroines and heroes of the 1942–43 partisan films gradually disappeared. They were replaced by less believable and therefore less interesting soldier-martyrs like the “real life” hero in Igor Savchenko’s Ivan Nikulin, Russian Sailor (Ivan Nikulin, russkii matros, 1944) and also by the map-reading generals to be found in films like Fridrikh Ermler’s The Great Turning Point (Velikii perevorot, 1945), in which the brutal combat at Stalingrad is rarely more than an afterthought to generals’ pontifications. Countering movies of this sort, however, were two romantic musical comedies that would have fitted comfortably in the Anglo-American repertory (and harked back to Soviet movie musicals in the 1930s). The first was Ivan Pyriev’s Six o’ Clock in the Evening after the War (Shest chasov vechera posle voiny, 1944), in which wartime lovers blissfully reunite in Moscow, followed by Semyon Timoshenko’s Celestial Sloth (Nebesnyi tikhokhod, 1945), about a convalescing

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male pilot assigned to command a group of women aviators. In both movies, the promise for future bliss was clear: pretty, well-dressed women and girls easily shed their wartime duties and unpleasant memories of the horrors they had witnessed (and participated in) to reunite with lost loves or find new ones. Good food, well-tailored clothes, stockings, and makeup were as bountiful as the supply of healthy, unattached men; the one young man who has lost a leg finds a usable prosthesis as easily as he does a girlfriend. This cheery optimism about the seamless reintegration of veterans into postwar life quickly faded. Although no one understood the political importance of Soviet cinema better than Stalin,8 the exigencies of postwar economic reconstruction necessitated diverting resources from the well-financed and completely nationalized film industry in order to rebuild the infrastructure, maintain the western frontier, and gear up for the Cold War. Film production collapsed, falling well short of projections. In the eight-year period 1946–53, only 160 films were made, compared to nearly that number per year twenty years earlier. The lowest point in the “film famine” was 1951, when only nine movies were released.9 Increased censorship was as important as reduced funding in explaining the shortfall. Cinema did not enjoy immunity from the depredations of the attack on artists known as the Zhdanovshchina, 1946–48, led by Leningrad Party boss and Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov: not only were filmmakers excoriated in the press, but scripts were banned and productions halted in the early stages. The films that did make it to the screen fell into two categories: nationalist biopics about Russian generals, scientists, and composers; and musical comedies. The Great Patriotic War was a particularly perilous subject for filmmakers to undertake as the glorification of Stalin reached gargantuan proportions that left no room for ordinary war heroes and no place for a serious dramatic assessment of the events of the war or its aftermath.10 Accomplished directors tried to steer clear of the subject. Because there were so few war films made in the years between Victory Day and Stalin’s death, it would be inappropriate to draw too many hard and fast conclusions from them. The best known of these movies in the West are the overblown combat epics celebrating Stalin as war hero extraordinaire: Igor Savchenko’s The Third Blow (Tretii udar, 1948), Vladimir Petrov’s The Battle of Stalingrad (Bitva Stalingrada, 1949), and most notoriously, Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina, 1949, in honor of Stalin’s seventieth birthday). Their broad, unvarnished propaganda, especially their open sarcasm about the contributions of the Anglo-American Allies to the war effort and their deification of Stalin, confirmed the West’s Cold War cultural assumptions. It is worth noting, however, that among these films only The Fall of Berlin ends by showing the final victory: Stalin’s plane descends from the heavens to Berlin, and he emerges dressed in white, accompanied by music from a celestial choir, to be greeted by multiethnic Soviet soldiers and freedom-loving people

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of all nationalities. Carrying banners, with beatific smiles on their faces, these people march into the future singing, but unlike Six o’ Clock in the Evening after the War or Celestial Sloth, The Fall of Berlin does not even hint at what that future will hold in concrete terms. By 1949, of course, Soviet citizens had seen the future and knew it was not shining. If there is a motif to the war cinema of this period it is this: “peace” is not realized on screen any more than it was in life.11 Three very different films offer provocative points of comparison. Boris Barnet’s The Exploits of an Intelligence Officer (Podvig razvedchika, 1947), about a Soviet spy who infiltrates German-occupied Vinnitsa, is arguably more a Cold War film noir than a war film proper, but Barnet subverts the tropes of the spy film very subtly. Major Fedotov exposes the native traitors, foils German plans, and returns safely to his loving wife, it is true, but he is also cold and duplicitous, skilled in currying favor, flitting about in the shadows of his double life. This subversive reading derives from Barnet’s aesthetics, particularly the film’s shot composition and lighting. The Exploits of an Intelligence Officer presents the earliest hint in Soviet cinema that the talents invaluable in wartime might have ominous import in war’s aftermath. Sergei Gerasimov’s The Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia, 1948) is based on the true story (novelized by Aleksander Fadeev) of a Komsomol underground group in occupied Krasnodon who are caught, savagely tortured, and executed. Based on a recounting of the plot, the story sounds stereotypically “Soviet”: a group of teenagers sacrifice themselves for the motherland. However, the acting, directing, and cinematography add different dimensions to the well-known story. The teenagers are communist believers, to be sure, but they are also idealists. True to wartime spirit, although not to the spirit of 1948, the Party is rarely mentioned as the source of their courage and inspiration. Furthermore, Gerasimov assembled a cast of accomplished young actors who brought genuine humanity and individualism to their roles. He underplays the brutality of their deaths, but the story is still very grim, and its coda is rather interesting. The final scene takes place at the end of the war: the martyrs’ grieving mothers stand at a memorial as their names are read one by one. Only three years after the war, this was not only a poignant tribute to the fallen but also a painful reminder that the country was inhabited by millions of grieving wives and mothers. Another war film released the same year, Aleksander Stolper’s The Story of a Real Man (Povest nastoiashchego cheloveka, 1948), is more overtly optimistic. Based on Boris Polevoi’s thinly fictionalized novel about the saga of Hero of the Soviet Union Aleksei Maresiev, the film shows how the “real man” survives a plane crash with terrible injuries and crawls through the snowy forest for days until he reaches a partisan camp. His broken and badly frostbitten legs are amputated, but not only does he learn to walk (and dance!), he is recertified as a

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fighter pilot. As with The Exploits of an Intelligence Officer and The Young Guard, a recitation of the film’s plot suggests that it is a Soviet cliché from beginning to end. It is not. The young pilot’s pain, doubt, and anxieties ring true in the movie (whereas they did not in the novel), which is due to actor Pavel Kadochnikov’s talent, rather than to a scintillating script. It is also interesting to note what the film omits: the reintegration of a disabled veteran into postwar Soviet life. By 1948, the lack of veteran services was all too well-known—as was the shortage of prostheses. That the hero receives two state-of-the-art artificial legs would have struck disabled veterans as more remarkable than his bravura dance performance. Soviet filmmakers’ relative silence about the war is not hard to understand. Since the early 1930s, directors had been forced to make difficult decisions about how much accommodation was too much for their consciences. Naturally, they wanted to work, but most were also deeply committed to the integrity of their art. Although they were adept at shading the messages in their films, they had to live with themselves, as artists and as human beings. Certainly, no director except Chiaureli rushed to make movies about Stalin. On the other hand, proposing a project about more authentic wartime types was politically fraught at the height of the Stalin cult in the late 1940s. The grassroots initiatives celebrated in the wartime war films were forbidden, and real war heroes who had not been martyred or maimed were denigrated or pushed to the periphery of postwar life. In any case, the Great Patriotic War was too recent and too painful to probe, and the hope for a better life that had characterized the wartime war films had been dashed.

Postwar II, 1957–67 Stalin’s death brought no immediate change. The cinema establishment was very conservative and moved much more slowly than its literary counterpart when the first cautious signs of cultural liberalization began. In 1955, however, the new Five-Year Plan called for substantially increased investments in consumer goods and agriculture, with a goal of improving the standard of living in the USSR. It also called for increased investment in cinema, with the first postStalin films on the Second World War appearing in 1956. Zakhar Agranenko’s The Immortal Garrison (Bessmertnyi garnizon, 1956, about the siege of Brest) and Aleksander Ivanov’s Soldiers (Soldaty, 1957, about Stalingrad) were interesting transitional works, combining the attributes of the combat epic with the humanization of the smaller-scale “comrades” film. But it was not until 1957, with the release of Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (Letiat zhuravli), that the Thaw truly began in cinema.12 Whether this film also marks the beginnings of a truly “postwar” cinema is a different question. As we shall see, the

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twists and turns of Soviet policies, under Khrushchev as well as Brezhnev, made it difficult for the Soviet people to count on any new direction for long, and a cooler climate replaced the Thaw even before Khrushchev’s ouster. Stylistically, Soviet Thaw cinema is a national variation of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. Thaw war films reflected, and influenced, the newest European cinematic trends. Yet in the Soviet context, the new filmmaking was even more revolutionary than it was in the West, given that avantgarde flourishes had not been seen in Soviet cinema since the early 1930s. The content of the new films was not, however, always as revolutionary as it seemed to Western critics, who had only a superficial understanding of Soviet cinematographic traditions. Soviet directors were always very conscious of their distinguished cinematic history, and in these works they paid tribute to the best of the wartime war films, in which individuals had real flaws and real fears and fought for their families and their homeland, rather than for the Party, the state, or Stalin. But there is no question that the new cultural dynamics allowed them to go much, much farther than had their predecessors in exploring the impact of the war. Of course, the motives of the wartime directors differed greatly from those of their Thaw counterparts. The former had sought to commemorate genuine heroism and sacrifice in order to rally the population, while the latter tried to debunk the myths of the nascent war cult and, in so doing, to understand “what really happened,” especially in the wake of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. Furthermore, some of the most important younger filmmakers (scenarists, directors, actors, and cinematographers) were themselves veterans who understood the sorrows of war and wartime all too well. The canonical films of the Thaw are (not coincidentally) war films, a reflection of a pent-up desire to tell authentic, human-centered stories about the Great Patriotic War and its devastating impact on the Soviet people. The Cranes Are Flying was followed in 1959 by Sergei Bondarchuk’s The Fate of a Man (Sudba cheloveka) and Grigory Chukhrai’s The Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o soldate) and in 1962 by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo, released in the US as My Name Is Ivan). All four were widely seen at home and abroad, garnering numerous festival prizes and critical acclaim (as well as some concern about their “negativism”). The stories they tell are different, but their meanings are strikingly similar. The Cranes Are Flying follows a hapless (and therefore not very “Soviet”) young woman, through the deaths of her parents in a bombing raid, her marriage to a man who has raped her while her boyfriend is fighting (and is soon killed) at the front, her eventual separation from her ne’er-do-well husband, and adoption of a war orphan. In The Fate of a Man, we see the reprise of the warorphan-as-redemption theme. A POW whose wife and children are killed during the war, manages to escape captivity and return to the army and society’s good graces. To overcome his loneliness and alienation, he adopts a war or-

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phan. The Ballad of a Soldier traces the journey of a boy soldier on leave to help his mother mend the roof of her cottage. Along the way, he is distracted by people who need the help that this unassuming hero offers unsparingly. As a result, he has only a moment to embrace his mother before he returns to the front. She never sees him again. Ivan’s Childhood looks at the wartime exploits of an even younger boy. Ivan, a twelve-year-old war orphan sheltered by a Red Army reconnaissance unit, is also exploited by them as a scout. Eventually he is captured and hanged by the Germans. Although the humanity in these films was not new to Soviet cinema, their complexity and ambiguity startled audiences accustomed to the “black or white” characters and linear narratives that characterized socialist realism. These movies, unlike socialist realist films, attempted to show life as it “was,” not as it “should have been.” In these movies, Soviet citizens do not always behave selflessly or courageously. They are profiteers and collaborators. They are unfaithful to their boyfriends and husbands. Soldiers lose limbs that are not replaced. Families are destroyed, the survivors’ lives forever scarred. The possibility of a good postwar life remains problematic, even when the possibility of redemption through adopting an orphaned child is part of the plot. Each film “ends” without a resolution. The Cranes Are Flying’s closing scene shows Veronika waiting at the train station for her true love to return; she refuses to believe that he was in fact killed in the early days of the war. Ballad of a Soldier finishes as it began, with Alyosha’s mother, back to the camera, standing watch over an empty country road, waiting for the child who will never return. The last scene in Ivan’s Childhood shows Galtsev, the sole survivor among the main characters and the only one who opposed Ivan’s work as a scout, disconsolately staring at an SS photo of Ivan prior to his execution. Galtsev has reached Berlin, the war has ended, but “victory” seems far removed. The detritus of death and destruction surrounds him.13 Even in Fate of a Man, the most overtly optimistic of these four movies, the viewer cannot be certain that the griefravaged soldier and the scared, lonely child will be able to help each other heal their traumatized souls and thus make a successful return to “normal” life.14 Other Soviet war films from this period, little known in the West but famous at home, reinforce this cinematic “revisioning” of the war. Three especially significant examples are Grigory Chukhrai’s Clear Skies (Chistoe nebo, 1961), Aleksander Alov and Vladimir Naumov’s Peace to Him Who Enters (Mir voskhodiashchemu, 1961, released 1962), and Aleksander Stolper’s The Living and the Dead (Zhivye i mertvye, two parts, 1963–64). Chukhrai followed his success in Ballad of a Soldier with the hard-hitting Clear Skies, which was a box office sensation. Clear Skies follows the reversals in fortunes of a handsome young pilot and a girl with whom he has a brief affair prior to going to the front. Their lives are ruined by the war. Sasha, orphaned and pregnant, be-

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comes a factory worker, hardly the fate the viewer would have expected when she is seen before the war in a well-furnished apartment that suggests her family belongs to the Soviet elite. Astakhov returns home alive, badly disfigured and disgraced, stripped of his Party card because he had allowed himself to be taken prisoner by the Germans. He becomes an embittered, abusive alcoholic, while Sasha, now his wife, rises to prominence in both factory and Party. The startling denouement of Clear Skies, in which Astakhov is rehabilitated after Stalin’s death, is a tacked-on “feel-good” ending that is alien to Chukhrai’s aesthetic and was likely imposed on the director, a sign of the rapidly cooling cultural climate of the early 1960s.15 Likewise, Alov and Naumov’s film Peace to Him Who Enters is marred by a jarringly optimistic ending. Even so, this movie almost failed to reach the screen. Minister of Culture Yekaterina Furtseva, the directors’ patron, intervened; as a result the film was given a limited release.16 Peace to Him Who Enters is set in Germany, in the last two days of the war. Newly arrived at the front, the eager boy lieutenant is aggrieved to have missed the war and annoyed at being assigned to escort a very pregnant German woman to a nearby hospital, accompanied by two battle-hardened veterans, one deaf and shell-shocked. Their quixotic journey through a postapocalyptic German countryside is by turns comical and tragic. None of them can communicate with each other effectively. The terrified expectant mother speaks no Russian; neither, it seems, does Jr. Lt. Ivlev, whose language is “training manual Sovietspeak.” The driver Pasha talks so much that he never listens; Yamshchikov is deaf. The little party is ambushed and Pasha is killed, but the survivors arrive at the hospital in time for the woman to give birth to a healthy boy. The baby urinates over a pile of weapons as the Soviets celebrate the victory. The symbolism of this last scene is so heavy-handed that one suspects it is ironic. Regardless, it by no means subverts the overwhelming pessimism about peace and reconciliation that characterizes the rest of the movie. Stolper’s The Living and the Dead, based on Konstantin Simonov’s beloved, best-selling novel about the encirclement, is a combat film and therefore very different from the other Thaw films discussed above, which take place behind the lines or in the refugee-filled towns and camps that are the Soviet version of a “home front.” Although the movie’s structure superficially conforms to genre conventions, its content was deeply subversive, to an even greater extent than in Simonov’s novel. The Living and the Dead follows the fortunes of a Red Army political officer as he struggles to survive the first months of the war. Separated from his unit in the chaos, he loses his Party card, but not his soul. The same cannot be said for many of the others he encounters on his terrifying odyssey. Arrogance, corruption, and cowardice are in much greater supply than heroism and sacrifice. The film forces us to question its title: who are the “living” and who are the “dead”? This message is reinforced by the story’s second protagonist, a general who was imprisoned during the military purge in 1937

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and has been released to redeem the honor he never lost. A comparison of the film with the novel demonstrates the truth of the hoary aphorism “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Stolper’s frank depiction of the panic and disarray in the Red Army as it attempts to fight its way out of the encirclement—soldiers throwing stones at the advancing German forces because they have been stripped of the German weapons they have found—is still shocking. The tragedy of the encirclement has never been told more compellingly, and The Living and the Dead had a profound impact on the Brezhnev era’s most important war film director, Aleksei Gherman, whose work will be discussed below.17 Stolper’s picture led the box office in 1964, drawing over forty million viewers for each part,18 even though it was officially criticized for its “pessimism.” Pessimistic it is, not only for its open acknowledgement that thousands of men died unnecessarily because of the venality of their commanders, but also for the doubts it casts on the “living.” Few honorable men and women survive. Few specialists on Soviet politics or the economy would argue that “postwar” lasted much beyond Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, and as I have indicated above, a more common ending date is 1956, with the Secret Speech, or 1957, when de-Stalinization was openly underway. The problem with this periodization, however, is that it is tied to Stalinism as an institution, rather than to society’s discourse about the meaning of the war, which had only just begun and was far from being resolved. During the Brezhnev era the war cult developed full force,19 along with challenges to the cult’s false majesty. Filmmakers led the way.

Postwar III, 1967–86 In the first few years of Brezhnev’s reign, it seemed that Soviet war cinema had been “normalized” according to a Hollywood standard. The Great Patriotic War had become a convenient backdrop for adventures and comedies, part of the movie industry’s plan to increase the numbers of pure entertainment films released in order to boost cinema’s sagging revenues. (Only now was television a source of competition for viewers.) Suspense and laughter replaced the soulsearching and angst of the Thaw war films. The most popular war film in the period 1964–71 was Vladimir Basov’s Shield and Sword (Shchit i mech, 1967– 68), a four-part blockbuster charting the exploits of a handsome NKVD agent who infiltrates the SS. Its first part attracted some 68 million viewers, dwarfing all competition.20 By comparison, the most popular war comedy, Teodor Vulfovich’s zany A Hard Little Nut (Krepkii oreshek, 1967) attracted “only” 32 million,21 a number that a few years earlier would have earned it “top ten” box office honors. The trends of the late 1960s contribute to a perception that the film industry was mired in Brezhnevian zastoi (stagnation).

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This perception was reinforced by the Brezhnev era’s canonical war film, Liberation (Osvobozhdenie), which was commissioned to celebrate the twentyfifth anniversary of the victory and clearly designed to buttress the war cult. Directed by Yury Ozerov and released in five parts (eight hours) between 1970 and 1972, this combat epic easily overshadowed the grandiosity of The Fall of Berlin. Richard Stites reports that workers were strongly encouraged by their factory committees to see it.22 Even with enforced attendance, the film fell short of box office expectations, with attendance precipitously dropping from 56.1 million for part one to 28 million for parts four and five.23 Nevertheless, Liberation is a serious, well-crafted genre film that is important for illustrating the official Soviet interpretation of the course of the war after the battle of Stalingrad. Due to Stalin’s skillful leadership on the diplomatic front, and to the Soviet high command’s equally skilled military leadership on the battlefront, the valiant Red Army prevailed. The role of the Party in directing the partisans is also central to this interpretation. Ozerov, a journeyman director who continued to direct combat epics, never made a genuinely popular film or an artistically significant one. It is, however, important to stress that he was far from a “tool” of war cult propaganda: Liberation indicates how deeply the Thaw had penetrated into Soviet culture, even in a vehicle that seemed to reject its key values. Ozerov individualizes and humanizes his characters as much as he can, showing the bickering and competition between Zhukov and Konev as well as everyone’s obsequious behavior around Stalin. The combat film’s obligatory romance, between an officer and a nurse, is as sexual as it is emotional, another sign of the long road Soviet cinema had traveled since Stalin’s death. More significantly, when Liberation ends with the victory in Berlin, the lovers are not reunited. Whether they will have a future together, or what their future will be, is left to the viewer’s judgment. Even though Liberation is a much better film than critics allowed, it was immediately clear that Ozerov’s picture would not mark a cinematic turning point in the treatment of the Great Patriotic War on screen. With every fiveyear anniversary of Victory Day, Soviet critics compiled lists of their favorite films about the war. Although Liberation was never included in these lists, the best Thaw films and the most innovative of the wartime war films always were. The silence surrounding Liberation became even louder with the release of Stanislav Rostotsky’s And the Dawns Are Quiet Here (…a zori zdes tikhie), which led the box office in 1973, drawing 66 million viewers for each of its two parts24 and earning a permanent place in the hearts of Soviet viewers and the history of Soviet popular cinema. And the Dawns Are Quiet Here, the story of a women’s corps assigned to defend a small northern village that was unlikely to see any action, served as a powerful antidote to Liberation. As Rostotsky’s movie demonstrates, in wartime, what seems improbable can quickly become

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a tragedy. When a German reconnaissance unit is spotted in their forest, the girls, accompanied by their kindly starshina (sergeant-major) Fyodor Ivanovich, form a scouting party to do their own reconnaissance. Their initial excitement at “seeing action” turns to doubt and fear and genuine courage, as they are picked off, one by one. Only the grieving starshina survives to remember them. And the Dawns Are Quiet Here was among the first Soviet war films to be framed in the present. At its beginning, some teenagers are enjoying the tranquil and pristine scenery; untroubled by any knowledge of what occurred there thirty years earlier. At the end, we see the now elderly Fyodor Ivanovich somberly watching a soldier affixing a modest commemorative plaque to a rock at the same spot in quiet recognition of the unassuming heroines. The message was clear, and both critics and audiences responded to it. With one significant exception, the best films made in the decade after And the Dawns Are Quiet Here were “small” war films that focused on wartime comrades and the strengths and limitations of wartime bonds, including the fraying of those bonds. As in Dawns, teenaged soldiers and nurses were frequently at the center of these films, subtly casting doubts about their deployment and, especially, their training. As in Dawns, the protagonists of these movies rarely survived, leaving the postwar generation to wonder, perhaps, what might have been. Certainly the shift from adult to child heroes helped make these movies more accessible for those to whom the war was only a series of increasingly meaningless rituals. The exception to the trend toward small-scale war films, Sergei Bondarchuk’s They Fought for the Motherland (Oni srazhalis za rodinu, 1975), was a bigbudget combat film commissioned for the thirtieth anniversary of the victory. Although its budget and status as an “anniversary film” recall Liberation, the resemblance ends there. They Fought for the Motherland is a resolutely “local” look at a platoon on the eve of the Battle of Stalingrad, as they wend their way across the steppe in July 1942. The film is essentially plotless, anchored by an unusual protagonist for an anniversary film: a cheerful, womanizing “fixer.”25 The men forage for food, joke, play cards, attempt to fondle village women. Mainly they wait. But when they do meet the foe in a minor skirmish en route, the results are catastrophic: Bondarchuk went farther than any Soviet director in graphically depicting the carnage of battle. The survivors wearily regroup and continue onward; they are last seen as specks on the steppe. As these brief discussions of And the Dawns Are Quiet Here and They Fought for the Motherland suggest, provocative films about the war continued to be made, be released, and sell millions of tickets, belying the oft-expressed view that Soviet cinema did not recover from the end of the Thaw until the advent of glasnost. This is not to suggest, however, that culture was so liberalized that filmmakers could never exceed the limits imposed by the censors—or the audi-

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ence. The films I have chosen to illustrate the limits of artistic freedom in war films are Aleksei Gherman’s The Trial on the Road, Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent, and Grigory Chukhrai’s The Quagmire, three pictures dealing with the difficult subject of traitors and collaborators. Gherman, the son of the well-known war novelist Yury Gherman, was the conscience of the generation of filmmakers who came to adulthood after the war. His second film, The Trial on the Road (Proverka na dorogakh), based on stories by his father, was banned in 1971 and lay “on the shelf ” until 1987. Gher man’s film brought Lazarev, a Russian caught fighting for the Germans, to life in a way that the elder Gherman’s prose never could. Lazarev pleads for his life with the partisans who “repatriate” him: he claims that he was forced by the Germans who had taken him prisoner and offers to redeem himself by fighting with the partisans for his own people. Not surprisingly, the partisans do not trust him and send him on a suicide mission to bomb a German supply train. He carries out the mission successfully and is killed. The catch is that the viewer, like the partisans, has no idea what motivates Lazarev. Is he a martyr for the motherland? Or merely a Russian fatalist? Although the film industry’s political watchdogs had developed a greater tolerance for ambiguity since the Thaw, presenting a likely traitor as a “hero” was too much, even if he had repented.26 The next picture to confront the fraught subject of native collaborators was Shepitko’s The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1976). Shepitko was a rarity in the masculinized world of Soviet directors: a woman who refused to make “soft” pictures. For example, her second film, Wings (Krylia, 1966), concerned the unsatisfying postwar life of a female fighter pilot who has been relegated to the periphery of the war cult and, like most of the women pilots, pushed out of the service.27 Although The Ascent deals harshly and directly with the even more difficult subject of collaboration, unlike The Trial on the Road there is little ambiguity in the presentation of the heroes and villains. The captured partisan Sotnikov, a teacher and Party member, is brutally tortured by the collaborator Portnov, formerly a Party political instructor, in an effort to get him to “turn.” In sharp contrast, Sotnikov’s comrade Rybak easily, if guiltily, agrees to work for the Germans. He wants to live, and he does (as does the other traitor, Portnov). With Rybak and Portnov as witnesses beside the Germans and villagers who have been forced from their homes to watch, Sotnikov is hanged along with two peasants who have helped him and a little Jewish girl who had been hidden in the village. The message is obvious: the brave and good perish; the cowardly and craven survive. The implications for the Soviet postwar “future” (now the present), are stunning, but Shepitko’s film did not run into direct censorship trouble, and the picture was widely and justly acclaimed by critics at home and abroad. However, the film was too harsh and uncompromising to resonate with ordinary moviegoers and attracted only some ten million viewers.28

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The final film in this trio, Chukhrai’s The Quagmire (Triasina, 1977), problematizes the definition of a “traitor.” Since Clear Skies, Chukhrai had become an increasingly outspoken director and had founded a quasi-independent branch of Mosfilm called the Experimental Creative Studio. The studio saw some of its films banned and was shut down in 1972; The Quagmire was Chukhrai’s first film since 1971. The film’s original screenplay was based on a true story about a woman who sheltered her deserter son up to the end of the war. It was hardly a safe choice for a once-lionized director whose career had become troubled. Unlike the sacrificing mothers of Soviet wartime lore, The Quagmire’s mother not only hides her younger son after his desertion but also, in order to keep him hidden, cuts her ties with her older son, a veteran and POW who she knows would disapprove. Even her priest refuses to absolve her when she confesses. The weight of her secret destroys her health, both physical and mental, and when her younger son, who has become subhuman after years in the attic, decides to give himself up, she dies of a heart attack, clutching at him to prevent his leaving. This bizarre tale has a bizarre ending: the deserter cannot find anyone to arrest him. The village policeman shoos him away; an arrest will require too much paperwork. Another traitor slips away into postwar society. The Quagmire had a remarkable box office for an art film, nearly twenty million.29 The darkest of these three films, it highlights one of the most difficult issues of Soviet life: where do one’s primary loyalties lie—with the state, or with one’s family? After The Quagmire, the best Soviet directors and the up-and-coming generation of filmmakers who had been born after the war turned away from war films. Audiences were turning away, too. War fatigue had set in, and the rituals of the war cult were being openly mocked by the late 1970s. The malaise was such that upon the thirty-fifth anniversary of the victory, 1980 became the first “five-year” anniversary without a memorable war film. The last important Soviet film about the Great Patriotic War appeared in 1985, before glasnost was formally declared but while its foundations were being laid in the arts world. Had the “real day” finally come? Had all the questions about “what is defeated and what is victorious” been asked and answered? Elem Klimov and Ales Adamovich’s Come and See (Idi i smotri, 1985) is one of the most important movies ever made about the Second World War and a fitting finale to the rich tradition of Soviet war films. The phantasmagorical story of the destruction of the Belorussian village of Khatyn in 1943, as seen through the eyes of the fourteen-year-old peasant boy Flor, Come and See sucks the viewer into the apocalypse. There is no escape, not even when the film is “over” and the partisans leave the village of the dead behind, disappearing into the heart of darkness. Although the horrors of what he has seen do not entirely extinguish what is human in Flor, his face, which is transformed into a wizened, scared mask, becomes the window to his soul. This ravaged visage—or so Klimov and Adamovich suggest—is the face of USSR in “victory.”

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When Will the Real Day Come? 1986–?? In the USSR, it might be said that the postwar era truly began when Gorbachev announced perestroika in 1986, not with the putative end of the Cold War in 1989 or with the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991. In cinema, the war was forgotten as moviemakers during glasnost focused on contemporary social problems, of which there were many, and the legacy of Stalinism. When filmmakers were inspired to confront the past, they turned to the 1930s and the Great Terror, not to the “Great Patriotic War.” The forty-fifth anniversary of the victory passed without a major commemorative film, and so did the fiftieth. Of course, by then the USSR was no more, and the storied Soviet film industry had collapsed with the withdrawal of state support. Post-Soviet Russian screens were flooded with second- and third-rate American and European entertainment films and domestic pornography.30 By the late 1990s, when the rebirth of the Russian film industry was apparent, there were new wars for filmmakers to dissect: Afghanistan and Chechnya. Not until 2002 were there noteworthy Russian films about the Great Patriotic War, and these were glossy fantasies: Nikolai Lebedev’s The Star (a glamorized remake of a once-banned film) and Aleksander Rogozhkin’s The Cuckoo, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. If a Russian director’s war film was considered for an Oscar, then perhaps “normalization” had begun at last. Along came the sixtieth anniversary and an astonishing revival of the Russian war film tradition in the cinemas and on television. No Saving Private Ryans or Enemies at the Gates were to be found among the many movies made about the Second World War. Instead the films were mainly harsh, uncompromising confrontations with the legacy of the war, focusing on the penal battalions, the devastating impact of the NKVD and SMERSH in the army, POWs in the Gulag, the ambiguous role of partisans and nationalists, the abuse of teen draftees in the officer corps, the humanization of the enemy, and on and on and on. The public continues to be fascinated. The turn toward samokritika (self-criticism) on a national scale drew the unfavorable attention of the Putin government, which invested heavily in a campaign to revive Russian patriotic culture, including “patriotic” movies to counter the “negativism” of these critical examinations of the “holy war and its cult.” The final scene has yet to be written.

Notes 1. See Denise J. Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005, (Lawrence, 2007), 3. Details on all the films discussed in this essay can be found in chapters 4–9. 2. When “the Second World War” is used, it generally refers to the entire conflict, i.e., the Great Patriotic, the Western Front, and the Pacific War.

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3. Nina Tumarkin’s The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994) offers an excellent overview and analysis of this phenomenon. 4. This is a common viewpoint among post-Soviet Russian film critics; see, e.g., Aleksandr Shpagin, “Religiia voiny: subektivnye zametki o bogoiskatelstve v voennom kinematografe,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 5 (2005): 56–68, and no. 6 (2005): 72–89. 5. Nikolai Dobroliubov, “When Will the Real Day Come?” in Ralph E. Matlaw, ed. and trans., Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov: Essential Writings by the Founders of Russian Literary & Social Criticism (Bloomington, 1962), 176–226. Dobroliubov was, of course, reflecting on the possibility of genuine reform on the eve of Alexander II’s Great Reforms. 6. This statement is not intended to denigrate the importance of novels and short stories about the war, many of which were adapted to the screen. The greatest works of war fiction, like Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (Zhizn i sudba, 1960, not published in the USSR until 1988), were, however, much more likely to be censored or banned than films. (See Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 113–14, for a brief discussion of Life and Fate.) When war films were adapted from war novels, they were usually much more vivid and effective than their literary sources. 7. The best account of daily life in this period is Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale, (Armonk, 1998). 8. See, e.g., Grigorii Mariamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor: Stalin smotrit kino (Moscow, 1992). 9. For an overview of Soviet cinema in this period, see Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London, 2001), chap. 10. 10. Dramatic films dealing with postwar life were nonexistent. When Vsevolod Pudovkin was finally able to make The Return of Vasily Bortnikov (Vozvrashchenie Vasiliia Bortnikova, 1952), about a soldier who returns to find his wife with another man, it was in a severely bowdlerized form and not released until after Stalin’s death. 11. The sole exception, Konstantin Yudin’s Brave People (Smelye liudi, 1950), an adventure about a boy and his racehorse set in the Caucasus, is strikingly different from the other war films of the late Stalin era. At the film’s end, life has returned to a “normality” that few Soviet citizens experienced. A well-dressed crowd fills the stands at the race; the scene could easily pass for Derby Day, whether in the US or the UK. I can only surmise that locating the film in a borderland republic far from the center made it possible for viewers to enjoy it as a fantasy. 12. The cultural politics of this period in Soviet film history is covered thoroughly and well in Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London, 1999). Woll also provides excellent analyses of many of the films discussed in this section. 13. The final shots, however, reprise the film’s opening, showing Ivan with his mother and sister, cavorting on a beach. Some critics take this as an optimistic message for the postwar future; I see it as a reinforcement of all that was lost, never to be regained. 14. A much more optimistic film with the war orphan motif is Marlen Khutsiev’s The Two Fyodors (Dva Fedora, 1958), which depicts a rocky but ultimately successful transition to postwar life. 15. An earlier prewar/wartime/postwar saga, Lev Kulidzhanov’s The House I Live In (Dom v kotorom ia zhivu, 1957), offered its disabled, embittered veteran a less spectacular “happy ending”: he has to wait for years before a woman with whom he had a one-night stand, now a war widow, agrees to resume a relationship with him. 16. Woll, Real Images, 123. 17. Aleksei Gherman, “Pravda—ne skhodstvo a otkrytie,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 12 (2001): 82, a reprint of material first published in 1979. 18. Sergei Zemlianukhin and Miroslava Segida, Domashniaia sinemateka: Otechestvennoe kino, 1918–1996 (Moscow, 1996), 146. 19. Nina Tumarkin dates the transformation of the cult from an occasional theme of Khrushchevian propaganda into a state enterprise at 1965, when Victory Day was restored as a national holiday. See Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, chap. 6, for a discussion of the cult in the Brezhnev era.

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20. Zemlianukhin and Segida, Domashniaia sinemateka, 509. 21. Ibid., 214–15. 22. Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, 1992), 169. 23. Zemlianukhin and Segida, Domashniaia sinemateka, 305. 24. Zemlianukhin and Segida, Domashniaia sinemateka, 11. 25. This character, Lopakin, was played by the beloved actor, writer, and director Vasily Shukshin, who died before the film was released. Shukshin’s phenomenal popularity, and the sorrow over his early death, was a major drawing card for the film. 26. Several years after this debacle, Gherman directed another war film, this one about a war correspondent on leave, the brilliant Twenty Days without War (1976, released 1977). 27. The ending of the film is ambiguous but suggests the heroine commits suicide. 28. Zemlianukhin and Segida, Domashniaia sinemateka, 76. This is, however, a decent box office for an art film, especially one that had a limited distribution (common for art films). There was also a lively discussion about The Ascent in the journals The Art of the Cinema (Iskusstvo kino) and Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran). 29. Zemlianukhin and Segida, Domashniaia sinemateka, 460. 30. For the best analysis of this period see Anna Lawton, Before the Fall: Soviet Cinema in the Gorbachev Years (Washington, D.C., 2002) and Lawton, Imagining Russia 2000: Film and Facts (Washington, D.C., 2004).

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Winning the Peace at the Movies Suffering, Loss, and Redemption in Postwar German Cinema Robert G. Moeller

I

1940S and 1950s, the past that preoccupied most Germans was not one in which millions of German soldiers stormed uninvited into Western Europe and participated in a racist war in Eastern Europe, and in which hundreds of thousands of Germans were responsible for the murder of nearly six million European Jews. Rather, the past about which Germans talked most was that of their own loss and suffering, a history of the aftermath in which Germany had been laid waste by Allied bombs and a protracted war on the ground, millions of German soldiers and civilians were dead, and millions more were homeless. In his contribution to this volume, Norman Naimark describes how these individual experiences of loss shaped public memories of National Socialism, the war, and its aftermath in both German states. Germans also faced this past in massive projects of urban renewal and rebuilding, clearing away the rubble to make possible a new beginning; in parliamentary discussions of how to compensate the German victims of “Hitler’s war”; and in ceremonies to commemorate German victims of Allied bomb attacks, Germans driven out of eastern Germany and Eastern Europe by the Red Army at the end of the war and in the first months after the armistice, and even Germans who had died in Wehrmacht uniforms. The work of cleaning up the psychological, emotional, and literal rubble left by the war also took place in a space visited by millions of West Germans in the 1950s and studied very little by historians—the cinema. With few exceptions, historians of post–Second World War Germany have paid little attention to movies as a source, leaving this domain to students of film and cultural studies.1 Film theorists, in turn, have shown little interest in the movies of the early postwar period because most films produced in the late 1940s and 1950s are aesthetically uninteresting, easily shoved to the margins as an unfortunate way N THE LATE

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station between the “blood and soil” of Nazi cinema and the artistic breakthrough of the “new German cinema” of the early 1960s associated with directors like Werner Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge.2 Most accounts view postwar movies critically because they leave unspoken what is most important. Scholars have focused on movies’ silences—about the Nazi attempt to murder all European Jews, about the broad-based support enjoyed by the Nazis, about many Germans’ enthusiasm for a war that was not only Hitler’s. In this essay I want to look at what the movies did say about the past, rather than what they did not. My focus is on West German films. The postwar statecontrolled East German film industry, DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft), was not silent about the war and its aftermath, but East German movies that addressed the war were few in number, and a limited range of themes dominated DEFA’s carefully regulated offerings: the paramount importance of the communist anti-fascist resistance, the complicity of big business in promoting war, the need in postwar society to root out the handful of real perpetrators. These didactic films always clearly distinguished the overwhelming majority of the “good Germans” and the promise of conversion and redemption for those who were able to emerge from the darkness of the fascist past into the cleansing light of communism. Whereas these movies testify that the East German state clearly understood film as a crucial medium for mass-mediating ideological messages, those messages were never very surprising and remained fairly constant. Meanwhile, for West German filmmakers it was the box office, not a state monopoly, that determined whether films failed or succeeded, and directors were under pressure to give their viewers what they wanted—not, as in the East German case, what political leaders thought they needed. If the West German state could not dictate the content of film, it also could exercise no influence over the critical reception of films, registered in the daily press. Although film critics are no stand-in for “the public,” their responses to movies that addressed the war and its aftermath suggest some of the range of opinion about the portrayals of the past presented by films in the first decade or so after the war’s end. Many reviewers applauded virtually all cinematic attempts to revisit the Second World War, uncritically heralding them as contributions to the process of “overcoming the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), but a vocal minority remained unsatisfied. They sought an explanation of the social and political forces that had brought Germans from 1933 to 1939, a part of German history on which most postwar films did not comment, and they called for much more thoroughgoing explorations of guilt and responsibility than most films had to offer.3 However, by the late 1950s, when many West Germans—and at least some West German filmmakers—were ready to take a more critical look at a past in which they were perpetrators, not victims, and some films began to address this difficult topic, the popularity of movies about the war and its aftermath was waning. Indeed, it has really only been since Ger-

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man unification that the Nazis and the war have once again become big at the box office.4 In the space allotted here, I cannot do much more than sketch the range of themes that postwar West German movies addressed, including movies of the immediate postwar period that described life, love, and recovery in the rubble of bombed-out German cities; so-called Heimatfilme, movies that evoked a lost German past of civility, neighborliness, and community and told the story of Germans who were heimatlos (homeless) because they had been driven out of Eastern Europe by the Red Army at the end of the war; and movies in which Germans in uniform fought the war all over again. In a brief epilogue, I will fast-forward to consider why themes that dominated West German cinema in the 1950s have resurfaced nearly half a century later.

Clearing Away the Rubble In May 1945, most German cities were laid waste, leveled by British and American bomb attacks. Some 11 million German men in uniform were in POW camps, and upon returning home they faced wives and children to whom they had become strangers and enormous problems of social, psychological, and emotional reintegration.5 In the late 1940s, filmmakers sifted through this rubble to present melodramatic narratives in which not just buildings but psyches, relationships, self-confidence, and hope lay in ruins. The most famous of the “rubble film” genre was Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us), the first postwar movie licensed by the Soviet forces of occupation. Staudte originally sought permission to make the film from British and American authorities, but at a moment when the Western Allies remained anxious about allowing Germans to start making movies again, he had better luck with the Soviets. Produced by DEFA, Murderers premiered when the boundary between East and West was still quite porous and the Cold War divide had yet to open, and the film was seen and reviewed in both East and West. Through much of the film, the protagonist, Dr. Hans Mertens, wanders through a landscape of ruins that reflect his soul. He seeks the commanding officer Bruckner, who sent him out to shoot Polish civilians in the winter of 1942. Bruckner is a murderer who has survived the war unscathed. Mertens’s rehabilitation is facilitated by a woman, Susanne Wellner, who convinces him that the courts, not he, should mete out justice to the perpetrators. As the film nears its conclusion, Susanne tells Mertens that “we don’t have the right to judge.” “No,” he responds, “but we have the duty to indict and to demand justice in the name of the millions of innocent people who were murdered.”6 Millions of other innocents who survived the war—Mertens included, the film implies—were also victims, witnesses to acts that they, like

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Mertens, had been helpless to prevent. Susanne too bears scars of the war; she was incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp because of her political, not racial or religious, persuasion. Unlike Mertens, however, she seeks to put the past behind her as soon as possible, clearing a path to the future toward which she and Mertens bravely stride. In other variations on this theme, it is the child, not the lover, who redeems the man. In Irgendwo in Berlin (Somewhere in Berlin, Gerhard Lamprecht, 1946), a son who at first cannot even recognize the gray figure who slumps home from a POW camp convinces his father that assuming parental responsibility and obligation can define the way to proper manhood. In …Und über uns der Himmel (And the Heavens Above, Josef von Báky, 1947), the Third Reich’s favorite leading man, Hans Albers, plays a returning POW who descends into criminality and is active on the black market. His son also returns from the war, blinded in battle, and as he regains his vision he witnesses his father’s decline and leads him to the path of moral recovery. In 1949,Wolfgang Liebeneiner translated the most famous “returnee” (Heimkehrer) theatrical production, Wolfgang Borchert’s Draussen vor der Tür (The Man Outside) into Liebe 47 (Love 47), a film in which a POW, Beckmann, back from “three years in Soviet summer camp,” contemplates suicide in Hamburg on the banks of the Elbe. Liebeneiner, well known as the head of the Nazi film production company from 1943 until the end of the war, was most famous for his film Ich klage an (I Accuse), a melodrama that unambiguously advocated euthanasia. Beginning in November 1944, when more and more Germans began to doubt Hitler’s predictions that the Third Reich would triumph, Liebeneiner began work on Das Leben geht weiter (Life Goes On), a film that celebrated the resiliency of Berliners amidst falling Allied bombs. Five years later, he confronted the war’s aftermath. In Liebe 47, Beckmann is saved by Anna, a woman whose hell has been not Soviet barbed wire but flight from the bombs and the Russians, the death of her husband and child, and privation that did not end on 8 May 1945. Liebeneiner’s female protagonist is much rougher at the edges than Susanne Wellner, but ultimately it is again the healing balm of femininity that brings Beckmann back to the land of the living. Anna’s benediction—“Why do we need to make the world better? Let’s begin with ourselves, I’ll help you and you help me”—allows Beckmann to find peace.7

There’s No Place Like Heimat Liebeneiner’s movie was a box office flop, and by the late 1940s, the genre of the “returnee film” (Heimkehrerfilm) and the “rubble film” (Trümmerfilm) had become the stuff of ironic commentary. In Robert Stemmle’s Berliner Ballade (1948), the imaginary Berlin of 2048 is juxtaposed with “archival material from

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1948” and a voiceover expresses the likely dismay of many in the audience: “not another Heimkehrerfilm!” And in Rudolf Jugert’s Film ohne Titel (Film without a Title, 1948) a screenwriter, an actor, and a director debate what kind of film will attract audiences. If anti-Nazi films exploring questions of guilt are unpopular, they agree, then the “rubble film” and the “returnee” film will definitely not fill movie houses.8 Once tragedy, these genres were now the subject of satire. Liebe 47, a film that depicted a world in ruins, was filmed in the Germany it described in 1947, but it was not released until March 1949. Much had happened in the meantime. By May 1947, a British-American “Bizone” had etched out the future form of a West Germany separated from the East. By early 1948, it was ruled by a shadow parliament, Germans elected by Germans. On 20 June, every German citizen was entitled to exchange fifty Reichmarks for fifty new Deutschmarks. Overnight, the black market—a set piece in many of the “rubble films”—vanished. As one reviewer of Liebe 47 put it, “it is the theme, the atmosphere, the ambience of war and postwar that [audiences] are rejecting.” The past the film depicted was “too present and not yet removed enough to spark historical interest … It is a time of spiritual restoration. We’ve had enough upheaval.”9 Anna and Beckmann told a story that began in 1943— when Beckmann lost his kneecap at Stalingrad and Anna lost her virtue in a hail of bombs—but by 1949, Germans had progressed “from Stalingrad to currency reform,” and there were many indications that for West Germans, the postwar years were over.10 Even as the West German film industry turned to other themes, however, filmmakers continued to circle around key elements of the legacy of the war and National Socialism that did not vanish as rapidly as the black market. Even if the physical ruins of destroyed cities and souls were less prominent in German theaters, the “troubling exigencies of the postwar years” remained a staple of the film industry. As Heide Fehrenbach writes, well into the 1950s the war and its consequences remained “part of an unportrayed past. Like a natural catastrophe, it has no author but unsettling repercussions.”11 Those repercussions were perceptible in one of the decade’s most popular genres, the Heimatfilm, the pastel version of an unsullied natural landscape that stood in sharp contrast to the bombed-out cities filmed in black-and-white in the “rubble films.” Heimatfilme reproduced scenes that had been the bread and butter not only of Nazi cinema but also of theatrical and literary traditions that stretched back to late nineteenth-century celebrations of rural society. The Heimat represented hearth and home, local culture and identity—values that postwar Heimatfilme could portray as a German bedrock that had survived the devastation of war and National Socialism. But the postwar Heimat also bore the mark of the war’s aftermath. In one of the first films that signaled the revival of the genre, Am Brunnen vor dem Tore (At the Fountain in Front of the Gate,

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Hans Wolff, 1951), the love triangle at the center of film includes the irrepressibly cheerful owner of a local inn, which has been restored to her after having outlived its purpose as the headquarters for British forces of occupation. Her two suitors are both war veterans, one the German proprietor of a gas station, and the other a British officer whose heart she has won during his stay in Germany as a compassionate conqueror. The postwar reconciliation of victor and vanquished is acted out by the male rivals, who determine that they have met each other before—in an aerial battle that ended with the downing of the British pilot, hauled from his plane by the German who shot him out of the sky. All may be fair in love and war, but by the end of the film the British officer is ready to bow out, making way for a German-German union. Even more prominent in Heimatfilme than former rivals were the millions of Germans who had fled their homes in front of the Red Army in 1945 and others who had been driven out after the war ended. Of the twelve million or so Germans “expelled” (vertrieben) from Eastern Europe and eastern Germany, some eight million had started new lives in what became West Germany. Invoked musically in Am Brunnen vor dem Tore when a local band plays “Ännchen von Tharau,” a song from a lost German Heimat in East Prussia, incorporated into Poland after the war, expellees were much more than a suggestion in many other Heimatfilme. Consider the quintessential Heimatfilm, Hans Deppe’s Grün ist die Heide (The Heath is Green, 1951), which by the end of the decade had attracted some nineteen million viewers. The most popular example of the decade’s most popular film genre, like many other Heimatfilme it centered on those whom the war had made heimatlos (homeless). Grün ist die Heide features a former Pomeranian estate owner expropriated by the Poles. In the scene that is the emotional climax of the film, he addresses his newfound friends in the Lüneburger Heide, exhorting them not to be “too hard on the people who have fled to you. Whoever has not been compelled to leave his home cannot know what it means to be without one.”12 Surrounded by a group of displaced Silesians decked out in traditional dress, he clearly speaks not just for Pomeranian large landowners, but for all expellees.13 In Waldwinter: Glocken der Heimat (Forest in Winter: Bells of Home, 1956), expelled Silesians take center stage. Wolfgang Liebeneiner, leaving the rubble of Liebe 47 for the snow-covered Bavarian alps, sought to make a Heimatfilm because it was particularly timely: “In no other film-producing nation of the world has such an exceptionally large part of the population been homeless; and for those who were allowed to continue living in their Heimat, the example of the countless refugees, and those deported and detained created the anxiety that they too might one day be forced to wander.”14 Liebeneiner’s Silesian protagonists are led westward at the war’s end by the local baron. The film picks up their story a decade later, by which time they have settled in Bavaria. These expellees carry with them the lasting legacy of what one reviewer called the

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“the horrible days of Silesia’s downfall.”15 But they do not remain locked in mourning for the past. In no time at all they are producing hand-crafted glasswork with completely modern means, successfully exporting the products of the Heimat well beyond Germany’s borders. True to Holy Hedwig, the patron saint of Silesia who “cries about the many people who have lost their Heimat,” and equipped with a shrewd business sense, they are ready to make significant contributions to rebuilding not only their own lives but also postwar West Germany. Appearing two years after Waldwinter, Ännchen von Tharau, directed by Wolfgang Schleif, was praised by one reviewer because it “presented the problems that confronted thousands of people robbed of their Heimat.”16 The film’s heroine, Anna, fled from East Prussia in the winter of 1945, barely eluding the advancing Red Army and bringing with her a baby who is not her biological child but the son of another woman who lost her life on the trek. Resettling in a small town on the banks of the Main, she finds employment in a restaurant that features the finest wines of the local vintners. In a plot twist not unique in movies of the 1950s, the fates of expellees and POWs returned from the Soviet Union intertwine. The POW who marches into Anna’s life turns out to be her son’s father. His wife may be dead, but contrary to Wehrmacht reports he is not, and by the end of the movie the boy has two parents, Anna has a husband, and the returnee has been fully integrated into West Germany society after “six years in the big men’s barracks in Asia.” In Suchkind 312 (Sought Child 312), a film directed by Gustav Machaty that premiered in 1955, the adorable protagonist, once again an expellee, is a child, lost on the trek at the war’s end and reunited a decade later with her father, whose return from the eastern front is delayed by an involuntary stay in Soviet captivity. The tale of children separated from parents in the chaos of the war’s end was a familiar one, and one reviewer reminded readers that 97,000 children, once lost, had been reunited with their families since 1945 by the press and radio advertisements of the Red Cross.17 Even critics who criticized the “overcooked, sloppy” tone of the film agreed that this was a theme of enormous significance in the postwar world—“homeless children lost on the flight [from the east], carried off by strangers, left waiting for father and mother in hygienic but hapless institutional homes, without names or birthdates.”18 For favorable reviewers, the movie was a “timely protest on behalf of all children who were left over as victims of the last war.”19 These were not the only movies in which the “new citizens” from the East appeared, but they can serve to suggest some of the themes that ran throughout films about expellees in the 1950s. Focused on the successful integration of expellees into a new Heimat and their willingness to adapt to the realities of a society in the midst of economic reconstruction, the films told stories with happy endings: at the movies, there was little room for the economic, social,

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and psychological problems that continued to plague many expellees in the 1950s. Rather, on offer was what sociologists celebrated as “the creation of a new people” out of East and West.20 The “Volk ohne Raum,” who themselves had aggressively expelled indigenous populations in the late 1930s and 1940s, seizing vast expanses of territory in Eastern Europe for resettlement by proper “Aryans,” had become a people with enough space to make a new home for Eastern European Germans aggressively expelled by the Communists.

Everymensch Goes to War If the shooting war, as part of a collective nightmare from which postwar Germans wished to awaken, took place off-screen in Heimatfilme, it moved to center stage in a number of combat films that were churned out in the mid1950s. Before German defeat in the Second World War, over fifteen million men—some Austrians, some from those parts of Europe incorporated into the “Great Reich,” and most from Germany—had served in the military. Of these, over five million were dead by May 1945. For every man in uniform, there were wives, lovers, mothers, fathers, siblings, and children at home who were touched by the experiences that men had at the front. Movies healed the physical and psychological wounds of returning veterans and offered explanations of what their fathers had experienced to the generation that came of age after the war. Combat films presented classic narratives of male heroism, valor, and courage leavened with pathos, suffering, and even tears. They depicted fun-loving enlisted men who often put on the uniform reluctantly, whose first loyalty was to their loved ones and each other, and whose worst enemies might often be superior officers, the real Nazis who needed no black hats to be immediately recognized. They showed men who had been filled with a belief in Führer and Fatherland but quickly learned that they and their country had been betrayed by Hitler. And they portrayed men of principle who were caught between their dislike—even hatred—of National Socialism and a sense of honor that prevented them from questioning even those orders they knew to be bad. Not surprisingly, movies about the war differentiated sharply between front and home front. For the most part, women minded the hearth as they dodged the bombs, cleared away the rubble, comforted children, longed for loved ones, and orchestrated romantic interludes when men enjoyed brief leaves. In some cases, women of dubious morality and compromised patriotism proved unfaithful to those risking their lives in uniform. The shooting war was, however, almost exclusively a man’s world. Consider a few examples. A decade after the war’s end, West Germans could see the fictional ace fighter pilot General Harras, based on Ernst Udet,

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a hero of the First World War who was charged with expanding the Luftwaffe under the Nazis, go head-to-head with his superiors in Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General, Helmut Käutner, 1955). At a film named for its hero (Canaris, Alfred Weidenmann, 1954), they could applaud Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of military intelligence, who nobly sought to maintain his dignity and honor even as he served the Third Reich. They could reflect on those military men who had attempted to bring an end to the war by assassinating Hitler in Es geschah am 20. Juli (It Happened on July 20, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1955). And in Kinder, Mütter und ein General (Children, Mothers and a General, Laslo Benedek, 1955) they could follow a ragtag collection of women who pushed their way to the eastern front in the spring of 1945 to bring home their sons, victims of a Nazi ideology that exhorted them to fight to the bitter end. In still other films, the protagonists marched directly into battle. Hans Hellmut Kirst’s immensely popular three-part novel, 08/15, was quickly translated into an immensely popular three-part film by the same name (Paul May, 1954–55) that followed Gunner Asch, a German everyman, from basic training to the war in Russia, then back to the end of the war on German soil. Stern von Afrika (Star of Africa, Alfred Weidenmann, 1956) celebrated the accomplishments of Hans Joachim Marseille, the legendary fighter pilot who claimed 150 downed British planes in the battle for North Africa. His demise in a plane crash was offered as a metaphor for all the youth wasted by Hitler’s war. In Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?, 1959) Frank Wisbar revisited the battle of Stalingrad and the defeat of the Sixth Army, which for many West Germans had registered as the beginning of the end. Wisbar portrayed it as a tragedy for which only Hitler and his fanatical henchmen could hold responsibility and in which Red Army and Wehrmacht soldiers alike were caught in a fateful struggle they could exercise little control over as totalitarian rulers sent millions of men in uniform to their deaths. And Wisbar’s Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen (Night Fell over Gotenhafen, 1959) offered a love triangle in which the female protagonist, torn between two men in uniform, flees eastward, leaving Berlin and falling bombs for the refuge of the East Prussian countryside, only to face the red onslaught and a Wehrmacht in retreat. Defenders have ceased to defend, and the entire love triangle sinks to the bottom of the Baltic after a Russian submarine torpedoes the boat they vainly hope will carry them westward. Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? ends with the surviving German soldiers being marched off to Soviet POW camps, and three movies from the late 1950s followed them to this destination. Der Arzt von Stalingrad (The Doctor of Stalingrad, Géza von Radvanyi, 1957) tells the story of a Wehrmacht doctor who voluntarily stays on in a Soviet POW camp to heal German wounds. He faces off with Dr. Aleksandra Kasalinskaia, his heartless Red Army counterpart, but wins favor with the camp commandant when he successfully performs a deli-

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cate operation on a Soviet general’s son. In return the good doctor wins the early release of many of his comrades, but he stays on in the frozen tundra, ready to heal the sick, German and Russian alike. Taiga (1958), another creation of the indefatigable Wolfgang Liebeneiner, is the tale of a “camp for three hundred men, the forgotten of the war.” Like a typical Heimatfilm, it opens with the camera panning slowly across a vast expanse of evergreens. But in this forest behind the Urals is a home for German POWs. Into the midst of a dispirited, depressed, demoralized, and divided group steps Dr. Hannah Dietrich, played by Ruth Leuwerik, one of the biggest movie stars of the 1950s. Here, she is the lone female presence in a world of men. She turns things around, rediscovering her own femininity—at first obscured by a shorn head and rough POW clothing, which she exchanges for a frock cleverly fashioned by one of her comrades—and rehabilitating the men around her. In the film Der Teufel spielte Balalaika (The Devil Played the Balalaika, Leopold Lahola, 1961), the cure is administered not by a German physician but by an Austrian Jew in a Red Army uniform, a concentration camp survivor who has joined her liberators and married a Red Army political officer who is also a Jew. Elena translates Russian into a language German POWs can comprehend, and she also translates German experiences into the terms of Jewish suffering. Plagued by a dream that “this barbed wire is my barbed wire, this imprisonment is my imprisonment,” the survivor recognizes that the POW Peter Joost, the film’s good German, is suffering through his own living nightmare. By the end of the film she has convinced her husband that Peter “is one of the few who has learned something,” and at her behest he adds Peter’s name to the list of those to be released. In Stalin’s Russia there is no room for such acts of compassion, and as the movie ends, Elena’s husband is heading for an interrogation cell of the secret police. In tears, Elena watches from within the camp, framed by barbed wire, as the two men in her life depart: one free, the other on his way to prison. Writing in 1959 of the Stalingrad film Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?, Erich Kuby, who by the early 1960s would assume a role as a precursor of the West German “new left,” acerbically noted that movies filled with heroic survivors offered a means to retell war stories with different outcomes. Reflecting specifically on Hunde—but in terms that could easily be applied to other movies whose heroes were men in the uniform of the Wehrmacht—he commented that “our life in West Germany since 1950 can only be comprehended if we understand that this time around every single German wants to win the war he lost. The German man cannot tolerate having a lost war in his past.”21 But West German movies that presented the war at the front and the POW experience were not about winning the war the second time around; they were about winning the peace. They established the moral high ground on which Germans

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could look back on National Socialism, drawing from it cautionary tales about the horrors of modern warfare and the totalitarian menace. Movies offered a version of the past in which men in uniform were compassionate, courageous, and caring, not bloodthirsty and murderous.

What’s Wrong With This Picture? It is easy to understand why Kuby, the advocates of the “new German cinema,” and many other critics since have nothing good to say about the movies discussed above. They pay little or no attention to the origins of the war, and they focus almost exclusively on the war’s outcome and aftermath. Causality and chronology fall from view. When German men appear in uniform, very few are convinced Nazis, and with few exception the worst crimes that Nazis commit are perpetrated against the men they lead, not non-German civilians. The films are nearly as “judenrein” (“free of Jews”) as the Third Reich itself, and when a Jewish survivor appears—as in Der Teufel spielte Balalaika—it is to forgive. However, the preoccupation with these films’ multiple silences should not prevent us from looking carefully at what version of the past they selectively pieced together. In the “history of the aftermath” they offered, heterosexual unions accelerated the pace of recovery and rebuilding, hardworking eastern Germans found a new Heimat in West Germany, men in uniform were loyal to Frau and Familie rather than Führer und Vaterland, and noble POWs suffered with dignity, surviving both brown and red forms of totalitarianism. These stories of redemption left much unsaid, but they also said much about the paths toward postwar restoration that many West Germans chose to follow. Postwar war stories also offered interpretations not just of the war but also of the geopolitical consequences of the aftermath. In a world divided between East and West, movies from the early 1950s that featured barbaric Red Army soldiers reminded West Germans that the face of the old enemy was little different from the face of the new enemy. By the second half of the decade, however, with Stalin out of power and a possible Soviet-German reconciliation in sight, movies offered a different set of war stories. One enthusiastic reviewer recommended the antiwar theme of Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? as an “admonition for Germans, but for other countries too, even for Russia! With purity and fairness, it will become a connecting link between the German people and erstwhile enemies, and it is suited to replace coexistence with friendship”;22 press reports emphasized that the Soviets concurred. According to one account, when Wisbar, the director, asked the head of the Soviet film industry why he had not purchased the film for circulation in his country, the official responded: “Do you have any suggestions how I should explain to my staff that the best Stalingrad film was made not by a Soviet Russian but by a German?”23 Good

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Germans and good Russians could exist in 1961 because they had existed in the past. Evil systems, not evil people, were the problem. Finally, all movies that addressed the war and its aftermath emphasized the suffering and loss that war had brought to Germans, and the redemption that they had achieved by overcoming this past. The war created not a “community of the people” defined by race but a community of the people defined by their status as victims. Victims, in turn, emerged as survivors, the shapers of their own destinies, able to return Germany to the proper path. In 1983, at a conference to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, Hermann Lübbe argued that in the postwar era West Germans had of necessity maintained a “certain silence” ( gewisse Stille) around memories of National Socialism. For Lübbe, keeping silent about the past was essential to permitting West Germans to construct a functioning civil society after 1945—a virtue, not a vice. At the movies and elsewhere in the 1950s, West Germans were anything but silent about National Socialism, the war, and its consequences, but perhaps a “certain noisiness” was essential to achieving what Lübbe thought silence had accomplished—the creation of a functioning civil society, based on democratic institutions, that was capable of integrating millions of Germans who had supported National Socialism but were willing to learn from the past.24 It is not surprising that in the aftermath, millions of Germans flocked to see mass-mediated tales of loss, suffering and redemption. Perhaps more remarkable than this consensus view of Germans as victims is the fact that there were at least some who challenged it. By the late 1950s, the civil society that it had helped to shape also created the space in which a handful of critics demanded that movies go farther, offering a fuller account of the past. The filtered version of National Socialism and the war that films presented, which we can identify sixty years later, was apparent to some contemporaries as well. In the pages of the daily press, they called for movies that would explore not just the end but the origin of the war; that would remind viewers that many regions of Eastern Europe from which Germans fled in 1945 had in fact been overrun after 1939 by uninvited Germans in uniform; that would acknowledge that some soldiers had done nothing more than their duty yet still concede the criminal nature of the army whose uniform they had worn; and that would emphasize that the devastating war that ended in May 1945 was the product not just of a handful of Nazis, but also of a regime that millions of Germans had enthusiastically embraced.25 Some filmmakers responded. Consider a few examples: in Falk Harnack’s Unruhige Nacht (Troubled Night, 1958), a military pastor provides comfort to a deserter, who has been sentenced to death for fleeing the madness of war on the eastern front to live with a Soviet war widow and her young son. Bernhard Wicki, who plays the pastor in Unruhige Nacht, went behind the camera to direct Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1959), which depicts battle scenes of enormous ferocity

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in a story of youth recruited to defend the Heimat against American tanks in the spring of 1945. They die terrifying deaths that Wicki’s direction graphically captures, and their war has little in common with that of the good-natured hero of 08/15 or even the sadder but wiser protagonist of Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?. As reviewers noted, Die Brücke broke with many of the conventions that defined other war movies. There are no heroes. Germans kill the enemy, but Germans also kill Germans, and when the enemy dies, it is not off-camera. In Wicki’s telling of the war’s end in the west, Germany is marked by the “complete disruption of the ethical order.”26 Death redeems no one, and Wicki’s indictment includes not just Hitler but a generation of fathers who did nothing to stop their sons from succumbing completely to fantasies of Führer and Fatherland. Wicki’s film had a huge audience. As one film journal concluded, Die Brücke was “the big event of 1959,”27 and its success continued to resound as it accumulated more film prizes than any other West German movie.28 Judged in the late 1950s to be “the best and most important postwar German film,” it was praised as “a political and moral act.”29 Writing in general of war movies from the 1950s, the film historian Gerhard Paul concludes that they sought to make a “civilized act” out of the “catastrophic, chaotic, primal experience of war, conforming [war] to a visual, narrative, and moral order that a war does not possess.”30 Unruhige Nacht and Die Brücke were powerful exceptions that proved the rule. Wolfgang Staudte, known for Die Mörder sind unter uns, did not lose his critical edge upon moving to West Germany in 1956 and added his voice to those demanding a more critical assessment of the war and its consequences. In Rose Bernd (1957), the main character is a Silesian maid driven by the exigencies of the war’s end into an unusually inhospitable West German countryside. A loveless affair with her employer leaves her pregnant, and at the film’s end she faces an uncertain future with the child she has refused to abort. In Rosen für den Staatsanwalt (Roses for the Prosecutor, 1959), Staudte takes on the lawless system of Nazi military justice, telling the tale of a soldier sentenced to death in the last days of the war for the theft of a chocolate bar. His execution is disrupted by a bomb attack, and he escapes his fate. Years later—in the midst of a West Germany fully recovered from the ravages of war—he crosses paths with the lawyer who prosecuted him. The lawyer has emerged unscathed from the war and has continued to engage in his profession. The two confront one another in court a second time, after the outraged veteran smashes a display window—to steal two chocolate bars. And in Staudte’s Kirmes (1960), the citizens of a small West German village confront a past they have tried to hide when, fifteen years after the war’s end, they come upon the skeleton of a deserter whom many had refused to shelter and who had taken his own life. Just as more critical films made for a mass audience began to appear, however, the audience for any films, let alone those that addressed the war and its

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legacy, was dwindling, and increasingly West Germans found their entertainment in their living rooms in front of the television set, not in movie houses. Rainer Maria Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Helma Sanders Brahms, and other representatives of the “new German cinema” had much to say about National Socialism, the Second World War, and the past West Germans had avoided, but few Germans cared to listen. As Eric Rentschler put it, “New German Cinema was challenging and unsettling, which in part explains why it found such a modest domestic following. It was taken seriously abroad because it was spurned at home.”31 When the war made a comeback in big-budget mainstream movies for a mass audience, it was in the shape of Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (The Boat, 1981), Josef Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993), and most recently Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), war stories that once again differentiated sharply between a handful of fanatic Nazis and hosts of good Germans. The war’s aftermath could also be seen again in 2003, when Sönke Wortmann’s blockbuster Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) told the story of a POW returning to West Germany in 1954. Estranged from his family, he is brought back to a kinder, gentler patriarchy by his wife, a patiently waiting Penelope, his priest, his son, and West German victory in the World Cup. And in Dennis Gansel’s NaPolA (Before the Fall, 2004), a working-class youth is recruited by an elite Nazi training academy. Bad Nazis once again lead astray good Germans. Writing in 2000, Rentschler described a new German “Cinema of Consensus,” referring to the emergence of movies in the previous decade that offered straightforward narratives, entertainment, and “a much lighter touch … far more user-friendly” than the new German cinema. He quotes a disgruntled Alexander Kluge, interviewed in 1988, who characterized a new generation of filmmakers who “believe in Spielberg and so on, and not at all in politics … They think a real director … must be recognized with a telephone call from Hollywood or somewhere, and he mustn’t do anything political. They find politics boring.” Kluge did not anticipate that Spielberg would soon be bringing the Holocaust and D-Day into multiplexes, any more than Rentschler foresaw that German filmmakers would offer big-budget versions of the Second World War as a unified nation approached the sixtieth anniversary of the end of that conflict. But what Rentschler got right was that a “Cinema of Consensus” was seeking “ways of saying ‘we’ in its address to German audiences.”32 When it comes to the war stories told at the movies, the “we” of the early twenty-first century is, in remarkable ways, not unlike the “we” of the immediate aftermath of the war. Once again crazed Nazis are pitted against innocent Germans, this time in color, but recent movies depict a moral world of black and white, not the grays that some critics demanded and some directors offered a decade or so after the war’s end. Indeed, contemporary films made with big budgets for mass audiences remind us of how German war stories—particularly those that are

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produced for mass consumption—remain trapped in melodramatic narratives that divide the world neatly into good and bad, and guilt and innocence, with most Germans landing on the side of the angels. This move back to the future at the movies reflected other developments in the politics of memory in the early twenty-first century. The theme of German suffering during the war figured prominently in a renewed interest in the legacy of the Allied bombing campaign, described in graphic detail by historian Jörg Friedrich in his bestselling book Der Brand, published in 2002, and in political demands that a unified Germany acknowledge and incorporate into a national narrative of the war and postwar years the enormous suffering of “expellees” driven from their homes in Eastern Europe and eastern Germany by the Red Army at the end of the war.33 In their contribution to this resurgent discourse of German victimization, film directors asked few questions about the origins of the Third Reich or the circumstances that led millions of Germans enthusiastically to accept what Hitler had to offer. From this perspective, it is perhaps even easier to understand the huge success of the comforting stories of the war and postwar years that dominated the 1950s, as they remain comforting sixty years later. Melodrama allowed millions of West Germans to make sense of the past in ways that in some respects have changed relatively little and are now contributing to mass-mediated history in a unified Germany. In interviews about Downfall, Eichinger, the screenwriter and the producer of the film, made much of the movie’s authenticity and his absolute commitment to reproduce the documentary record. He also emphasized that he would use a German cast speaking German, so that Germans themselves could tell this important story. But what Eichinger got right was not so much Hitler’s last ten days in Berlin, of which he offers a selective account. Rather, what he accurately presents is the version of the past that circulated in the immediate aftermath of the war, in which Germans were victims of the Führer, no Red Army soldiers died, the concentration camp prisoners who cleared away the rubble and corpses and removed undetonated Allied bombs remained in the shadows out of sight, most Germans were innocent, and evil Nazis were few in number. The same selective version of the past was told with variations in many West German films of the 1950s. In a recent study that examines memories of the Second World War by conducting interviews with representatives of three generations in the same German families, the social psychologist Harald Welzer has observed that for many young Germans, “Opa war kein Nazi” (Grandpa was no Nazi).34 At the movies, this third postwar generation will find little to rattle its comforting conceptions of the past. Eichinger’s film was not the first time this version of German history was told in German by German actors, but in the 1950s such tales of German victimization were steps toward a more complicated understanding of the past. Let us hope that in the early twenty-first century they do not lead in the direction of one that gets ever simpler.

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Notes 1. I have been particularly influenced by Heide Fehrenbach’s pathbreaking work, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill, 1995). 2. An extremely important exception is Johannes von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley, 2005). See also the useful collection of Bernhard Chiari, Matthias Rogg, and Wolfgang Schmidt, eds., Krieg und Militär im Film des 20 Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2003). 3. Robert G. Moeller, “Kämpfen für den Frieden: 08/15 und westdeutsche Erinnerungen an den Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 64, no. 2 (2005): 359–89; and Robert G. Moeller, “Victims in Uniform: West German Combat Movies from the 1950s,” in Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Houndmills, 2006), 43–61. 4. See Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001), 123–70; Robert G. Moeller, “What Did You Do in the War, Mutti? Courageous Women, Compassionate Commanders, and Stories of the Second World War,” German History 22 (2004): 563–94. 5. Robert G. Moeller, “Germans as Victims? Thoughts on a Post–Cold War History of the Second World War’s Legacies,” History and Memory 17, nos. 1–2 (2005): 147–94. 6. Translation from Ulricke Weckel, “The Mitläufer in Two German Postwar Films: Representation and Critical Reception,” History and Memory 15, no. 2 (2003): 64–93. 7. For an excellent introduction to “rubble films,” see Robert R. Shandley, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Philadelphia, 2001); also Robert G. Moeller, “When Liebe Was Just a Five-Letter Word: Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Love 47,” in Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch, eds., German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins (New York, 2008), 141–56. 8. Shandley, Rubble Films, 152–53, 174–76; von Moltke, No Place Like Home, 73. 9. “Überholte Filme,” Wirtschaftszeitung, 16 July 1949; and “Zwischenfall mit Hintergründen,” Die neue Zeitung, 28 May 1949. 10. Martin Broszat, Klaus-Deitmar Henke, and Hans Woller, eds., Von Stalingrad zur Währungsreform: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland (Munich, 1988). 11. Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, 153. 12. Translation in ibid., 153. 13. “Das Hohelied der Heimat in einem Farbfilm gesungen,” Selber Tageblatt, 22 March 1952. 14. Wolfgang Liebeneiner, “Was ist ein ‘Heimatfilm’?” Frankfurter Neue Presse, 18 February 1956. 15. Untitled review in of the film in Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, 22 June 1956. 16. “Film mit fränkischer Kulisse,” Volksblatt, 7 August 1954. 17. “Kinder suchen ihre Eltern…,” Wilhelmshavener Zeitung, 1 December 1955. 18. Lothar Papke, “Scheingefecht mit der Aktualität,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 November 1955. 19. “Kinder suchen ihre Eltern…” 20. Eugen Lemberg, ed., with Lothar Krecker, Die Entstehung eines neuen Volkes aus Binnendeutschen und Ostvertriebenen (Marburg, 1950). 21. Erich Kuby, Mein ärgerliches Vaterland (Munich, 1989), 210. 22. Joachim Weiner, “Der letzte Sinn des grossen Opfers,” Hannoversche Rundschau, 8 April 1959. 23. Uwe Kuckei, “Ein ewig Suchender fand heim nach Deutschland,” Der neue Film, 7 September 1959. 24. Hermann Lübbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewusstsein der Gegenwart,” in Martin Broszat, ed., Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur: Internationale Konferenz zur nationalsozialistischen Machtübernahme im Reichstagsgebäude zu Berlin (Berlin, 1983), 329–49, esp. 334–35. 25. See Moeller, “Victims in Uniform.”

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26. Günter Seuren, “Geht nach Hause, statt zu sterben,” Deutsche Zeitung, 1 September 1959. 27. “’Die Brücke’: Ein Geschäftserfolg,” Film-Telegramm, 15 December 1959. 28. “Aufrüttelnder Antikriegsfilm: ‘Die Brücke’ von Bernhard Wicki und ein weiterer Film,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 26 October 1979. 29. Karl-Heinz Krüger, “Die Brücke,” Der Abend, 14 November 1959. 30. Gerhard Paul, “Krieg und Film: Historische Skizze und methodologische Überlegungen,” in Chiari, Rogg, and Schmidt, Krieg und Militär, 7. 31. Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (London, 2000), 264. 32. Ibid., 264–5. 33. Mary Nolan, “Germans as Victims During the Second World War,” Central European History 38, no. 1 (2005): 7–40; Moeller, “Germans as Victims?”; Robert G. Moeller, “The Bombing War in Germany, 2005–1940: Back to the Future?” in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History (New York, 2009), 46–76. 34. Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main, 2002).

[[[ CH AP T ER 9

Italian Cinema and the Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy Ruth Ben-Ghiat

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N

NOVEMBER 1945, THE editors of the review Società reflected that

the war has recently ended, and at times none of us can remember what his life was like before. None of us recognizes his past. It seems incomprehensible to us. Even the Renaissance or the nineteenth century seems closer to us than the sad years of yesterday … Our life today is dominated by a sense of stupor and by an instinctive search for a direction. We are simply disarmed by the facts.1

In the months and years following the end of the Second World War, a similar sense of disorientation accompanied many other Italians as they tried to rebuild their lives and their country. Military defeat, foreign occupations, civil war, mass deportations, and the material and emotional toll of total war affected each individual differently, but left a collective feeling of devastation and disgrace. Nor had the war really ended, for millions of Italians. A stream of refugees from Italy’s now-lost colonies and from its borderlands traversed the country, hundreds of thousands of former Italian soldiers remained abroad as prisoners of war, and wartime violence continued through clandestine killings, rapes, and rough-justice executions that further fractured families and communities. The protracted wartime violence and suffering left some Italians feeling numb and victimized, unable to see past the last atrocity they had witnessed or experienced. As in Elsa Morante’s novel La storia, which spans the years from 1941 to 1947, history became one with the history of the war and its aftermath. The tendency to regard the years prior to the war as unrecognizable was also a strategy of political survival for many Italians. At a time of purge trials and prison sentences, the realm of before—as Società glossed two decades of dictatorship—was still all too present, and too troublesome to contemplate. Much more compelling were the new liberal and leftist political and cultural projects born from the resistance and from the imperatives of reconstruction and democrati-

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zation. As in other Western European countries, the emphasis on the resistance as an agent of national renewal was a means of mobilizing collective energies for reconstruction in the face of the schisms created during the war, both through collaboration with the German occupier and through the institutionalization of different views of the national future and past. Italian resistance narratives offered martryologies for dealing with loss and death in the context of the German occupation and mapped new, non-Fascist models of male heroism and collective action.2 Like the amnesty for Fascists ordered by the Italian Communist Minister of Justice Palmiro Togliatti in 1946, the patriotic historiographies born in this period countered the divisions and compromises among Italians during the preceding twenty years of dictatorship. They fulfilled the desire so many Italians shared in 1945 to “depart from a tabula rasa,” as Italo Calvino put it, offering the mirage of a clean psychological break with the Fascist past.3 My essay investigates this very particular moment in Italian history. It concentrates on those first few years after the war, when the need to consider 1945 as a “zero hour” clashed with a reality still determined by the conflict’s destructive legacies. I draw here on new work that regards 1945 as a porous date, rather than an absolute break between two eras, and considers the immediate postwar period outside of common narratives of Americanization and Sovietization.4 In the Italian case, the forward-looking political party and public narratives of the time, together with the later historical focus on Italy’s rebuilding within the context of Cold War politics and American models of modernization, have obscured the sense many Italians had in 1945 and 1946 of living through an interregnum, of having to find their way through a “broken time, fragmented space” as the Italian critic Anna Maria Torriglia has felicitously termed it.5 Yet what Pieter Lagrou has observed of France and other Western European countries is true of Italy as well: the public optimism of the immediate postwar period glossed over the private residues and legacies of total war, such as the prolonged bodily and psychic consequences of years of deprivation, persecution, and humiliation, and the disorientation that came from mass displacement and the delegitimization of local and national authorities, even when, as in Italy, these were politically discredited.6 To approach these other histories, alternative narratives are necessary, ones concerned as much with unmaking as with remaking and dwelling on the real “impotence, humiliation, and loss of meaning” that afflicted Italians during and immediately after the war.7

Neorealism as Alternative History The Italian cinema of these years, I argue, is a privileged source for the construction of such an alternative narrative about the difficult transition from war and dictatorship. Italian movies of the years from 1945 to 1948 are consumed

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by precisely those issues that found little expression in the historical literature, such as the legacies of Fascist and wartime violence, the need for a recovery of humanitarian values, the importance and meaning of testimony and language, and the war’s effects on gender roles.8 In this essay I will focus on neorealist films, which are particularly, and often self-consciously, reflective about such issues. Certainly, neorealist films by Roberto Rossellini and others reinforced and diffused the emerging liberal and leftist histories that posited the resistance as a redemptive event and a “second Risorgimento.” Yet these and other neorealist films also tell other kinds of stories, ones defined by loss and crisis, which have received less attention. I argue here that the neorealist representation of the “objective” disasters and dramas wrought by the war, and the recourse to realist codes of representation, is part of a larger quest to convey, through the medium of film, the experience of living through a liminal moment. I will demonstrate my points with a close reading of Alberto Lattuada’s 1946 film Il Bandito, which recounts the difficult and ultimately tragic return home of a Italian soldier who had been deported to the German camps after Italy’s 8 September 1943 armistice with the Allies. Through modes of narration that privilege elliptical narratives and afflicted characters, neorealist films such as Il Bandito sought to express the diffused sense of living through a time marked by ruptures and ongoing transitions. The urgency of the calls for realism in 1945 also sprang from the exigency of working through a crisis of signification caused not only by the war’s dislocations but also by the end of a Fascist-era system of meaning that had permeated Italian life for twenty years. Neorealism, in this light, was a work of unmaking as much as of remaking, of decolonization as much as revolution. It was one manifestation of the need among Italian intellectuals to divest language, gesture, bodies, and objects of the meanings they had taken on during Fascism, both on and off the screen.9 Of course, such an unmaking of Fascist mentalities and aesthetics was inevitably partial.10 But it is this presence of past representational codes and iconographies in works that depict the destruction of the past that give neorealist films of the years 1945–48 their status as transitional objects of a sort. While neorealist films cannot be precisely termed “vanishing mediators” in the sense postulated by Frederic Jameson—for they left an immense legacy in postwar Italian and world cinema—they did act as “catalytic agents” in the crucial years of transition, creating a different type of narration for the exposition of different histories and imaginaries.11 The mediating function neorealism exercised in this capacity between several linked historical moments and realities (Fascism, the war, and the new postwar) was operative in the years before 1948, when Italy was still actively negotiating its peace treaty with the Allies and instability and uncertainty were the norm in all spheres of life. This mediating function can be seen in neorealist notions of temporality—a present consumed by the destructive legacies of the past—and through metacinematic reflections, recurrent in

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neorealist films, on the moral consequences of succumbing to Fascist models of cinematic and other spectacle. It is not incidental that the ruin, once denounced by the Italian Futurists as the symbol of Italy’s picturesque irrelevance, now became all too contemporary. It figures in neorealist films as an index of the exploded space and fractured time of the present, as well as of Italians’ victimization by both allies and enemies.12 Highlighting the transitional and experiential dimensions of neorealism necessitates a different perspective on the relationship of this filmic movement with history. The social and political engagement of neorealist directors led them to consciously posit their films as “agents of history,” to cite the formulation by Marc Ferro that has a special relevance in analyzing the role of film in moments of political transition.13 And neorealist directors certainly adhered to the idea of the artwork as testimonial, as document, which underwrote all of neorealist culture. Yet, as Robert Rosenstone has written, cinema’s distinction as a font of alternative historiographies, especially in “societies recovering from totalitarian regimes or the horrors of war,” rests on the fact that its reconstructions of reality often have less to do with fact than with conveying realms of perception and feeling connected with coping with the legacies of the past.14 New work on the history of emotions in immediate postwar Germany reminds us that the transition from dictatorship and war was also a time when the desire for normalcy and reconstruction left little space for the articulation of feelings of anxiety, loss, and sadness.15 Neorealist films gave public voice to such feelings, which in Fascist Italy, as in Nazi Germany, had been publicly discouraged in favor of a culture of aggression and revenge, or filtered, in the Italian case, through a consolatory Catholic ideology. They encouraged the formation of new emotional communities through a reawakening of civic and humanitarian sentiments. Indeed, the injunction to replace Fascist hardness with tenerezza (tenderness) runs through many neorealist films, including Il Bandito. The encouragement and modeling of new attitudes and affects through film was part of the pedagogical and prescriptive nature of neorealism and an important, if neglected, dimension of its ethical engagement with reality.16 Christian Delage and Vincent Guigueno have cautioned against assuming a too-literal approach to films’ relationship with the real, even within the genres of the realist and historical cinema, advocating that we investigate instead “specifically cinematic forms of the figuration of history.”17 Neorealism’s re-creation of emotional climates and its work of mediation between two opposing subjectivities form an example of such a figuration of history, especially if we keep in mind Ferro’s assertion that history also includes the realm of fantasy, of intentions and their delusion, of what did not happen.18 Following on this, I would argue that it was the desire to convey current emotional climates in an honest manner that led neorealists to depart from realism when necessary, making recourse to genres such as the melodrama and the gangster film and borrowing

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from the stylistic conventions of expressionism. This eclecticism within neorealist films was initially ignored as not in keeping with purist conceptions of realism, and its manifestations were later seen as auteurist flaws or weaknesses, or as the product of external commercial pressures.19 Yet they may also be seen as part of an attempt to express the real distress and challenges faced by millions of Italians who lived in a “fractured and incoherent situation, deprived of any center of orientation.”20 The dramatic power of neorealism thus lies not merely in its “authenticity” but in its ability to capture the contemporary sense of living through a hiatus and in its accurate expression of what was often too painful to express: the abyss between aspirations for normalcy and the psychic and material devastation wrought by the war. In arguing that neorealism operated as a transitional aesthetic, I depart from the premise that the neorealists felt the desire to forge a new filmic language that would not entail just stylistic innovation but enact new modes of seeing and express a different social and ethical investment in the image. These new modes of seeing had been developing in the last few years of the Fascist regime, but they took shape as a result of exposure to and participation in the dramatic, destructive, and liberatory events of the war. As Cesare Zavattini observed in 1944, Today a destroyed house is a destroyed house, the odor of the dead has not yet dissipated, from the north arrive the echoes of the last cannons, in sum the stupor and the fear are intact and almost able to be studied in vitro. The cinema must attempt this kind of documentation, it has the specific means to travel in time and space, to gather within the pupil of the spectator the multiple and the different, as long as it abandons its usual narrative modes and its language adjusts to the [new] content.21

This desire to render, through filmic means, “the stupor and the fear,” as well as the sight of ruined people and landscapes, meant that the new modes of seeing would attempt to recover the emotions connected with the act of perception. This emphasis on the optical, which Gilles Deleuze has theorized to be a distinctive characteristic of neorealism, is at the core of this new mode of seeing. The film text, with its “character that becomes a kind of spectator,” models this different relationship with a quotidian reality rendered exceptional because of the war.22 The importance within neorealist films of landscape and setting, and of the figure within them, also derives from this privileging of the act of perception. Il Bandito is one of many films in which the protagonist is “an observer who travels in a deformed landscape,” and who registers the sights and sounds of his hometown rendered almost unrecognizable by the war.23 Such moments of apprehension are couched, in very early neorealist films, within narratives that emphasize themes of travel and flight. These journeys take place against devastated landscapes, whether rural or urban, that are depicted according to realist conventions but often have a hallucinatory quality. They speak in their own right, as monuments to this moment of historical hiatus, and as “visions,” in the

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Deleuzian sense, that stupefy the protagonist-spectator: this is why Gian Piero Brunetta asserts that “there is no longer a background” in neorealist films.24 It has often been observed that neorealism engaged in a remapping and rediscovery of Italy for both Italian and foreign audiences. Yet the journeys that chart this new cartography and human geography are hardly linear. Rather, they are open-ended, disconnected, and of uncertain resolution, with protagonists who are often in situations of marginality and crisis.25 The difficult or incomplete homecomings and interrupted reunions of many postwar films reflect the actualities of contemporary Italian society, but also express the filmmakers’ questioning of narrative and filmic conventions better suited to portraying times of stability and continuity. Another dimension of neorealism’s mode of telling stories also evidences its transitional and mediatory nature: its attention to language, to the reappropriation of Italian after twenty years of Fascist rhetoric, to the need to relegitimize political discourse and public oratory. The neorealist distrust of narrative is evidenced in the deprioritization of literary sources, in the new communicative authority given to landscape and to the human body, to non-colloquial forms of Italian language.26 The silences and ellipses of this cinema, its reliance on body and gesture, are solutions to the problem of utilizing a still “contaminated” language, but should also be seen in function of the different relationship of the protagonist to his or her setting. Although it has been little investigated, within neorealist cinema the act of speaking has an importance analogous to the act of perception. The questions of who is allowed to speak, who refuses to speak, and in what contexts, are central to neorealism’s public function in dramatizing the psychological, juridical, and political issues that accompanied the passage from Fascism to democracy. In films such as Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, Giuseppe De Santis, 1947) and Il Bandito, the act of speaking is a means of establishing horizontal connections with others that facilitate the constitution of non-authoritarian civic and emotional communities. It is also a means of filtering out totalitarian language, by silences or other refusals to carry over Fascist speech to the new world, or by relegating such speech to characters destined for death or exile. Often the desire to avoid reproducing the sounds of Fascist speech led cineastes to feature it only through what Tom Conley calls “hieroglyphs”—writing within the film frame, usually of anonymous authorship—as in the Fascist graffitis that are seen in passing on the walls of rural and urban buildings, but which are not accorded any aural authority.27 The propagation of new modes and sites of speaking contrary to those allowed by the Fascist regime, and the mandate to restore civic and humanistic value to the act of speaking, are integral to neorealism’s approach to the themes of guilt, punishment, and retribution that consumed Italian society in the immediate postwar years. Neorealist films are often structured around the telling

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of stories that acquire the value of testimony, whether they take the form of narratives extracted under pressure in countryside kangaroo courts, depositions in urban courtrooms, or impromptu confessions made to priests on the street. Such stories of moral failing and misguided idealism had both a diegetic and an extra-diegetic function. On-screen, as in Italian culture of the time, raccontarsi (recounting oneself) was accorded a positive moral and social value, either as an act of repentance, in the case of characters who had acted badly, or as an act of civic education, as in films about the resistance, which also model instances when not speaking (to the enemy, even under torture, as in the case of Marcello in Roma città aperta) is the highest means of communication. This valorization of processes of telling and listening is common in films that are concerned with issues of justice and retribution. As David Black has commented, such films revolve around the reconstruction and communication of verisimilar narratives; they are “stories about the process of storytelling.”28 In this context, though, reflexivity calls attention to the performative dimension of language, to both the political and moral consequences of the speech act and to the neorealist belief in the transformative powers of the artwork, in history as armed struggle but also as narration.29 Neorealist films situate the act of speech in the body and dramatize its effects in the family and in the community, rebuking the disembodied authoritarian commands issued via radio by Mussolini and other Fascists. The accent on testimony in neorealist films thus cannot be reduced to a populist project to tell the stories of the man and woman in the street, but is part of a project of civic reeducation for Italians who had learned the values of silence and subterfuge and had come to distrust any kind of public declaration during the long decades of the Fascist regime. Giovanna Grignaffini has written that neorealism was above all an attempt to reconstruct the history of Italy, through a simultaneous operation of erasure (of the now-discredited history of the recent past) and excavation (of origins, of identities).30 Yet this desire to find solid ground and a fund of emotional innocence as a basis for starting from zero had to contend with the messy realities of Italy in 1945, when the present was heavily determined by the legacies of the past. Neorealist films navigated this fractured time and space, guided by the aim of finding a means of expressing the new and the previously inexpressible and by the perception that the crises of the war and its aftermath brought with them an opportunity to give the cinema an authority and social function that differed from what it had had during the Fascist regime.

Il Bandito I turn now to an exploration of these themes through a reading of Lattuada’s 1946 film Il Bandito, which treats the theme of the difficult reintegration of

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Italian veterans into postwar Italian society. Ernesto (Amadeo Nazzari) and Carlo (Carlo Campanini), who were among those Italian soldiers deported by the National Socialists to their concentration camps after Italy’s armistice of 8 September 1943, return to a Turin rendered unfamiliar by the devastation of war and the Allied occupation. The first half of the film contrasts the two men’s very different homecomings: Carlo, who lives in the countryside, finds his home and family intact, while Ernesto must deal with the lack of family and shelter and soon finds that the state has little to offer veterans in the way of assistance (his apartment has been bombed, his mother is dead, and his sister, Maria, is presumed missing until he discovers her working as a prostitute). He confronts Maria and ends up fighting with her pimp, who has a gun; the pimp kills his sister, prompting Ernesto to shoot him. The killing makes Ernesto a fugitive, and the film’s second part shifts the focus from his status as a veteran to his new life as a bandit in a gang led by Lydia (Anna Magnani). He gains dominance within the group, and Lydia’s sexual favors, for his cold-blooded attitudes and martial talents, but he remains inwardly tortured and retains an attachment to Carlo and Carlo’s daughter Rosetta, for whom he buys toys in between his gangster killings. After Lydia informs on the gang and escapes, the film builds to a showdown between the bandits and the police, which takes a dramatic turn when the bandits ambush a car, killing the driver, and Ernesto discovers that Rosetta was the other occupant. Putting his war training to good use, he is able to return the terrified Rosetta to Carlo. Yet he will not surrender to the police, nor seek refuge with Carlo, and the film ends when Ernesto is killed with Rosetta’s toy in his hand. Although Il Bandito treats major collective and social themes of immediate postwar Italy—the problems faced by veterans, the pervasiveness of crime and corruption—it is unlike many neorealist films in that it has no aspirations to coralità, or the text as a frame for the expression of multiple voices, as in the movies of Rossellini or De Santis. Although Lydia and Carlo have great diegetic importance, the film revolves entirely around the vicissitudes of one man, the bandit of the title, who in the course of the film goes from being the afflicted veteran, to the ruthless criminal, to the courageous savior of Rosetta. By centering the narrative on one protagonist, Lattuada avoids indulging in the consolatory strategies followed by neorealist directors such as Rossellini, who usually locate good and evil in different characters. Ernesto’s shifts in subject position speak to his uncertain moral status: he is both good and evil, victim and persecutor. An exchange he has with Lydia upon their first meeting sums up his ambiguous identity. When she asks him where he is from, he can only answer that he has come back from Germany, the site of trauma and abjection; but when she asks him what he did before the war, he responds: “I killed, with rifles, machine guns, and bombs … they taught me for ten years how to do it. There are a bunch of people who I really should kill but they tell me that now

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it is forbidden, that it is just not done any more.” Ernesto is thus simultaneously, with the differentiated traumas this implies, a victim of the concentration camps and a cynical killer, the perfect product of the Fascist regime. The narrative focus on Ernesto, “a solitary man in profound internal crisis,”31 also dramatizes the dilemmas of Italian manhood during the passage from dictatorship to democracy. Il Bandito’s mise en scène of the disrupted sexual politics of the era, through the story of Ernesto, is crucial to its communication of the experience of living in a transitional time. Here, as in other neorealist films, representations of masculinity are a lens for viewing many issues proper to the transition period, such as the erosion of trust in public and private life, the need for new ethical and civic codes, and anxieties about the war’s contributions to female independence.32 Il Bandito’s focus on the unmaking of the Fascist man means that it offers no “positive” solution to the challenges of creating a non-Fascist model of an armed and virile Italian manhood, as do the films of the resistance genre. Nor does it engage in the common neorealist strategy of using characterizations of foreign or foreign-tinged men to signal unacceptable versions of manhood: evil, here, is located entirely in the Italian sphere, in the person of Ernesto and in his fellow bandits. Yet Il Bandito does share with Italian resistance films a coding of female pleasure and autonomy as immoral, through a foreign-tinged aesthetic of excess that signals untrustworthiness and inner corruption. Lydia’s ostrich-trimmed dressing gown and her sexual and other dominance connect her to American gangster movies and French and American films noir as well as to the upending of “natural” gender roles in Italy caused by the war. In Il Bandito and many other neorealist films, the figure of the returned prisoner of war has a particular burden as a symbol of male abjection and the instabilities of immediate postwar gender relations. Returned prisoners of war were not only symbols of Italy’s military defeat, but also reminders of a history of Fascist violence. Moreover, their long captivities meant that they had missed out on the events that most informed the new national imaginary: the resistance, the German occupation, and the experience of Allied military rule. Thus the “homecoming” of the ex-prisoner is often a destabilizing and not wholly positive event. The returned prisoner’s assertion of his rights as husband or fiancé disrupts the economic and affective ties that his woman formed during his absence. In Il Bandito, as in Caccia tragica, the destabilizing effects are projected outward, onto society, and are caused by the returned prisoner’s discovery of his solitude in the wake of the destruction of all of his emotional ties. Ernesto is vulnerable to exploitation in a society where women have abandoned their “natural” roles as nurturers and taken on “male” roles as bandits and profiteers. Postwar sexual politics conspires to repeat the victimization of the ex-prisoner after his return “home.” But it is also true that Ernesto and other returned prisoners are dangerous in their own right. They represent the eruption of the past

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into the present: they are men who carry in and on their bodies the signs of a history of violence that few wanted to remember in 1945. The desire to convey, through the story of Ernesto, the difficulties of adjusting to an unfamiliar and constantly shifting reality also governed Lattuada’s stylistic choices in Il Bandito. The movie has many neorealist traits, from the documentary-style filmmaking of its early scenes, to its use of deep focus cinematography, to its topical subject matter that aimed to capture quotidian reality and the workings of larger social and economic forces. Lattuada’s movie is neorealist, too, in the ways that we might understand neorealism today: as a combination of history and tragedy, documentary and spectacle, as a film born of an ethnographic study of Italy and a transnational filmic imaginary.33 Yet reality, in this neorealist film, is highly mutable and stupefying in its strangeness and difference to those who return home after years of absence. For Ernesto, it is also a world of mysteries and missing information, of repeated discoveries that things are not as they seem; it is a reality that mirrors his sense of estrangement from his surroundings and from himself. The story of this ruined and mutable self not only provides the movie’s narrative continuum but also justifies its shifts in style—from realism to gangster action film to melodrama—as an attempt by Lattuada to render Ernesto’s changing emotional climate and to demarcate the moments that signal a change in his subject position and destiny. As Federica Villa has argued, the film’s logic resides in its privileging of acts of perception that register a new reality, as when Ernesto sees his destroyed apartment building or discovers Rosetta in the car he has just ambushed. Ernesto is “a subject who is constituted through the act of looking.”34 Let us look more closely at this as an instance of the “new mode of seeing” that characterized neorealism in general and Lattuada’s particular humanistic sensibility. Il Bandito reflects repeatedly on the significance of the act of looking as a means of establishing human connections: there are dangerous gazes—such as the intense close-ups of Lydia’s and Ernesto’s eyes that communicate the birth of an erotic spark between them—and there are empathetic, nurturing ones. Refusing to look, here, is itself an act of inhumanity, as when the bureaucrat at the veterans’ office will not look at the crippled ex-prisoner who pleads for his subsidy, prompting Ernesto to scream “Look at him! Look at him!” Yet there is also the more abstract gaze that has as its object the landscape and poses the protagonist as the spectator of what in Il Bandito is sometimes a spectral vision. The scene of Ernesto’s search for and apprehension of his bombedout home in Turin is exemplary in this regard. As the camera follows Ernesto down dark and deserted streets, it is difficult to see clearly, to get one’s bearings, and thus the viewer is placed in a similar position to that of Ernesto, who struggles to recognize his former neighborhood. The feeling of estrangement is underscored by the contrast of the upbeat American popular song “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” and the deserted and ominous surroundings. The music continues,

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now in a minor key, during a 360-degree pan that reveals the full extent of the destruction and comes to rest on Ernesto’s tortured face, communicating his realization that his home and family are gone. Lattuada’s camera work here has a documentary ambition. The full-circle shot conveys, through one apartment building courtyard, the extent to which Italy had become “a turbulent space, in which all relationships are destroyed and ruins provide the measure of everything.”35 Ernesto’s homecoming will now become a journey, one structured by a series of terrible discoveries about the fates of his mother and sister, and ultimately about his own incapacity to make the transition to postwar society. In this scene and others in Il Bandito, witnessing and looking are embodied acts, with emotional and physical as well as social consequences. Witnessing also has a verbal, linguistic dimension, and acts of speaking and listening are valorized in Il Bandito as a means of forging emotional connections. At times these small testimonial moments follow Ernesto’s visual epiphanies, filling in what has been assumed by his solitary gaze and offering the possibility of human solidarity. This is the case when Ernesto learns his mother is dead: his nightmarish apprehension of the destruction of his home is followed by his visit to an elderly neighbor, who in a loving voice recounts the “terrible day” when his mother was killed by the bombing and his sister went missing. She then reveals her own loss—of her son Franco, a partisan who was executed by the Fascists—and offers him food and lodging in her dead son’s bed. Significantly, Ernesto does not offer his own war story in return either here or at any other point in the film, in keeping with his status as a carrier of histories and acts that in 1945 have become unrepresentable. Testimonial space is instead accorded to a benign character, Carlo, Ernesto’s closest companion in the camps and Ernesto’s one emotional connection in life. In one of the film’s most crucial scenes, Carlo recounts the sufferings he and Ernesto endured in the camps, but also discloses that Ernesto risked his own life to save him when he was injured and could no longer walk. Here Il Bandito evidences most clearly Lattuada’s notion of film as a kind of public testimonial. Not only does the director attempt to capture the physical and psychological symptoms of the traumatized ex-prisoner, but he also models an emotionally sustaining environment for the recounting of such testimony. Although Carlo and his elderly relatives are comfortably seated around the fireplace, drinks in hand, Lattuada makes clear the bodily and emotional toll of reevoking such traumatic experiences. The trigger, here, is the sound of a barking dog, which returns Carlo to the universe of the camps, and he tells of forced marches in subzero temperatures, starvation rations, and the constant vision of death, as well as Ernesto’s role in saving his life. Close-up camera work here documents the embodied nature of bearing witness. As Carlo’s voice picks up pace and urgency, and the music rises in volume and intensity, various nervous tics appear: his hands fidget, he stops to

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drink, to scratch his ear, and his body shifts uncomfortably. These close-ups of Carlo alternate with reverse shots of the faces and eyes of his elderly companions as they listen with close interest and compassion, and with the tearful face of Rosetta, who is listening, unseen, at her bedroom door. Matching sightlines during these reverse shots reinforce the emotional bonds that are strengthened by the giving of testimony in an atmosphere of empathy and trust. Listening, as well as speaking, is an embodied act. Indeed, as Carlo’s narrative reaches its dénouement, when he re-creates how he was close to death when Ernesto took him in his arms, Rosetta runs to him to comfort him. Here the familial sphere becomes a healing space, one that encourages men to shed their Fascist armatures and recover the ability to connect with others through the telling of their stories. Lattuada’s ethical and filmic agendas in reconnecting speech and vision to the body are relevant in considering the film’s ambiguous ending. As has been observed above, Ernesto’s success in saving Rosetta’s life does not bring with it any happy ending. Rather, after Ernesto releases Rosetta near her home, the camera pulls back to silhouette his lone figure against a breathtaking mountain view. A slow pan ensues, reminiscent of the one that communicated Ernesto’s visual apprehension of the loss of his home; here the pan circles halfway, stopping behind him, allowing us to see what he sees but also conveying his isolation. The camera then cuts to his face, making us privy to his emotional state and the fact that his vision, this time, is directed inward: he is making his final decision to remove himself from society. As the police corner him, asking him to put up his hands to surrender, he remains still, neither speaking nor moving. His final action is a renunciation of action, which in this context ensures his death. We see Ernesto’s lifeless body only through the eyes of Carlo, whose last glance takes in Ernesto’s bloodstained hand still holding the toy Rosetta gave him. Throughout the film, Ernesto has been portrayed as both an aggressive and an aggrieved individual: he is a killer, and also a survivor of the concentration camps. Yet in viewers’ minds these last frames leave him as principally a victim: of the Fascist regime, which educated him to violence; of the Germans, who abused him in the camps; and of a republic that wished to forget about veterans as part of a disavowal of the Fascist regime. It is noteworthy that the shooting version of the script removed a comment by Carlo to Rosetta that “they caught a bad man.”36 By suspending any definitive judgment about Ernesto, the film participates in the divided discourse that marks Italian films of the era with respect to the question of collective complicity with Fascism. Il bandito denounces the psychological and social legacies of the Fascist valorization of violence in more open terms than most films. Lattuada’s insistence on reconnecting speech and vision to the body is a rebuke to Fascist attempts to produce automatons who “believe, obey, and fight” regardless of the costs to

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self or society. Yet Ernesto’s tragic end has a sacrificial and thus redemptive air to it. Yet Lattuada does not share De Santis’s communist certainty of the justice of history; nor does he openly espouse Rossellini’s brand of Christian humanism, despite his pedagogical and moralistic tendencies. Rather, as Villa observes, redemption as articulated in Il Bandito must be understood as a moment of transition between a before and an after, between a state of degradation and suffering and a state of hope and renaissance, one which is necessary to understand the state of mind of those who find themselves in a no man’s land, caught between that which they no longer want to be and that which they do not yet how to be.37

The meaning of Il Bandito as a figuration of history lies instead in this embrace of indeterminacy, in its absence of solutions. In this Il Bandito differs from resistance films, in which sacrifices take place in the framework of a positive resolution to history and whose martyred heroes, such as Marcello in Roma città aperta, are on the right side of that history. Ernesto’s death has no such meaning. He is a product of a history that must be discarded, interrupted, transformed, but his death does not provide any solution to this hiatus. It is a symptom of, rather than a cure for, the current crisis. Il Bandito, which was first presented at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, was a popular success both in Italy and abroad.38 Yet critical reaction was mixed. Il Bandito was faulted for its lack of stylistic cohesion, and for its Americanstyle sentimentalism whereby the criminal “with a heart of gold … becomes a sugar-coated protector of children.”39 Some critics reacted to the movie with defensiveness or discomfort, objecting to the focus on a “delinquent” and its “lewd” subject matter.40 One argued that characters such as Ernesto had no basis in historical reality, and thus the movie was completely invalid as “social testimony.”41 Other reviewers, though, were more philosophical. One, writing in Hollywood, felt the film gave a realistic picture of Italy “as we see it walking on the street, listening to the stories of friends, or going to dance in the evenings.” Il Bandito was a film designed to speak not to critics, he felt, but directly to spectators, “who have seen both the world of their fathers and their own world crumble.”42 But it was the critic of Film rivista who showed the most honesty, confessing that he felt he could not pass judgment on it, given that he was unsure “exactly what phenomenon this film represents … it seems to be the consequence of a crisis of language.”43 It is this “crisis of language” that makes Il Bandito of such interest as a sign of the profound fractures and dislocations created by the war and the end of twenty years of Fascism, not only within Italian society but also within the institution of Italian cinema. Like many other neorealist films, Il Bandito challenged inherited cinematic conventions: the desire for reality was a desire to cast off Fascist visions of spectacle and with them “a misunderstood historicity and monumentality” in favor of filmmaking practices rooted in a belief that

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daily life and its humble stories also constituted histories in the making.44 Yet Il Bandito, like the films of Rossellini, captures the extent to which contemporary reality was mutable and unreliable, and the quotidian both traumatic and exceptional. For Lattuada and his fellow neorealists, filmmaking constituted an act of accounting, understood as both a narrative and moral attempt to come to terms with the civic and intimate legacies of the dictatorship. Their films are as much about the process of unmaking, of unlearning the lessons of Fascist totalitarianism, as they are about projecting a path for the new republic through forward-looking narratives of resistance and reconstruction. Neorealist filmmakers were very conscious that this time of transition not only called them to new social responsibilities but also offered opportunities to experiment with film language. Seeing neorealist films as “texts from a cultural interregnum”45 allows us to recover the larger crisis of language, identity, and representation that marked Italian culture after the fall of Fascism and the ravages of war.

Notes 1. “Letteratura d’occasione,” Società, 15 November 1945. 2. See on this Alan Perry, Il santo partigiano martire (Ravenna, 2001). 3. Italo Calvino, interview in Renato Palmieri, Ezio Antonini, and Ettore Albertoni, eds., La generazione degli anni difficili (Bari, 1962), 79. On the functions of resistance narratives of history, see Filippo Focardi, La guerra della memoria: La Resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 a oggi (Bari and Rome, 2005). 4. See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York 2005); Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York, 2006); Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in 20th Century Germany (Princeton, 2005); Istvan Deak, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution:World War Two and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000); Klaus Naumann, ed., Nachkrieg in Deutschland ( Hamburg, 2001); Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003). 5. Anna Maria Torriglia, Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map of Postwar Italy (Toronto, 2002). 6. Pieter Lagrou, The Legacies of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 2000). 7. Lagrou, Legacies of Nazi Occupation, 2. The work of Gabriella Gribaudi is a model for this kind of treatment of how Italians experienced the war. See her Guerra totale: tra bombe alleate e violenze naziste. Napoli e la fronte meridionale (Turin, 2005). 8. Suggestive observations on the notion of film as an alternative historiography can be found in Robert Rosenstone, “Introduction,” in Robert Rosenstone, ed., Revisioning History (Princeton, 1996); Pierre Sorlin, Sociologie du cinéma : Ouverture pour l’histoire de demain (Paris, 1977); and in the works of Marc Ferro, such as Cinéma et histoire (Paris, 1977). Christian Delage and Vincent Guigueno, L’historien et le film (Paris, 2004), 9–26, offer a useful critique of older approaches to the relationship between cinema and history. 9. Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano dal 1945 agli anni ottanta (Rome, 1982), 320. 10. Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis, 2001), esp. 12 and 72–77. 11. For Frederic Jameson’s formulation of the “vanishing mediator,” which he made in the context of his analysis of Max Weber’s conceptions of historical and other change, see Jameson,

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Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986. Vol. 2: The Syntax of History (Minneapolis, 1988), 3–34. Quote is from 25. 12. On this theme see Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis, 2008). 13. I take Ferro’s formulation here from Film et Histoire (Paris, 1984), 3. On neorealism and the concept of historical film, see Giulia Fanara, Pensare il neorealismo: Percorsi attraverso il neorealismo cinematografico italiano (Rome, 2000), 54–108. 14. Rosenstone, “Introduction,” esp. 4–5. 15. See Frank Biess, “Feelings in the Aftermath: Toward a History of Postwar Emotions,” in the present volume. 16. Neorealism’s moral nature has been highlighted by critics since 1945, but has usually been discussed in terms of an ethics of representation. See on this Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, 1986), and, for an intelligent interpretation of the debates of the 1940s and 1950s, see Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema 1945–1995 (Austin, 1999), 23–30. 17. Delage and Guigueno, L’historien et le film, 23. 18. Marc Ferro, Analyse de film, analyse de sociétés: une source nouvelle pour l’histoire (Paris, 1975), 10. 19. Alberto Farassino, “Neorealismo, storia e geografia,” in Alberto Farassino, ed., Neorealismo: Cinema italiano 1945–1949 (Turin, 1989), 26. 20. Quote from Gian Piero Brunetta, “La ricerca dell’identità nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra,” in Gian Piero Brunetta, ed., Identità italiana e identità europea nel cinema italiano dal 1945 al miracolo economico (Turin, 1996), 13. 21. Cesare Zavattini, “Italia 1944,” in Mino Argentieri and Valentina Fortichiari, eds., Opere: Diario Cinematografico, Neorealismo, ecc. (Milan, 2002), 45. 22. Giles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris, 1985), 9. I take the point about the exceptional character of the quotidian from Mario Sesti, “La vita quotidiana nell’età neorealista,” in Farassino, Neorealismo, 115–120. 23. Sesti, “La vita quotidiana nell’età neorealista,” 115. 24. Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, 332; Fanara, Pensare il neorealismo, 182; for the larger issues connected with landscape and monumentality, Steimatsky, Italian Locations. 25. On this theme see Alberto Farassino, “Margini, attraversamenti, contaminazioni,” in Callisto Cosulich, ed., Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 7 (Venice, 2003), 156–71. 26. Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, 293; also Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in the Italian Cinema (Princeton, 1992); and Mark Sheil, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (London, 2006), 12–13. 27. See Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs (Minneapolis, 1991). 28. David A. Black, Law in Film: Resonance and Representation (Urbana and Chicago, 1999), 55. 29. On speech acts and the relationship of language and violence see Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (New York, 2000), 158–78. I take the formulation of “l’histoire est narration” from Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires (Paris, 1972), 3. 30. Giovanna Grignaffini, “Il femminile nel cinema italiano: Racconti di rinascita,” in Brunetta, Identità italiana e identità europea, 357–87; quote is from 364. 31. Federica Villa, Botteghe di scrittura per il cinema italiano: Intorno a Il Bandito di Alberto Lattuada, (Venice, 2002), 85. See her intelligent and careful analysis of the film, 79–129. 32. See on this Massimo Perinelli, “Männlichkeit im dopoguerra: Geschlechterhistorische Betrachtung neorealister Filme der italienischen Nachkriegszeit 1945–1950,” in Christoph Kühlburger and Roman Reisinger, eds., Mascolinità italiane: Italienische Männlichkeiten im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2006), 92–111; M. Landy, Italian Film (Cambridge, 2000), 309–43; and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Unmaking the Fascist Man: Masculinity and the Transition from Dictatorship in Italy,” Journal

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of Modern Italian Studies (September 2005): 336–65, which offers a more historically oriented approach to some of the questions examined here. 33. On this see Farassino, “Neorealismo, storia e geografia”; for a critique of this interpretation see Fanara, Pensare il neorealismo, esp. 22–25. 34. Villa, Botteghe di scrittura, 120. 35. Brunetta, Storia del cinema, 333; also Fanara, Pensare il neorealismo, 187. 36. Villa, Botteghe di scrittura, 122. 37. Villa, Botteghe di scrittura, 99. 38. Stefano Masi, “L’hardware del neorealismo: Ferri del mestiere e strategie della tecnica,” in Farassino, ed., Neorealismo, 49–52, here 60; Callisto Cosulich, I film di Alberto Lattuada (Rome, 1985), 37. 39. Quote from Lan, review in Il Nuovo Corriere della Sera, 7 November 1946; also P. S., review in Il Quotidiano, 22 February 1946. 40. First quote from C. A. Felice, “7 giorni a Milano: Un film che si affloscia di colpo—Scusare il banditismo—Un buon Nazzari,” Film, 16 November 1946, cited in Villa, Botteghe di scrittura, 81; second quote from a review in La rivolta ideale, 12 May 1946, cited in Cosulich, I film di Alberto Lattuada, 35. 41. E. C., “Briganti Dabbene,” Mercurio, July–August 1946. 42. A. Baracco, review in Hollywood, 4 November 1946. 43. G. Sig, review in Film rivista, December 1946. 44. M. Cattaneo, “Una buona produzione media…” Film rivista, 30 June 1947. 45. Erica Carter, “Sweeping up the Past: Gender and History in the post-War German ‘Rubble Film’,” in Ulrike Sieglohr, ed., Heroines without Heroes. Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945–1951 (London, 2000), 91–112, here 95.

[[[ PA RT IV

The Reconstruction of Citizenship

[[[ CH AP T ER 10

War Orphans and Postfascist Families Kinship and Belonging after 1945 Heide Fehrenbach

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extent to which social policy and ideologies concerning children and the family after 1945 were not merely postwar but also postfascist in character. I propose this more fine-grained analytical category to investigate whether and how the specific content and experiences of Nazi violence that targeted civilian populations and destroyed families in occupied Europe affected conceptions of family and kinship after 1945. Were European efforts to remake these bonds after 1945 conditioned by the specific ideological nature of their destruction? What, in other words, was the legacy of the racist and eugenic policies that achieved such radical and murderous expression under the Nazi regime and its aggressive war of conquest? My aim here is to consider some of the ways in which the biopolitics of the failed Nazi “new order” reverberated across 1945 to generate postfascist notions of kinship and belonging. Nazi aggression laid bare the gaping insufficiency of families and nations to protect their members, especially the most vulnerable among them.1 In terms of their numbers and ideological significance, children were not incidental victims of the Nazis’ vicious fight for posterity. Due to their dependent, unproductive status and fears about their future reproductive potential, children of perceived inferior stock were inevitably “selected” for immediate death. Casualty rates were highest among Jewish children, and only an estimated 6 to 11 percent survived the Nazi imperium in Europe.2 Yet other children were targeted as well, including (in rough chronological order) Black German adolescents, who were sterilized; disabled children, who were euthanized; Eastern European Roma children, who were killed along with family members; and Polish and Soviet youth, who were seized as slave labor for farms and industry HIS ESSAY EXPLORES THE

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in the Reich. In addition, phenotypically desirable children of Polish, Czechoslovakian, and Yugoslavian parents were kidnapped for “germanization” and adoption by “Aryan” couples in Germany.3 At war’s end, millions of children were dead or declared missing, hundreds of thousands of European children of various nationalities and ethnicities were parentless, and families were rent asunder on an incomprehensible scale. Even before the end of military hostilities—and prior to the Allies’ ability to survey systematically the wreckage left in its wake—contemporaries had judged the Nazi war of aggression a “war against children.” This was the heyday of photojournalism, and photographers in western Allied nations represented the civilian wartime experience through the lens of children’s suffering.4 In graphic and symbolic terms, the Nazi threat to European civilization was visualized through the effects of Nazi violence on children. A particularly significant example was produced by Thérèse Bonney, a decorated wartime photographer who covered the Spanish Civil War, Battle of France, and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union for prominent newspapers and magazines in the US and Western Europe. In 1943, her self-published photographic study Europe’s Children, 1939 to 1943 became an overnight media sensation.5 Bonney’s photographs disseminated a shockingly intimate view of the ravages of war, capturing how it broke the bonds of family and destroyed the reassuring predictabilities of daily life. The full-page photos were offered with minimal commentary, yet had a distinct narrative sweep, chronicling the destruction of the protections and patterns of “normal” childhood—parents, home, family life, mealtime, bedtime. Terrified and exhausted children cling to traumatized mothers on the road during the invasion of France or are separated from parents due to death, illness, or flight. A young boy with bare legs on a chilly day, slumped over from fatigue at the side of a road; a girl with a blond bob and head wound sitting in a hospital bed; two young, solemn brunettes, aged perhaps ten and six and likely sisters, peering through the barbed wire of a unnamed concentration camp; Finnish toddlers on a child transport to Sweden in search of safety; a premature newborn wrapped in paper rather than blankets; starving children and infants with bony limbs and distended stomachs, staring hollowly at the camera. All vulnerable, some on the verge of extinction, each an iconic child-in-need, silently pleading for care, nurture, rescue, and a compassionate maternal or paternal response. Bonney disavowed the distancing lens of ethnic or national distinctiveness. Rather, her intimate portraits encouraged viewers to respond viscerally to these children in need, on the basis of shared humanity, even kinship.6 Through their overt claims to “authenticity,” the photos served as a public chronicle of the private hell created by war: a kind of perverse photo album of disintegrating families that documented starvation, separation, misery, and death rather than a reassuring cyclical calendar of celebrations, meals, marriages, and births. What

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is was so awful because it had destroyed what should be. By capturing the horrors of its demise, the photos elevated the family to an unimpeachable social ideal. Despite this iconography of family destruction, some were affected worse than others. Jewish families were destroyed, and Jewish children killed, in larger numbers than were other groups; they died at greater rates in Poland, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands than in France, Belgium, or Italy.7 Postwar Europeans in diverse national settings believed that the war had harmed families—if not irreparably then at least gravely and in unprecedented ways. The question was not just whether they could be rehabilitated, but how they should be reconstituted, and to what end. There were many dimensions—and political agendas—involved in the rehabilitation of families after 1945.8 Here I consider postwar efforts and debates surrounding family reconstitution in regard to the perceived proper placement of war orphans. “War orphans” is a large social category that included both full and half orphans (children who lost both or one birth parent) as well as children who were abandoned or separated from parents during or after the war. In this essay, “war orphans” will be used to describe the children of Allied and UN nations’ parentage as well as children of German origin—categories that were kept distinct after 1945 in international social welfare work.9 In particular, I explore aspects of contemporary responses to surviving Jewish hidden children, Central and Eastern European Lebensborn children kidnapped for adoption and germanization in the Reich, and “occupation children” fathered by postwar Allied troops in occupied Germany. The postwar treatment of these children has only recently attracted historical attention.10 As a result, this analysis is necessarily provisional and incomplete. After 1945, prescriptions for postwar reconstruction rested heavily on the enlivened social units of nation and family. This applied to the disposition of orphaned war children as well as the restoration of normative social and gender roles, to international activism as well as national initiatives for postwar relief and recovery. In a recent essay on displaced children, historian Tara Zahra has argued that as much as international relief workers after the Second World War “touted individualist and internationalist values, they viewed two collectives, the nation and the family, as essential sources of individual identity and agency.” As a result, they “sought to rehabilitate European youth through a particular kind of identity politics, which entailed the reunification of biological families and the renationalization and repatriation of children uprooted and allegedly denationalized by the Nazi war machine.”11 Here I am interested in exploring some significant exceptions to this general rule: instances—typically involving minority children—in which repatriation and integration into their country of origin was deemed undesirable or inadvisable. Such cases suggest multiple ways that postwar notions of kinship and belonging were shaped as self-conscious responses to Nazi social ideology, policy, and practice. The lessons learned varied,

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but the perceived need to engage with—and counter—the Nazi past informed the work of contemporaries engaged with war orphans. How this worked, and to what effect, is the focus of what follows.

Hidden Children, Jewish Kinship: Tensions in National and Ethnic Ascription Scholars have been begun to write a more intimate history of “the effects of Shoah” on the daily life and relationships of surviving European Jews. “How are lives reshaped and families reconstituted in a postgenocidal setting?” asked sociologist Diane L. Wolf recently in relation to the Jewish experience after 1945.12 In exploring the lives of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) in postwar Germany, historian Atina Grossman has shown the eagerness with which survivors began life anew by marrying and starting families in DP camps on formerly Aryan territory. “In the aftermath of the Nazi Final Solution that had specifically targeted pregnant women and women with young children for immediate and automatic extermination,” notes Grossman, “childbearing was desperately overdetermined.”13 Jews experienced a remarkable baby boom in postwar Germany as they struggled to create a hopeful future and overcome a debilitating past, including memories of the brutal murder of spouses, children, and other family members. Having babies after 1945 was an act of “genealogical and biological revenge” against the genocidal ambitions of the Nazi regime and a determined bid to rejoin “normal humanity.”14 In choosing to reproduce, then, surviving Jews acted consciously as Jews. Through their ubiquitous appearances on the streets of Berlin and Munich and in DP films and print publications, Jewish babies in baby carriages became the iconic embodiment of collective Jewish rebirth. The resuscitation, fostering, and preservation of Jews and Jewishness—as a religious, cultural, and even ethnic identity—informed the efforts of numerous Jewish individuals and organizations. As a result, revitalized Jewish reproduction and Jewish families acquired “red hot political valence” after 1945.15 Nonetheless, efforts to reconstitute family life and a semblance of domestic “normality” were neither simple nor straightforward. In her recent book on the Netherlands, for example, Diane Wolf interviewed seventy former hidden children (thirty-nine women and thirty-one men), who ranged in age from under one year to their mid teens when they went into hiding with nonJewish Dutch families.16 After examining their wartime and postwar placement and experiences, she concludes that “creating and re-creating a family in the post-Shoah context often incurred extraordinary emotional costs.”17 For the majority of children in her sample, the end of the war brought more misery than happiness. “My war began after the war” was the oft-invoked motto of child survivors of the Netherlands. Regardless of whether they were reunited

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with surviving relatives or placed with an adoptive Jewish family, “normal” family life remained a deeply desired, yet unrealized dream.18 For most hidden children, the emotional yearning to recapture a prewar sense of being cherished and secure—whether this was actually experienced, barely remembered, or merely imagined—went unrequited. Over the course of their lives, it could lie dormant or reawaken (as in the late 1980s) to shape not only individual narratives of self, but also collective notions of identification and belonging. In general there were four possibilities for Jewish hidden children after the war: they could remain with their non-Jewish hiding family; they could be reunited with surviving family members, whether parents or more distant relations, if these existed; they could be adopted by an unrelated Jewish family; or they could be sent to live in a Jewish orphanage. Of the approximately 3,500 children that survived hiding in the Netherlands, some 1,417 were reunited with one or both parents and 2,041 were orphaned. Of the orphans, threequarters were placed in Jewish foster homes or sent to Israel; one-quarter grew up in “non-Jewish” settings, in most cases, it seems, remaining with their hiding family.19 How were their postwar placements decided? And how does Wolf retrospectively evaluate them? In surveying the postwar history of hidden children in the Netherlands, Wolf and other scholars have been highly critical of the role of the Dutch state in determining the placement of Jewish hidden children. This was done via a special state Commission for War Foster Children that had been proposed by Dutch resistance members before the end of the war and that effectively acknowledged the right of the resistance, which had run the rescue operation for Jewish hidden children, to have an official voice in deciding their postwar fates. Established in August 1945, the commission included representatives from all religious confessions; Jewish members comprised a large minority (eleven of twenty-five).20 Initially, the commission took the same approach as the Dutch state to issues of postwar reconstruction: namely, to recognize only distinctions of nationality and to avoid those based upon differences of race or religion. This approach was a direct reaction against, and a conscious attempt to nullify, the discriminatory ethno-racial classifications and hierarchies that characterized the Nazi era. In sum, the official postwar Dutch strategy sought to undo the fascist social model by insisting on a nationally based integrationist one. The practical application of this principal, however, seemed at best insensitive, and at worst anti-Semitic, to many surviving Jews. In the early postwar days, for example, German Jews entering Dutch territory were dumped into the same camps as their former “Aryan” German masters, and repatriated Dutch Jews were expected to pay back rents and payments that accrued during their deportation. While these injustices were not peculiar to the Dutch in the immediate postwar period (US occupation officials in defeated Germany also initially classified DPs solely according to nationality, which led to German Jews

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being grouped with their former persecutors), they do indicate in stark form the seemingly unanticipated problems of renouncing any identification other than nationality as the basis of social classification and policy. When it came to reclaiming hidden children in the Netherlands, Jewish parents were given merely one month to appear. After that time, it was assumed that they were dead or had abandoned their child; if they subsequently appeared, it was their burden to prove that they were fit parents and not guilty of child neglect. Like many European countries and the United States, the Netherlands had a tradition of religion-based family and child welfare work: Catholics would minister to Catholics, Protestants to Protestants, Jews to Jews. In deciding postwar placements, the commission honored this tradition and placed the orphans of Jewish parents in Jewish care. However, this soon proved controversial since the commission adopted a narrow definition of Jewishness: namely, that deceased parents would be considered Jewish only if they had belonged to a synagogue, had kept a kosher household, or had been Zionists. Since Dutch Jews, had become increasingly assimilated and secularized by the early twentieth century, this struck many postwar survivors as unreasonable, and they insisted that the commission take into account other evidence of Jewish cultural identity, such as upholding Jewish tradition in weddings, funerals, or the practice of male circumcision.21 Jewish members of the commission increasingly chafed at the application of a “rigid and pedantic” definition of Jewishness and complained that the commission violated the Dutch principle that each religion exercise “autonomy in its own affairs.” It would be inconceivable, one prominent Jewish commentator wrote, “that a commission composed of a majority of non-Catholics should pronounce on the question of the sacraments of baptism, confession, marriage.” In the summer of 1946, Jewish members of the commission defected temporarily, denouncing the state’s “disregard of denominational differences”; the work of the commission, they argued, “offended against the Dutch tradition of tolerance.”22 These criticisms had some substance. The head of the commission, Dr. Gesina van der Molen, a law professor and former member of the resistance, was a practicing Calvinist who, on occasion, suggested that leaving Jewish children to be raised with loving Christian hiding families would have a salubrious psychological and social effect. To her thinking, it would liberate the children from the “liability” of their Jewishness. She, along with some assimilated Dutch Jews, believed that most Dutch Jews’ primary identification was, and should be, their Dutch nationality. They expressed skepticism regarding the existence of a unified Jewish community and characterized collectivist Jewish claims to the children as an “extremist” Orthodox and Zionist position. In making judgments about placement, she and the majority of commission members advocated that the individual child’s physical and psychological well-being be paramount.23

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In response, an activist contingent of Jews in the Netherlands, bolstered by international support,24 denounced the Dutch state’s legalistic insistence on nationality-über-alles, which, they argued, would lead not to civic equality but to assimilation and the social and cultural erasure of Jews and Jewishness. In the end, Jewish activism made a difference. Through publications and protests, the commission was educated, and its work influenced, by Jewish criticisms. While the organization L’Ezrat ha-Yeled (To the Aid of the Child, created by Dutch Jews in July 1945 with intention of replacing the work of the commission) never achieved complete and exclusive authority over the guardianship of the children, it undertook a organized campaign to convince Dutch hiding families to turn over Jewish orphans they had hoped to adopt so the children could be raised within their faith by Jewish families. These social workers also contacted Jewish children, whether orphaned or not, to make sure that they were aware of their Jewishness and instructed in religious and cultural traditions. Although Jewish social workers promised hiding families that their foster children would be placed with Jewish families, that did not always happen, and a substantial number of children wound up in Jewish orphanages. As historian Tara Zahra has noted for the broader European context of international child relief work after the war, some experts working with Jewish refugee children, such as the émigré Austrian socialist and Adlerian psychologist Ernst Papenek, advocated placement in collective children’s homes. Papenek argued that because the children had earlier experienced the tragic inability of families to protect them, they would find life in a collectivity more secure and reassuring; they and their recovery would benefit from the “therapeutic community of peers who had undergone similar traumas.”25 In fact, several women interviewed by Wolf indicated that they had happy and positive experiences in Jewish group homes in the Netherlands and Israel precisely because of the companionship and friendship of other girls who had undergone similar ordeals. They felt cared about and understood, and bonded much better with such peers than other hidden children did with surviving parents or with new foster or adoptive families. However, in Wolf ’s sample, this held predominantly for teenaged girls. Boys, on the other hand, had a much more negative assessment of collective life in Jewish orphanages. Some described being removed from the loving homes of hiding families by Jewish social workers with the promise they would be adopted by Jewish families. When this didn’t happen, they were “warehoused” in Jewish orphanages and prohibited from having any contact with their hiding families.26 As a result they felt physically and emotionally abandoned for a second time in their lives. Many described boys’ institutions as cold, militaristic, and punitive. Some claimed that they were subjected to Orthodox Jewish religious teachings and punished if they were not already knowledgeable about these upon their arrival. Others complained they received a substandard education, which negatively affected their

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career prospects. Still others were incensed that they were shipped to Israel and recruited shortly thereafter into army life and another war. Marcel, for example, blamed the Dutch state for allowing him, a Dutch citizen, to be expatriated as a minor to Israel. He felt that the Netherlands carelessly and illegally reneged on its duty to protect him, and he was again involuntarily catapulted into a wartime setting. When it came to collective homes, at least in the Dutch case, gender made a difference. Contrary to the psychologist Papanek’s prescriptions for collective living, which were not overtly political in nature, most Jewish orphanages for boys in the Netherlands were, and sought to train their charges to be both practicing Jews and good Zionists.27 Preference for normative gender roles and families affected decisions regarding family reunion. As Wolf and others have shown, surviving widowed fathers were typically denied guardianship of their children unless and until they remarried. One father’s attempt to reclaim his son to live with him and the boy’s grandfather was denied on the grounds that the men did not constitute a “proper” family. Widowed mothers were more likely to be successful in reclaiming their children, but evidence exists that some were denied if their material circumstances or emotional health was deemed poor. One young girl grew up in an orphanage only to learn much later, when poised to marry, that she had a surviving mother who had been denied custody. In some cases, siblings were split up and sent to distant relatives or foster families. Eva, for example, was adopted by her father’s first wife’s sister in the Netherlands, while Eva’s brother was sent off to an unhappy life with wealthy relatives in New York. In other cases, children were not informed that they even had surviving siblings. Because researchers have not been permitted to consult individual files, we do not have a detailed picture of the rationale and biases influencing placement. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that the commission denied requests to reunite biological non-normative families in a number of instances. In her study, Wolf was particularly concerned to explore the “dynamics” of reconstituted families as experienced by hidden children and to assess, in retrospect, the stresses, strains, and effects of postgenocidal family life. The results are surprisingly somber. Even when reunited with biological parents, children felt their parents to be cold or detached, sometimes troubled and unable to cope. Those children sent to live with relatives often described being moved from adequate or even loving environments to un-nurturing or, at worst, abusive ones. Such was the case of Max, taken from a supportive hiding family to live with his businessman father and unstable stepmother, who repeatedly abused the boy emotionally, physically, and during his teen years, sexually. Max’s case, while extreme, was unfortunately not unique.28 On the whole, children taken in by relations or by unrelated Jewish families did not fare well, and physical abuse was “the most common pattern.” As Wolf put it, these experiences “deconstruct particular images of Jewish families as safe havens and are likely indicators

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that this kind of abuse occurred in other survivor families as well.” This is not to demonize Jewish families, much less those struggling to resume life after the horrors inflicted under the Nazis. Indeed, we lack comparative rates of child abuse in non-Jewish and non-survivor households for the period, something that would put Wolf ’s study in perspective. We also lack statistics for abuse when older children are placed with foster or adoptive families (as opposed to the infants and young children taken in by hiding families). Summarizing the overall effects of postwar placement on her sample of seventy hidden children, Wolf counterintuitively concludes that children who did best and suffered least were those who remained with their hiding families and experienced continuity of care and the fewest “ruptures” in their primary relationships. “What matters is a connection with a caring adult, even if he or she is not the biological parent.”29

Family Reconstitution and the “Best Interests of the Child”: The Case of Lebensborn Such observations are not specific to the postwar Jewish context. Following Nazi defeat, international child welfare workers in Europe were confronted with the troubling question of just how much weight to give questions of national and ethnic belonging when deciding postwar placement for orphaned children, particularly for those who were targeted (and whose family members were killed) because of Nazi insistence on the racial or eugenic significance of such affiliations. Among these were the Lebensborn children of Polish, Czech, and Yugoslav origin whom Nazi medical experts had judged “gutrassig” and placed in foster or adoptive homes of German families under a new name, with falsified backgrounds and birth certificates attesting to their ethnic Germanness. In some cases, German adoptive or foster parents appeared to have known the child’s true origin, since some verbally abused their wards for stereotypical “Polish indolence,” for example, or scolded them for slipping into their native tongue. In other cases, adoptive parents either pretended to accept, or actually believed, the fictive story and accepted the children into their families and hearts. After the war, the challenge for UNRRA and IRO workers was to determine whether the adoptions should stand or be rescinded, with the children repatriated to their country of origin. In legal terms, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared the abductions and subsequent adoptions a “crime against humanity” due to their “flagrant violation” of parental and civil rights. Nonetheless, the tribunal warned that the children should not be forcefully seized from caring families unless and until they were claimed by surviving relatives or their cases were investigated by international organizations. The records of French social workers for UNRRA show that they agonized over the moral and political implications, as well as physical and psy-

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chological effects, of some cases. What should be done, for example, with the children whose original identity could not be determined due to missing or destroyed paperwork? Or with little Heidi, who was placed at age four with a German couple in their fifties “who spoiled and pampered” the girl, having lost their own daughter to wartime bombing? Or with Jesica, too young to remember her Yugoslavian parents who were murdered at Auschwitz, but who was now attached to her adoptive German mother, a widow, who found in Jesica “a new reason for living and cares for her as her own child.”30 Mindful of the lifelong impact of their recommendations, these social workers embraced the casework approach of individual study of each child and her circumstances in Germany and her home country. While they worried that a recommendation in favor of the German adoptive family would “render us accomplices to what the Allied Military Tribunal called ‘crimes against humanity,’” social workers also had serious reservations about the “solution of forced repatriation without discrimination.” Here they were referring to the blanket demands by governments, such as the Soviet Union and Poland, for the immediate mass repatriation of citizens, including minors born to their citizens on or off native soil.31 In addition, they worried explicitly about causing further harm: whether, in allowing repatriation in the absence of living family members, they would be guilty of inflicting on the child an emotional and psychological trauma similar to the one that had been perpetrated by the Nazis. In the end, social workers recommended that “the child be removed from its adoptive family [in Germany] only for the purpose of joining its real family.”32 To these French UNRRA workers, “the best interests of the child” and family reconstitution—or failing that, family placement—seemed the least compromised principles on which to base decisions. If these principles were not politically neutral, they at least appeared to be the most humane, universal, and least compromised—first, because they had become the foundational principles of modern child welfare work in Western Europe and the United States, and second, because they invoked a liberal tradition that countered the Nazi ethno-racial ideal of Volk as the raison d’etre of family formation, child rearing, and notions of kinship. The extent to which these principles were enforced, and to what longterm effect, has not yet been established by historians in the case of the kidnapped Lebensborn children. In the case of the Dutch hidden children, Wolf argues that her study highlights the range of “possible problematic outcomes when biology is privileged above all” and when notions of religious or ethnic belonging hold sway.33 In place of blanket solutions to child custody and placement on the basis of group identity, she suggests, more attention to children’s specific history, individual needs, and circumstances of placement may have made a positive difference.

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Ethnicizing Nations and Families: Some Observations on Postwar Poland In claiming hidden children for the Jewish community and Judaism, Jewish organizations were acting no differently from their Catholic and Protestant counterparts in the US and Europe.34 After 1945, activist European Jews ultimately diverged from religious business as usual in the international, extra-state practice of claiming Jewish children—orphaned or not, and regardless of nationality—for the new state of Israel, a geopolitical project that, after the Nazi-era genocide and in the face of postwar Polish pogroms, seemed essential to secure Jewish survival.35 That said, the quest for an ethnically defined nation was not unique after 1945. In broad areas of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, political decisions were made at the end of the war—supported by Britain and the US—to transfer, expel, and generally “unmix” ethnic populations in hopes of ensuring postwar political security and stability.36 European Jews were hardly the only group to feel, and mobilize around, a new sense of urgency regarding the importance of maintaining distinctions of ethnicity and nation, or religion and belief, in the post–Second World War period. While the new Polish government, for example, sought the return of “all” Polish children from German and European territory after 1945, they appear to have been intent only on reclaiming the non-Jewish among them, turning a blind eye as Jewish adults located, recruited, and led Jewish children of Polish nationality out of the country, via German DP camps, for emigration to Palestine.37 For Jews in early postwar Poland, such collective action—organized by Jewish organizations in Poland and the underground Zionist Bricha network, and aided internationally by the American Joint Distribution Committee, American rabbis in the US occupation forces in Berlin, and Youth Aliyah—appeared as essential self-help, especially as overt anti-Semitism and violence toward Jews increased.38 Jewish children were “redeemed” from Christian Polish orphanages and hiding families, and surviving Jewish parents handed over their children in hopes of establishing a secure future for them in Palestine. In the Polish context, Jewish collectives rather than families seemed the safest and most effective alternative. As a result, most Jewish children emigrating from Poland—whether orphaned or not—lived and traveled under the leadership of young Zionist adults in kibbutzim.39 In Poland, unlike the Netherlands, a political debate did not develop around postwar custodial issues regarding hidden Jewish children. The Polish government appeared unconcerned about retaining them for the Polish nation.40 A handful of Polish families did appear in court to attempt to retain guardianship of their hidden children, rather than turn them over to Jewish organizations. More often, Polish families that hid Jewish children were unwilling to advertise

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their good deed (regardless of whether it was motivated by moral, religious, or financial considerations) due to a legitimate fear that they would become the target of anti-Semitic hostility from neighbors. In some cases, surviving parents “tried to keep their own children ignorant about Jewish family roots,” a strategy that rarely worked due to the taunts of local gentiles.41 Shortly after the war, the situation in Poland turned lethal for Jews and their helpmates, as the pogroms documented by historian Jan Gross demonstrate. The largest pogrom, in Kielce in 1946, was touched off by unfounded rumors of the Jewish kidnapping of a gentile Polish boy who, it turned out, had run away to visit friends and pick fruit in a nearby village. In a cruel inversion, the victims of murderous Nazi anti-Semitism became imagined perpetrators in the minds of a segment of the Polish population. The rumor spread that Jews craved the blood of Polish children to revive themselves from the experience of the death camps, and in short order they became the target of murderous postwar Polish anti-Semitism.42 The story of Jews harming Christian children was a centuries-old staple of the blood libel legend in Europe. After 1945, the rumor also likely evoked the recent Nazi abductions of Polish children, most of whom were subsequently killed for failing to meet stringent standards for aryanization. Gross does not discuss the rumor’s resonance with this wartime experience, but evidence suggests that the narrative used to incite and justify Polish anti-Semitic violence after 1945 had been shaped by knowledge of Nazi deeds toward Jews and Polish children alike. While this does not explain the brutal treatment of Jews after the war, it does indicate that the meaning of communal violence toward Jews was altered and informed by Nazi aggression. As Gross explains, the “underlying drama of antiSemitic encounters … consisted of its inevitable mapping, in the minds of Poles and Jews alike, into the horrors of the Nazi occupation that just played out.”43 That violence was the result of conscious planning, rather than “unthinking” mob action, was shown plainly by Gross, who describes how a Polish police officer recruited local acquaintances and a passing truck driver to kidnap and murder a young Jewish mother and her newborn baby in a premeditated manner. Sentimental notions of family, motherhood, and a baby’s innocent vulnerability did not apply to these victims in the eyes of either the perpetrators or the inhabitants of a nearby village who willingly helped bury the freshly murdered bodies of mother and child. For those who participated in or condoned the pogroms, Jews were fully de-Polonized and could be eliminated with impunity despite the lack of overt official discriminatory policy. This pattern of events and behavior, which ranged from calculated, cold-blooded murder to official indifference and inaction, suggests that a fiercely ethnicized and exclusionary notion of nation and kinship was enacted by Communist officials and segments of the Polish population in the early postwar years. Moreover, it was likely influenced by Nazi treatment of Jews. As a result, reconstituting Jew-

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ish families on Polish soil after 1945 appears to have been thoroughly undesirable to many gentile Poles and much too dangerous a risk for most Jews.44

Who Belongs to Whom? Allied Occupation Children and Transnational Claims of Kinship Jews fleeing Polish pogroms headed, ironically, to defeated Germany and the protection of UNRRA and the American zone.45 While anti-Semitism persisted in Germany, Germans had no authority over Jews as a group during the military occupation; they were considered temporary wayfarers en route to elsewhere and were not objects of German social policy. Things were different for occupation children of Allied paternity born to German women after 1945, who were rapidly christened a social problem by Germans. As “illegitimate” offspring of German mothers, they were grudgingly extended German citizenship under the 1913 Nationality Law. Many lacked the requisite male guardian and were therefore subject to the legal guardianship of local youth offices and eligible for state welfare funds—a financial burden attracting German resentment. For many Germans, the children represented the result of rape by enemy troops or the traitorous impulses of their putatively asocial, materialist, or morally depraved mothers, who fraternized willingly and shamelessly with occupation soldiers. Into the 1950s, the children were viewed as an alien presence and unnecessary expense: a mark of the humiliating political and gender relations accompanying defeat and military occupation.46 The four occupying powers—British, French, American, and Soviet—neither encouraged nor (for a time) allowed their soldiers to declare paternity or pay child support. Yet treatment of the children varied. In the Soviet zone, German children of Soviet paternity, initially called “Russenkinder,” were quickly renamed “fatherless children” in official parlance and policy to neutralize the strong racial and moral stigma against the children as perceived products of “Mongols” and rape. Given Soviet patronage, East German officials found it politically expedient to erase references to the children’s paternity and render them merely “illegitimate.”47 In West Germany, little was done about the children until the end of occupation in 1949, when youth welfare organizations (1950) and the federal government (1954) undertook censuses of occupation children to determine their numbers and national paternity. They established a category for race and collected information on children of “colored” paternity, which included African Americans and French colonial soldiers from North Africa and Indochina. In the early 1950s, West German officials helped generate information for anthropological studies intent on studying “anomalies” of “mixed-race” children and undertook a nationwide school study on this scattered population of some 5,000 to look for signs of physical, mental, or moral

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problems that could hamper their “integration into our social and civil order.” (No comparable studies were done on the substantially larger population of ethnic German refugee children from Eastern Europe.) Although their German citizenship was uncontested, black occupation children were considered anything but kin by most West German officials and compatriots.48 Starting in the late 1940s, West German officials, youth workers, and the media advocated the international adoption of occupation children—and particularly the “colored mixed-bloods”—to the “home of their fathers.” Alone among the Allies, the French proved receptive, and from the early occupation period sought out German children of French paternity, even those living with their birth mothers, for “repatriation” to France in the form of adoption or institutional placement. “Mixed-race” children of French colonial paternity were also actively recruited.49 As Michael Spires has noted, French officials hoped that this action would help to both “redress the wrongs done by Germany in depriving other nations of births that would otherwise have occurred during the war years” and ensure “that Germany did not benefit from an excess of births after the war due to the presence on German soil of millions of refugees, displaced persons” and occupation troops.50 Thus official French policy toward its occupation children was overtly postfascist in its attempt to counteract the demographic effects of Nazi aggression in France and abroad. American policy was not as welcoming, and German war orphans—including occupation children—were allowed to immigrate to the US in a nonquota capacity only in the early 1950s. By that time, African Americans—via the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the black American media—had already mobilized to rescue “brown babies” born in Germany. They ran media drives to encourage African American families to send CARE packages to the children and increasingly urged them to consider adopting some of the more unfortunate. African Americans, like Jews, embraced international activism in order to save “their” people and secure the future of “their children.” In both cases, the Second World War and its immediate aftermath fostered broad-based political and emotional commitment to diasporic identities organized around notions of Blackness and Jewishness, which were grounded in particular experiences of discrimination and violence and enlivened through collective calls for self-help and self-defense. Initially, fears of Nazi-style racism played a role in African American activism. In the late 1940s, the Pittsburgh Courier reported that “brown babies were turned into side-show attractions” that Germans paying twenty cents to see, and that some were killed. Another news item alleged that Germans were establishing a “central colony” for several thousand of the children, which prompted a note to Walter White of the NAACP from a concerned black American citizen inquiring whether Germany would be “allowed to substitute her concentration camps and persecution of the Jews for children who happen to be brown in color?”51

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Black American expressions of kinship with European children of color were based on what they saw as a shared experience of subjection to institutionalized and informal racism and racist violence. Nonetheless, they were quite vocal in emphasizing that racism was not confined to Germany but pervaded American legal, social, and military culture as well. Both the NAACP and the black media repeatedly argued that one of the reasons accounting for the abandonment and misery of “brown babies” abroad was that US officials would not permit black GIs to marry their white German girlfriends and bring them back home. The United States’ anti-black racist policy toward its own soldiers, they argued, rendered the children “illegitimate” and therefore German citizens on German soil. African American activism around the adoption of “brown babies” derived from notions of racialized kinship and a pointed social critique of the United States and its hypocritical exercise of democratic principles. In a sense, their expressions of kinship were based both upon national claims as Americans (they deserved equal rights) and subnational claims as “Negroes” (since they were not allowed to exercise these rights or enter the American melting pot, they therefore felt a moral obligation to the “half-American” children of color). In advocating the US adoption of “brown babies,” African American activists protested the fact that Black American paternity did not count in the eyes of American law (despite the fact that this very paternity caused the child to be ascribed as “Negro/colored” in the US and Germany alike). Assertions of kinship with the children were connected to African American demands for official US recognition of their “manhood” in all of its political, legal, and social connotations. Thus notions of kinship remained intensely racialized because of the ongoing racial injustices perpetrated upon black Americans—including, most infuriatingly for affected contemporaries, those who served in the US military and helped defeat the Nazi racist state.52

War Children, “Groupness,” and the Elusive Ideal Family In Ethnicity without Groups, sociologist Rogers Brubaker has argued that “ethnicity, race and nation should be conceptualized not as substances or things or organisms or collective individuals—as the imagery of discrete, concrete, tangible, bounded and enduring ‘groups’ encourages us to do—but rather in relational, dynamic, eventful, and disaggregated terms.” Rather than think of the group as “entity,” he urges us to think about “groupness as a contextually fluctuating conceptual variable.” While historians have drawn on the insights of Brubaker and Benedict Anderson in their study of national formation and identities, our profession has been less consistent in treating ethnic and racial formations and identities—whether Jewish, African American, Afro-German, or Turkish—as historically situated and malleable political, social, and psycho-

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logical processes.53 Here I have tried to suggest that the experiences and lessons of Nazi violence and domination both enlivened an ethnically exclusive notion of Polishness and provoked new international understandings, strategies, and politics of “groupness” after 1945 among Jews and Blacks in Europe and the United States that were grounded in calls for collective self-sufficiency and articulated a broader postwar vision of diasporic community and identity. Although ideological commitment to family conditioned expectations for war orphans’ placement, divergent postfascist aims and expectations produced diverse “solutions” to children’s placement, both within nations and between them. The ideal family, invoked by Thérèse Bonney’s wartime photos, existed only it its absence. After 1945, family reconstitution was rent by competing claims, emotions, and ambitions, yet remained a seductive social and psychological goal. On the one hand, it was embraced by various constituencies as a crucial building block of national, ethnic, or religious identification. On the other, it remained the measure by which individual children—even as adults— measured and mourned their upbringing. Regardless of whether they were returned to their parents or relatives, adopted, or sent to orphanages, many hidden and occupation children have expressed unhappiness about their placement and betray a certain wistfulness about “what might have been.” Without minimizing instances of neglect and abuse, this response raises the question of whether personal evaluations of actual families carry within them comparisons to some sentimentalized, elusive ideal—what should be as opposed to what is—particularly in instances where relationships between biological parents and child are ruptured abruptly, violently, or prematurely. Historians need to look more closely at how the evolving politics of groupness after the Second World War affected social conceptions, policy, and practices of family after 1945. This brief survey of postwar treatment of war orphans suggests that it did, quite profoundly. For one, Nazi wartime violence toward children spurred a transnational trend in family constitution. Efforts to address the destructive consequences of Nazi policy accelerated international social work in child welfare and initiated what would become a global practice of inter-country adoption, thus challenging nations to revise immigration laws and adoption policies. Yet such developments have received little attention from historians of Europe.54 Postfascist changes in legal, social, and cultural conceptions of family, kinship and citizenship were conditioned by national exigencies and transnational dynamics. Such changes provide insight into the politics and processes of collective self-definition after 1945 and raise the question of how “difference” was defined, asserted, and enacted—both by those claiming subjectivity and by those prejudicially identifying “objects” of scientific study and social policy. This process, after all, highlights questions regarding the desirability and limits of social cohesion in postwar, postfascist reconstruction. To what extent was

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integration a goal? How was this defined and pursued? When, where, and why was it not? Can one speak of distinct democratic and socialist politics of integration during the Cold War? Or were the politics of integration and social disarticulation among democratic or socialist states as diverse as between them? Writing an intimate history of social reconstruction through a focus on family constitution—including the increasingly popular practices of child fostering and adoption—provides an opportunity, moreover, to link the history of wartime and postwar Europe with the history of decolonization and the globalizing American presence.55 All these stories are part of the broader, mobile mix of humanity and sexual relations that affected family constitution, kinship, and belonging in the decades after 1945. For this project, the term “postfascist” has epistemic value. It permits historians to bring diverse experiences of fascism—and their multivalent postwar aftermaths—into one analytic frame.56 It would also allow study of the comparative effects of National Socialism and Italian Fascism in Europe, something not discussed here. Temporally, it is more elastic than “postwar” since analysis is not cued solely to wartime and its aftermath, but can accommodate a broader range of social experience and trauma unleashed by the pursuit of the fascist utopian project in the interwar years. If we follow Brubaker and disavow the isolated study of particular groups, a postfascist focus encourages an interactional, international, and dynamic approach to history that is attuned to comparative group formation and selfarticulation. At the same time, it acknowledges the significance that the fascist past plays as referent in these processes. “Postfascist” invokes the full sweep of prewar and wartime violence unleashed by Nazi biopolitics against its victims, but it also suggests the subsequent moral and political condemnation of that violence, as well as the ongoing physical, social, and psychic trauma occasioned by it. The connotations of “postfascist” thus refine and expand upon those associated with “postwar.” I see the terms more as collaborators than as competitors: after all, postfascist subjectivities, sensibilities, and social policies can only be born of the postwar era (once the victory over fascism has been won). Yet they continue to develop and thrive beyond it, for unlike “postwar,” “postfascist” does not have a definable terminus or finite chronology. Rather, its effects can resonate across generations and into the future, giving rise to new forms of “groupness,” such as the self-organizing initiatives of Afro-Germans, hidden Jewish children, and war children (fathered by wartime German troops abroad) that have emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. In constituting themselves as “groups,” the former children have, as middle-aged adults, drawn upon received identities—as Blacks, Jews, and “Nazi bastards”—to refashion positive social identities out of the stigmatized or painful ascriptions imposed upon them in childhood. The result has been self-knowledge and self–affirmation, since the former children no longer regard themselves or their experiences as

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“odd” or “anomalous” but, in meeting others who share similar life stories, come to understand them in broader sociological and historical perspective. Reciprocally, the emergence of such recent instances of postfascist groupness has informed historical research and understanding, and has enabled the writing of essays such as this one.

Notes 1. Pieter Lagrou, “Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, 1945–1965,” Past and Present 154, no. 1 (1997): 195–96; Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, 2007); Leora Auslander, “Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (April 2005): 237–59; and discussion of Ernst Papanek in Tara Zahra, “Lost Children: Displacement, Family, and Nation in Postwar Europe,” Journal of Modern History (March 2009): 45–86. 2. An estimated 33 percent of Jewish adults survived. Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Children and the Holocaust: Symposium Presentations (Washington, D.C., 2004), i. 3. See ibid.; also Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, 1991); Jane Marks, The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust (New York, 1993); Richard C. Lukas, Did the Children Cry? Hitler’s War against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939–1945 (New York, 1994); Lynn Nichols, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web (New York, 2005); Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (New York, 2005); Gilad Margalit, Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal (Madison, 2002), 25–55; and Joanna Beata Michlic, Jewish Children in Nazi-Occupied Poland: Early Post-War Recollections of Survival and Polish-Jewish Relations during the Holocaust, Search and Research Lectures and Papers, no. 14 ( Jerusalem, 2008) and Joanna Beata Michlic, “The ‘Raw Memory of War’: Early Postwar Testimonies of Children in Dom Dziecka in Otwock,” Yad Vadem Studies, 37, no 1 (2009). 4. For example, Otto Zoff, They Shall Inherit the Earth, trans. Anne Garrison (New York, 1943), whose first chapter is titled “What have we done to the children of the world?” 5.The book was also published in Europe, and an exhibition of the photos toured US cities. Thérèse Bonney, Europe’s Children, 1939 to 1943 (self-published and edited, 1943); letter from Bonney to Jane Lawson at Alfred A. Knopf , 28 October 1943 (in my possession); excerpt from Publishers Weekly (23 October 1943): 1594–95. 6. The children were depicted as European and white; this held for other books as well. See the cover of Zoff, They Shall Inherit the Earth. On the absence of US press interest in Jewish “child refugees” after 1940, see Edith J. T. Baumel, “The Rescue and Resettlement of the Jewish Refugee Children from Europe in the United States, 1938–1945,” (Ph.D. diss., Bar-Ilan University, 1985), esp. 176–206. 7. An estimated 1.5 million Jewish children died under Nazi rule; Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Greece, and Hungary also had high Jewish death rates. Dwork, Children; Diane L. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (Berkeley, 2007), 95; Mordecai Paldiel, “The Rescue of Jewish Children in Poland and the Netherlands,” in Alice L. Eckardt, ed., Burning Memory:Times of Testing and Reckoning (New York, 1993), 119–39; Paldiel, “The Rescue of Jewish Children in Belgium during World War II,” in Dan Michman, ed., Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans (Jerusalem, 1998), 307–25. 8. The rehabilitation of the family in gendered terms, viz. the role of the husband and wife, father and mother, has been addressed in Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood:Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley, 1993); Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Postwar Germany (Berkeley, 1999); Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton, 2005); Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany

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(Princeton, 2006); Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton, 2006); and Robert G. Moeller, “The Elephant in the Living Room: Or Why the History of Twentieth-Century Germany Should be a Family Affair,” in Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert, eds., Gendering Modern German History (New York, 2007), 228–49. 9. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and its successor, the International Relief Organization (IRO), did not serve children of German citizens. Thérèse Brosse, War-Handicapped Children: Report on the European Situation (Paris, 1950); Louise W. Holborn, The International Refugee Organization: A Specialized Agency of the United Nations. Its History and Work, 1946–1952 (New York, 1956). 10. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank; Marks, Hidden Children; J. S. Fishman, “Jewish War Orphans in the Netherlands: The Guardianship Issue, 1945–1950,” Wiener Library Bulletin 27, no. 30–31 (1973–74): 31–36; Lynn H. Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web (New York, 2005); Arye Riesel, “Reeducation of War-Orphaned Jewish Children and Adolescents in Children’s and Youth Homes in Belgium, 1945–1949” in Michman, Belgium and the Holocaust, 483–97; Joanna Beata Michlic, “Who Am I? Jewish Children’s Search for Identity in PostWar Poland, 1945–1949,” Polin 20, “Making Holocaust Memory” (November 2007): 98–121; Michlic, Jewish Children in Nazi-Occupied Poland; Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen, eds., Children of World War II: The Hidden Enemy Legacy (New York, 2005); Fehrenbach, Race; and Zahra, “Lost Children.” 11. Zahra, “Lost Children,” 50. 12. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 35. 13. Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 201. 14. Ibid., 195–96. 15. Grossmann notes that Jewish reproduction was also “expected by East European Jewish religious and social tradition.” Ibid., 195, and 30, 194, final quote from 200; also Grossmann, “Trauma, Memory and Motherhood: Germans and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-Nazi Germany, 1945–1949,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 38 (1998): 215–39. Joanna Michlic notes the perceived “sacred obligation” of Jews to recover surviving Jewish children in her unpublished essay, “Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Some Vignettes of Jewish Children’s Lives in Early Postwar Poland,” which is part of her larger book project, Transformation of Jewish Childhood in Poland, 1939–1949. My thanks to Joanna Michlic for sharing her essay with me. 16. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 134. Of the interviewees, 41 lived in the Netherlands, 11 in Israel, and 18 in the US. The average age at hiding for her interviewees was 7.3; the median age was 4 years. Two-thirds of the girls and one-half of the boys in her sample were hidden at age five or younger. 17. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 9. For a discussion of the postwar placement of hidden Jewish children in postwar Poland, see Joanna Michlic’s recent essays “Jewish Children’s Search for Identity” and “Rebuilding Shattered Lives.” 18. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 9, 188, 253; this also applies to the DPs studied by Grossmann, who struggled to master, or reinhabit, the normative roles of mother and father, see Jews, Germans, and Allies, 208–12. 19. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 118–20. 20.This composition was similar to that of the Minors Protection Boards in the Netherlands. In 1947, membership was increased to thirty-four, of which fifteen were Jewish. Fishman, “Jewish War Orphans,” 32. 21. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 112–17; Fishman, “Jewish War Orphans,” 31–36. 22. Fishman, “Jewish War Orphans,” 34–35. 23. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 114–16, and Fishman, “Jewish War Orphans,” 34. 24. In 1946, the chief rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, met with the Dutch prime minister; a few years later the London Commission on the Status of Jewish War Orphans added its support. Fishman, “Jewish War Orphans,” 33–34.

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25. Zahra, “Lost Children,” 60–61. 26. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 333–34. 27. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 198, 228–45, 264–66, 278–92; also Marks, Hidden Children. In Belgium, some Jewish children’s homes were run by secular Jews who invoked the best interests of the child and rejected sending the children to Israel; other homes were run by religious Jews who encouraged Aliyah. See Riesel, “Re-education,”esp. 491–96. 28. In Wolf ’s sample, four of seven children with stepparents were sexually abused. 29. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 337, also 333. For a discussion of individual cases, 163–272. 30. Social Welfare History Archive, University of Minnesota, SW109, Box 29, file 13, “Translation of report by Denise Grunewald, 20 May 1948”; Georg Lilienthal, Der Lebensborn e.V.: Ein Instrument natonalsozialistischer Rassenpolitik, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 2003); Isabel Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”: Das Rasse- & Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen, 2003), 508–30; and Nicholas, Cruel World, 239–95. 31. SW109, Box 29, file 13, “Study on Lebensborn,” 10. 32. SW109, Box 29, file 13, “Translation,” 7. Also “Study on the Lebensborn,” and “Report on the activities of the I.M.S. section in Baden-Baden, 1946/47.” 33. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank, 338. 34. In some instances, Catholic priests helped kidnap Jewish hidden children who had been baptized into the Church from the Netherlands to avoid having them returned to a Jewish family or upbringing. On religion and adoption in the US, see Michael Shapiro, ed., A Study of Adoption Practice, vol. 2 (New York, 1955). 35. Nicholas, Cruel World, 482–502; Susan T. Pettiss, with Lynne Taylor, After the Shooting Stopped: The Story of an UNRRA Welfare Worker in Germany, 1945–1947 (Victoria, B.C., 2004); Grossmann, Jews, Germans and Allies; European reports of DP and children’s homes in SW109. 36. See Mark Kramer, “Introduction” in Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, eds., Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (New York, 2001). 37. Several hundred Polish hidden children were sent to France en route to Palestine. See Michlic, “Rebuilding Shattered Lives.” 38. In “Rebuilding Shattered Lives,” Michlic discusses the role of three postwar Jewish organizations in Poland concerned with reclaiming Jewish orphans. Her research suggests that some contested cases for the guardianship of Jewish children were heard in Polish family courts, but their numbers seem to be small and as yet there is no indication that such court cases received public attention. 39. Some 100,000 Jews left Poland in this way. See Nicholas, Cruel World; Grossmann, Jews, Germans and Allies; and Pettiss, After the Shooting Stopped. On Bricha, see Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 119–23. Also Michlic, “Rebuilding Shattered Lives,” which includes a discussion of the role of postwar Jewish organizations in Poland and their characterization of their search for Jewish children as a “sacred duty” and “redemption” of both the children and Jewishness, (Michlic, ms. p. 7). 40. Michlic, “Rebuilding Shattered Lives.” 41. Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New York, 2006), 73. 42. Gross, Fear, 74; Gross, “A Tangled Web: Confronting Stereotypes Concerning Relations between Poles, Germans, Jews, and Communists,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000), 74–129, esp. 110–11. 43. Gross, Fear, 69; and Gross, “A Tangled Web.” 44. Paldiel, “The Rescue of Jewish Children”; Gross, Fear, esp. 66–80 and 82ff.; Marks, Hidden Children; Lukas, Did the Children Cry? 45. The other zones discouraged acceptance of Jewish refugees from Poland or refused them. 46. Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler, esp. chapters 2–5.

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47. W. Karin Hall, “Humanity or Hegemony: Orphans, Abandoned Children, and the Sovietization of the Youth Welfare System in Mecklenburg, Germany, 1945–1952” (Ph.D. diss.; Stanford, 1998), 146–61. On rape, Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA., 1995); Atina Grossmann, “A Question of Silence,” in Robert G. Moeller, ed., West Germany under Construction (Ann Arbor, 1997); Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler, 46–56. 48. Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler, 61–168; Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria, Zwischen Fürsorge und Ausgrenzung: Afro-deutsche ‘Besatzungskinder”in Nachkriegsdeutschland (Berlin, 2002). 49. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, EA 2/007 Akten des Innenministeriums, Nr. 1177, correspondence, 1951–54. Spires notes a case in which French authorities rejected one child deemed too dark-skinned to easily integrate into French society; thus French authorities likely exercised discretion at the local level. Michael Spires, “‘This Child Ought to Belong to France”: Ordinance No. 71 and the Adoptions Commission in the French Zone of Occupied Germany, 1946–1950,” (December 2007, unpublished essay). 50. French citizenship laws had been liberalized in 1945. Spires, “‘This Child,’” 21. 51. NAACP, Reel 8: Group II, Box G11, “Brown Babies 1950–58”: Thomasina Norford to Walter White, 7 July 1950; “Brown Babies Turned into Side Show Attractions,” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 July 1948, 3. 52. Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler; also Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill, 2002). 53. Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, 2004), 11, emphasis added. Also Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor, 2009), esp. 1–29 and 80–136. 54. Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler, and Fehrenbach, “International Adoption and the Postwar Family: Rethinking Geneaologies,” unpublished essay. 55. See Jordanna Bailkin, “The Postcolonial Family? West African Children, Private Fostering, and the British State,” Journal of Modern History 81, no. 1 (2009): 87–121, which appeared just as this book was going to press. 56. In contrast to Diane Wolf ’s term “postgenocidal,” which allows only the actual or intended victims of Nazi genocide into the analytical frame.

[[[ CH AP T ER 1 1

Manners, Morality, and Civilization Reflections on Postwar German Etiquette Books Paul Betts

Fein oder nicht fein, das ist hier die Frage. —Erich Kästner

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renewed interest in chronicling the difficult history of the years immediately following the Second World War. But whereas the emphasis was once largely confined to questions of political reconstruction and macro-level social change in the aftermath of war and political upheaval, new scholarship has tended to revisit the period with different questions in mind. Of central concern to many historians these days is less how Europeans found their way into war, but rather how they got themselves out of it.1 With this approach have come new social and cultural histories of postwar life more attuned to how perpetrators, “fellow-travelers,” and victims—not just states—dealt with the wartime legacy of mass death and destruction. There is of course a long-established historiography devoted to addressing what remained unreconstructed in postwar European society, be it unmasking compromised political leaders, state and church complicity in the Holocaust, or unearthing other unsavory elements of continuity buried beneath the floorboards of postwar recovery. With time, however, these stories by and large were dwarfed by more Whiggish interpretations of post-1945 (Western) European history as a redemptive tale of peace and plenty, whose happy ending was then extended to Eastern Europeans after the political earthquake of 1989. Such liberal triumphalism has faded markedly since the mid 1990s, however, as scholars reopen the case on the postwar situation in new and surprising ways, providing alternative accounts of how the past did not pass so easily in 1945, despite all of the “zero hour” oracles from every quarter about the momentous opportunity to start everything afresh.2 ECENT YEARS HAVE WITNESSED

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Nonetheless, there are many themes that are only now being explored as part of the aftermath of war. In this essay I would like to turn my attention to what may seem a comparatively trivial dimension of Europe’s postwar reconstruction—etiquette books. For some, studying these long-forgotten guides to manners may seem an odd topic for rethinking the daunting European task of rebuilding new states and societies atop the charred remains of the past. Given the harrowing conditions in which Europeans had to meet basic questions of food and shelter during the “hunger years,” to say nothing of the difficulty of trying to erect new polities capable of providing some semblance of order and meaning to war-torn populations, courtesy manuals seem a far cry from the pressing demands of the day. After all, advice books historically have been creatures of peace and prosperity, speaking more to the powdered anxieties of the drawing room than to the horrors and homelessness of bombed-out cities and makeshift shelters. And yet, the period immediately after the Second World War saw a remarkable flourishing of etiquette books across Europe and North America, beginning in the late 1940s and reaching its apogee in the late 1950s. Feminist historians and sociologists (especially those inspired by Norbert Elias) have done the most sustained work on this material, showing how these manners books peddled the soft side of patriarchy and class warfare behind the screen of family values and domestic modernization.3 To the extent that these books are usually read as symptomatic of “recasting bourgeois Europe” after 1945, the postwar boom in etiquette books has been seen almost exclusively as a Western phenomenon. But we do well to remember that these guidebooks were equally as prominent in the East, where they also went through numerous editions as popular guides to helping people behave and stylize their lives according to new postwar principles.4 Germany is a particularly fertile ground for analyzing these trends, not least because there was so much concern about the moral makeover of Germany and Germans after 1945. However, this is not simply a story of table manners relearned after the war. At stake was nothing less than the remaking of civilization itself after Nazism. To be sure, interpreting Nazism and the Holocaust as a “civilizational rupture” (Zivilisationsbruch) has long been a staple in Third Reich historiography.5 The call to reconsider post-1945 German history as a kind of “civilizing process” is quite new, though, and has found most sustained attention in Konrad Jarausch’s 2006 After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995. Here he aims to “tell the neglected story of the struggle to rehabilitate the Germans after Hitler” and places special emphasis on the salutary effects of Allied reeducation officers, market engineers, journalists, and a “liberal public sphere” in effectively pacifying Germany’s warring ways and thus helping to return Germany and Germans to the path of Western civic culture. For Jarausch, the “civilizing process” that began with the Nuremberg Trials and eventually subsumed East Germany in

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1989 is a great—if underestimated—success story of American-led German liberalization, as Germany’s “military spirit transform[ed] itself into a more civil, peaceable outlook.”6 But even so, there is relatively little attention in his book to how the “civilizing process” was undertaken by Germans themselves after 1945. Admittedly, looking at courtesy books that prescribed new norms of civil behavior may not tell us much about lived experience, but they do go some way, as Elias himself claimed, in throwing light on the “standards of habits and behavior to which society at a given time sought to accustom the individual.”7 After the Second World War, the study of this advice literature even attracted prominent historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Harold Nicolson, who wrote serious histories of decorum following the “crisis of Western civilization” in the hope that the “necessity of manners” would counteract militarism and even improve international relations.8 German etiquette books were written in this same spirit of trying to expunge the wartime traces of violence from postwar society, and as such they served as a kind of self-generating “civilizing industry” in post-1945 Germany. Central was to reeducate the self, retrain the body and mind to live in a new postfascist world, and reschool a thoroughly militarized society in the values of peace, dignity, and personal honor. How and why the 1950s became a kind of Golden Age of these manners manuals on both sides of the geographical divide is the main focus of my contribution.

Cultural Compass At first glance, the renaissance of manners manuals after the war may not seem so unexpected. After all, the publishing history of advice literature shows that it tends to enjoy booms following wars and revolutions, periods when the fabric of everyday life has been radically altered. Often these guides were written as attempts to restore order to a world turned upside down. They were not necessarily conservative or backward-looking—the outpouring during the 1920s of communist advice books on how to live in a revolutionary society in the new Soviet Union (to say nothing of their Viennese or German proletkult equivalents) is an obvious example. In any case, the peak periods of European etiquette book production were the 1820s, the 1920s, and the 1950s. (The late nineteenth century was also a boom period, for reasons I will discuss later.) In Germany alone over 800 etiquette books were published between 1870 and 1970, approximately 150 of which were printed between 1948 and 1965.9 What made Germany’s postwar production of etiquette books so unique was its political situation. The material and moral destruction of the country meant that calls abounded from all camps about the urgency to remake German society anew, and that this radical reform crusade—in order to succeed—must

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include domestic life and everyday social interaction. That Germany served as the Cold War’s first ideological battleground between East and West also lent these etiquette books a heightened aspirational tone in willing a brave new Ger man world of postfascist civil culture, whether liberal or communist. The divided country’s superpower patrons were apparently quite supportive of this reform zeal, as the cultural campaign to remodel everyday civilian life was part and parcel of the broader crusade to reeducate a hypermilitarized former enemy into the ways of law and order. No less important was the fact that the physical destruction and loss of life meant that the traditional means of transmitting class taste and social standing—education and family property—had been severely disrupted if not altogether ruined by the war, rendering the surviving young generation—as the guidebooks often noted—cut off and unschooled, without adequate moral guidance and cultural compass. The guidebooks thus sought to address these concerns for a postwar generation unsure about how to live and behave after the collapse of the Third Reich. In consequence, these guides to good behavior reveal something of the hopes and fears of postwar Germans. It may then come as quite a surprise that virtually every German guidebook published after 1945 in both East and West paid explicit homage to Germany’s most famous guide to good behavior, Adolph Freiherr von Knigge’s Über den Umgang mit Menschen (How to Get Along with Others), first published in 1788. Several even referred to Knigge in their titles, such as W. Von Ginök’s 1950 West German Lebenskunst: Ein Buch vom guten Benehmen für Jedermann: Der Knigge des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Art of Living: A Book of Good Manners for Everyone: The Knigge for the Twentieth Century), or its East German counterpart, W. K. Schweickert and Bert Hold’s 1959 Guten Tag, Herr von Knigge! Ein heiteres Lesebuch für alle Jahrgänge über alles, was ‘anständig’ ist (Good Morning, Herr Knigge! A Humorous Book for All Ages About What is Proper). Indeed, Knigge’s eighteenth-century text on manners was a common cultural reference from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. At first this may seem odd; after all, why would postwar Germans—so preoccupied with building new postwar lives—look to eighteenth-century inspiration on how to get along with others? Readers unfamiliar with Knigge’s book would be forgiven for assuming that this was just another Enlightenment tract on the good behavior so beloved in eighteenth-century European court cultures. Etiquette books had their European origins in the late Middle Ages and found their first modern incarnation in Erasmus’s moral guide for sixteenth-century adolescents, On Civility in Children (1530), which had gone through 150 editions by the eighteenth century. The blossoming and refinement of French court culture under Louis XIV set the pace for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books on manners across Europe, inspiring a slew of German equivalents.10 Yet Knigge’s book was different. Although a noble, he was no champion of his class; he was not interested in consolidating aristocratic cultural capital

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in the face of bourgeois pretenders. But it is also incorrect to see his book—as did most nineteenth-century commentators—as simply an effort to initiate a new generation of middle-class parvenus into what remained of feudal society. Knigge himself was a staunch supporter of the French Revolution and was even jailed by the English in Bremen in 1795 for his outspoken revolutionary sympathies.11 His book was in this way more interested in devising a new universal grammar of social interaction in an age of change and Enlightenment, whose “republican” impulse some have seen as a “contribution to the Third Estate’s struggle for emanicipation.”12 Yet it was precisely Knigge’s call to unite all Germans in the name of civil values that won him adherents after 1945.13 That Knigge’s legacy would be rewritten to serve the new ideological dictates shaping each Germany is understandable. East Germans spilled a good amount of ink working to rehabilitate the eighteenth-century aristocrat as a heroic German revolutionary, while West Germans portrayed him as a protoliberal.14 More interesting is why they were so keen to write what were called “new Knigges” in the first place. Postwar Germany’s fascination with the distant past is hardly news. Many commentators have noted, for example, the remarkable flourishing of interest in Goethe and Schiller as polestars for postfascist German culture, whose legacy both Germanys worked hard to exploit as ballast for shaky new republics.15 In many ways the early postwar period was characterized by intense cultural battles between West and East over the inheritance of Germany’s bourgeois heritage of Weimar classicism and what was often called “democratic humanism.” For these etiquette book writers, it was the Enlightenment’s premium on education as social engineering that found particular resonance after the war. Invoking the language of social engineering was of course delicate business after 1945, given the Third Reich’s toxic legacy of radically remaking German state and society. Much of this reconstruction energy was channeled into reforming the structures of political life—governments, laws, political parties—while the remaking of individual citizens usually came under the rubric of “denazification” or “moral rehabilitation” of some sort or other. It was in this age of reeducation that etiquette books assumed their place in this (re)civilizing process of turning belligerent Germans into decent, peace-loving citizens.

Dignity and Discretion Let us start with the West German guides. In them one could find a combination of old and new. Common to all were tips about how one should introduce someone properly, greet strangers, and behave in the theater and in public transportation encounters, as well as how to dress and use proper speech in every situation. Much attention was also taken up with hygiene and personal

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appearance, focusing on clean haircuts, smart clothes, and polished shoes. The modern elements—how to act in the cinema, how to answer the phone—were for the most part extensions of older cultural codes. There were, however, frequent—if unacknowledged—elements in postwar books that betrayed a world recovering from catastrophe, as evidenced in the pages dedicated to how to react to family death announcements, behave tactfully at funerals, or “how to address a widow.”16 Even so, the main thrust was toward bringing social interaction up to date with the modern world, one in which Germans needed to find a way to express themselves that did not simply ape foreigners. One 1950 West German guide made this clear. While the author praised the English gentleman as the exemplar, he still insisted that “Germans should not slavishly ape foreign customs and mores.”17 More striking in this regard was the complete absence of the US in any of them. While fascination with the “American way of life” was so palpable elsewhere in West German culture, it did not find its way into these etiquette books at all. Apparently the Americans, judging from the silence, had nothing to teach Germans in the world of manners. Instead, the Knigge-inspired tradition of German courtesy books was invariably embraced as necessary cultural orientation through the 1950s and 1960s. But this is not to say that these West German etiquette manuals were not interested in their historical moment. One thing that made these West German guides distinctive was their strong emphasis on humanity and individual dignity. As one 1949 West German guidebook called Proper Behavior At Work and in Private: A Useful Guide for Young People put it, the task of such books is to “ascertain the moral substance beneath the outward appearance of behavior, helping young people to understand that the norms governing social interaction are a key part of the social and cultural battle for humanity itself.”18 In this case this “social and cultural battle” was depicted as the key drama of the century, to the extent that the struggle for personal civilization went far beyond private decorum: “It [good behavior] cannot be reduced to a matter of private interest, since it touches on vital economic, national (staatlich) and social concerns in addressing the decisive cultural issue of the century—that is, the reverence and dignity of the individual, as well as his liberty and relation to the whole [of humanity].”19 It is hard not to detect echoes of the UN Charter and Basic Law in this passage, as the dignity and honor of the individual were put center stage as an emblem of progress and civilization. This may seem quite predictable, given the ubiquitous presence of this human rights rhetoric in the media in the late 1940s. But it did represent a sharp break from the Nazi years, when honor and dignity had become distinctly collective and racial characteristics that found deadly expression in law, culture, social life, and even etiquette guides from the period.20 The effort to break from the Nazi past could also be seen in advice books’ preoccupation with social distance and the clear demarcation of public and

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private. After 1945 the emphasis fell on polished comportment and relaxed yet modest expressions of interaction, in which emotions were to be kept under strict control.21 Strong recommendations to retain the formal address Sie instead of the informal Du in these books were intended to restore and preserve social distance as the bedrock of postwar civility.22 Several were quite explicit in their advice that “silence was the best policy” in family settings, and as such paid heed to the more nineteenth-century virtues of reserve and reticence.23 One could see this as a kind of means of reintroducing a more class-based “culture of decorum” that served as a kind of postfascist social salve.24 Such breezy elitism at times made it difficult to fathom the readership of these guides; one 1949 guide, for example, devoted a number of pages to how to behave at the opera and how to eat lobster gracefully in a world in which the majority of citizens were living in makeshift residences without electricity, running water, or modern toilets. To be sure, the defense of class culture in the face of political upheaval was already present in the conservative guidebooks of the 1920s. Walter Bodarius’s widely-sold 1924 Behavior and Lifestyle in Educated Circles, for instance, called on the “leading stratum of the nation” to resume its cultural mission in a time of chaos. Even in the preface to the 1957 reprint of his book, Bodarius maintained that the “educated stratum must remain the carriers of culture.”25 But this was more the exception than the rule. Most were geared toward a wide audience, with a clearer sense of the actual demands and concerns of postwar Germans, providing tips on social grace amid material hardship. What distinguished the post-1945 books was a real disinclination against any sense of Volkskultur or identification of the individual with any larger collective, be it race, nation, or even class. Cultivated individuality was the key virtue, serving as a key step in the more general liberalization of West German culture. Just as liberal political theory posited a distant relationship between state and citizen, liberal culture was in part predicated on a distant relationship between citizen and citizen. In this way, these guides rejected the communal imperatives, military ethos, and violent political passions of Nazi society. West German etiquette books were efforts to break away from what they saw as the Third Reich’s cultural legacy; instead, discretion, reserve, and social distance were embraced as the very foundation of civilization after 1945. It would be misleading to suggest, however, that these guidebooks encouraged their readers to shun the public sphere and retreat into private havens of coffee and biscuits. Many of them were noticeably concerned with reeducating German youth—in particular young men—for life at the office. In fact, it is striking that women hardly figure at all in discussions about good behavior at work, as seen in G. von Hilgendorff ’s 1953 Good Behavior, Your Success. When women were mentioned at work, this is where much of the most sexist language surfaced. Nennstiel’s 1949 Proper Behavior at Work and in Private, for example, likened women in the office to “warm gulf streams” that helped heat human

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relations at the office.26 While such language tended to disappear by the early 1960s,27 virtually all of the manners books assumed that good behavior at work was just as central as proper behavior at home or in town. In Nennstiel’s book, good behavior at work was likened to “social credit” that needed constant and careful cultivation. As he concluded: “Our thoughts about proper behavior should conclude with the words of a German sociologist: ‘What brings credit? Not ostentation, not self-promotion—no, behind all great financial security stands strong moral fiber and the perserverance of a steadfast character, which manifests itself in every instance, such as punctuality, etc.’ If one is asked what brings success, then the answer can simply be put: proper behavior at work and in private.”28 What made these tips about proper office behavior so striking was their relationship to the Nazi past. In Nennstiel’s guide, the dangerous legacy of the militarized past took center stage, as the barracks were held up as the counterfoil to civilized life: “Military discipline plays no role in the social world that one encounters at work or in one’s private life.”29 Eradicating the residue of rude military comportment was something he felt needed direct confrontation: “While receiving instructions or assignments, one needs to avoid military behavior, be it standing upright with hands pressed against your sides, straightened knees, clicked heels and shouting ‘Yes sir, Commander!’; instead it is better to be civil, even ‘bourgeois.’ Behaving in this way is absolutely essential in a large office or company, since it is the very precondition for creating an atmosphere of human harmony amid the mad rush of everyday office life.” In another section he added: “A military “Yes, Sir!’ or ‘Present!’ in the office is as unwelcome as a vulgar statement or rude reply. Better to reply in a moderate and controlled tone with ‘Pardon me?’ or ‘Yes, may I help you?’ This is the best way to establish contact … The civil forms are by comparison to military language quite nuanced, even in highly disciplined firms.”30 The “demilitarization” of young men at the office was then construed as a key element of the broader reeducation campaign, and was held up as a measure of progress and civilization in everyday life. This dovetailed with the broader postwar effort to introduce a softer, more “democratic” image of fatherhood, one that broke from the martial values of the authoritarian past in the name of creating a more “civilized” society.31 Business elites were also involved in various forms of “bourgeois self-fashioning” in the 1950s,32 and even the West German military published manners guides for soldiers that stressed bourgeois habits and comportment for its “citizens in uniform.”33 But in the mainstream etiquette books, it was youth that drew most attention, since it was where tomorrow’s civil society supposedly began. In the 1952 preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his 1927 bestseller, Der Moderne Knigge, Weissenfeld made plain that the remarkable demand for his book (over 170,000 copies sold since 1927, with ten reprints since 1950 alone) sig-

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naled a new spirit among young West Germans. In his estimation, “the strong demand for his ‘Modern Knigge’ is a welcome sign of a growing awareness of ethical values arising from a disastrously decimated social culture (gesellschaftliche Kultur) resulting from both the war and immediate postwar experience,” and the “return of ethical values especially among the young generation challenges the oft-heard comment that today’s youth has no understanding of values anymore … May the book help readers create a life more worth living for themselves and others.”34 While the prescribed forms and ideals for young men at work may have been a throwback to a different era, it was the urgent need to revive bourgeois values after 1945 that was remarked on most.

Civility and Collectivity Fewer manners guides may have been published in the East, but they certainly enjoyed robust circulation and full state backing. Karl Smolka’s 1957 Gutes Benehmen von A bis Z (Good Behavior from A to Z) went through ten reprintings by 1974, whereas W. K. Schweickert and Bert Hold’s 1959 Guten Tag, Herr von Knigge! Ein heiteres Lesebuch für alle Jahrgange über alles, was ‘anständig’ ist was already in its twentieth reprint by 1969.35 In the GDR, state officials made no bones about intervening in the sphere of prescribed manners and decorum.36 In one 1960 speech, GDR First Secretary Walter Ulbricht explicitly addressed the complaints expressed by many citizens about the state’s “soulless bureaucratic behavior,” admitting that “we [state authorities] thoughtlessly antagonize people by showing them too little respect … under the false assumption that politeness and good manners are inconsistent with socialism. Quite the contrary is the case. We must not take such matters too lightly.”37 One reviewer of a 1950s guidebook summed up a shared sentiment when he remarked that “the grand concept of socialist morality begins with the small coin of our everyday interactions … without the constant development of this new consciousness, of which socialist morality is a key element, the further construction of socialism is unthinkable.”38 In the GDR, these guidebooks were interpreted as formative elements in the construction of socialist society. For German communists the Second World War was a class conflict on an international scale, but the victory of the Soviet Union—and with it the subsequent creation of the German Democratic Republic as Germany’s first socialist state—by no means ended the conflict. Despite the defeat of Nazism, ideologues were convinced that “fascism” and “bourgeois values” were as present, powerful, and sinister as ever, and thus needed to be eliminated in all of their guises. The nationalization of property and the imposed hegemony of the Socialist Unity Party over East German state and society were vital steps in this denazification process, yet the moral reedu-

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cation of the East German citizenry was of equal importance to the making of communist culture. East German manners manuals were to play their part in this great historical transformation. But unlike the West German guides, the war hardly figured at all in them. Instead, the tone was much more about the break with the past and the fascination with the future. This is mainly because the first etiquette book only appeared in 1956. Only occasionally did the war intrude in them. In Schweikert and Hold’s Good Morning, Herr Knigge, the war’s legacy of mass destruction surfaced in almost surreal fashion amid the planning of a larger dinner party: “One should not smoke between courses; only on special occasions should one do so, and only if the ashtrays are put out explicitly as a sign of acceptance. The last war, which hopefully really will be the last, brings memories for women of their male dinner partners: one-armed men—good-hearted and demanding no pity—helping to carve the meat in the kitchen before the meal began. Drinking goes with eating, so the man of the house should be there to serve his guests drinks. He should never fill the glass to the very top …”39 This certainly reads like a “return of the repressed” scenario, in which the mutilated war survivor is unable to be integrated into the narrative of familial festivity. Wartime death and suffering were elsewhere redeemed into the GDR’s official anti-fascist narrative of East German–Soviet friendship (where the state never failed to demonstrate its own good manners to the Soviet Union through ritualized acts of political thanksgiving) or shunted into sphere of private reckoning.40 But in the idealized world of etiquette books, the painful past (and even difficult present) only haunt the text at the margins. No less interesting is that these guidebooks made no explicit reference to their Soviet partners as model citizens. Soviet presence in the cultural makeover of East German everyday life may have been dominant in much of GDR culture,41 but the world of décor and manners remained untouched by Soviet occupation. Just as American references were absent from West German guides, so too were East German comportment and domestic culture relatively closed off from its superpower patron. But this is by no means to imply that Cold War antagonism was invisible in these GDR guidebooks. On the contrary, there was no shortage of discussion on how everyday manners perfectly reflected the differences between East and West. For their part, GDR etiquette authors routinely condemned their West German counterparts as brazen class egotism dressed up as personal cultivation, whose main message was all about gaining a competitive edge and using manners for personal career advancement.42 Socialist society in turn was hailed as its very antithesis. GDR authors never tired of extolling the virtues of socialism, insomuch as it was based on the values of equality and mutual respect.43 In their estimation, practicing good manners was inseparable from the grand historical triumph of socialist civilization itself. Smolka’s Good Behavior from A to Z heralded the new dawn of socialist civility thus: “The vast majority of the

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population has been excluded from the rules of good form and the opportunity to apply them, just as they have been excluded from justice and education. For the first time in German history, in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, our GDR, the working population is setting the tone. It is now in a position to acquire those things that were withheld for so long: education, knowledge—including knowledge of the rules of good form, which help to determine how people live together.”44 For Schweikert and Hold, this new socialist morality represented nothing less than the true liberation of the twentieth century’s real protagonist, the “kleiner Mann,” or common man. Etiquette books, so they maintained, had been traditionally infused with the sensibility of the underling, reflecting a strict social hierarchy built on hypocrisy and injustice. With relish they quoted Part II of Goethe’s Faust, in which Baccalareus remarks that “[i]n Germany when people are polite, they are lying.”45 The coming of socialist civility thus put an end to politeness as class artifice, ushering in instead a “new humanity” based on true solidarity, cooperation and honor.46 If this revolution in manners signaled the historical emancipation of the “common man,” how was he actually supposed to behave in this new world? Despite all of the rhetoric about socialist difference, the GDR guides to eating and greeting betrayed a tone and message discernibly similar to their Western rivals, and even the pictures were oddly alike. They too were concerned with detailed instructions on how to sit, walk, and shake hands, when to take off one’s hat and use the informal (Du) second-person pronoun grammatical case, how to set the table and dine properly, how to behave in trams or at the doctor’s office, and when and which gifts should be brought to dinner parties. There were of course some marked differences: the world of work received much less coverage in GDR guides, while a good amount of space was devoted to the theme of how to get on with civil servants and bureaucrats. What is more, the “decorum of death” (how to behave at funerals, console the bereaved, or design a death announcement) went totally unmentioned in East German manners books. In the realm of home decoration, modern personal touches were everywhere praised, to the extent that “everyone wishes to be tasteful, comfortable, unostentatious and functionally-decorated, so as to keep in step with the living conditions of our social order.”47 The same went for encouraging a more relaxed, informal and “modern” attitude in terms of getting along with comrades in everyday settings. The bourgeois past was frequently the target of ridicule and scorn: “[Too often] the man bows awkwardly when introducing himself, bellowing out in a style befitting the Prussian mail-carrier: ‘Extraordinarily honored!’ or ‘Very pleased to meet you!’—a lighter gesture of introducing oneself is much better.”48 Still, these manuals harbored plenty of traditional attitudes and often were criticized for not being modern enough. One press reviewer assessing Smolka’s Good Behavior book took particular issue with the passages that the “kitchen was the

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domain of the housewife” and that “the man of the house meanwhile was supposed to keep the guests happy with cigars and schnapps. How is this to function when both partners work full-time?”49 On this score, critics were correct to point out its dominant “petit bourgeois attitude,”50 as these socialist guidebooks had more in common with late nineteenth-century bourgeois manners guides than with the more radical proletkult pronouncements propounded by the early Soviet Union.51 Nowhere were these petit bourgeois sensibilities more on display than in the attitudes toward women and girls. That the socialist world in general—and the GDR in particular—maintained strangely traditional views of women and family after 1945 is nothing new. Scholars such as Ina Merkel and Donna Harsch have noted the ways in which the promotion of socialist family values—much of which assumed that the wife/mother would bear the responsibility for housework and child-raising—flew in the face of vaunted socialist ideology about the full equality of the sexes. As they have argued, the doctrine of full equality tended to end with the close of the business day.52 Not that the work world was without its contradictions as well: GDR women’s magazines, such as Frauen von Heute, Für Dich, and Junge Welt went to great lengths to argue that women needed to maintain their feminity at work, often in the form of makeup and “womanly attitude.” The guidebooks, for their part, largely concentrated on the world after work, and it was here that they championed a host of petit bourgeois ideals, not unlike their West German counterparts. The following passage from Kleinschmidt’s Don’t Be Scared of Good Manners book was quite typical: “A lady who asks a gentleman to dance is as ridiculous today as she was a thousand years ago.”53 It was precisely at home and on the town where women and girls were to cultivate their femininity with grace and charm. In this sense, AnnaSabine Ernst is right in saying that GDR guidebooks ironically indicate how “bourgeois rules of deportment had been adapted to the new society.”54 As in West Germany, the intended audience for these books was often young men. But there were key differences of emphasis. Karl Smolka’s widely circulated 1964 Junger Mann von heute (Young Man of Today) is a good example of this socialist dispensation. In it Smolka announced the uniqueness of the historical situation in conventional Cold War terms: “You are living in a new era. You belong to the first generation in Germany who has grown up in the Worker-And-Peasant State. You and your youthful comrades are in the midst of the decisive battle between capitalism and socialism in Germany.”55 However, Smolka’s book was not all that concerned with Marxist-Leninist ideology;56 instead, it aimed to educate the socialist young man as a civilized member of the community, taking pains to provide detailed advice on the importance of working well, serving in the military with honor, being a good friend, choosing a compatible partner, and enjoying sports. Individual chapters were devoted to personal hygiene, nutrition, moderate drinking, clothing, interior design,

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sex education, and even cooking. A wealth of illustrations were included to help readers visualize how best to open doors for women, dress smartly, decorate the living room, comb their hair, and even wash their face. These books departed from West German equivalents not only in their “softer” form of masculinity, replete with tips on sewing and attractive hairstyling. The West German guides tended to limit their advice for young men to work, dress, and decorum for the public sphere—the private sphere of home life was more or less confined to table manners. It was also distinguished by its more comprehensive approach to the young man’s life. To the extent that these books were about socializing the young man into the ways of adulthood, ranging from love to ironing, their thrust was toward deprivatizing private life in the name of “socialist civilization.” Such standards were stringently applied to aspiring Party cadres, as their personal lives (including their sexual conduct) were the subject of social scrutiny and even Control Commission review.57 However we interpret this, one thing was certain: unlike the West German advice literature, social distance was not seen as a precondition to civilization. Emphasis was placed instead on dissolving the individual into the collective, and these books made clear that their aim was to remake citizens at home as an extension of the broader communist project to refashion citizens in the workplace, at school, and in public life.58 This is why it seems to me mistaken to dismiss these GDR advice books as simply traditional and petit bourgeois. There was in fact a very modern sensibility at work here: the notion of social engineering. In the East German case, the emphasis on remaking the self for the collective took its cues from communist etiquette and self-help guides produced in the Soviet Union from the 1930s through the early 1950s, in which “working on oneself ” became a widely prescribed virtue for improving both self and society.59 The GDR’s advice book industry was perfectly in keeping with this broader crusade to remake East Germans from top to bottom. What is more, the advice books took on a more urgent tone in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By that time, there was an increasing sense in the guidebooks that despite the eradication of capitalism and liberal political structures, East German citizens had not been sufficiently transformed in terms of everyday life. This was no small thing, since it implied that Marx’s classic formulation that the transformation of the base would necessitate a transformation of the superstructure (values, culture) had not come to pass as predicted. The survival of “petit bourgeois attitudes,” seen in anything from increasing youth crime, vandalism, and domestic violence, all pointed up that “socialist civilization” was not automatically emerging, and thus the superstructure (including domestic life) needed more robust state intervention. This was already hinted at in Ulbricht’s complaint quoted above, and was noted by others too.60 The fundamentally impolite nature of GDR society was amply demonstrated in the records of the so-called dispute com-

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missions, or Schiedskommissionen, which were informal citizens’ courts set up across the country in the early 1960s to hear petty conflicts between citizens over broken windows, stolen mopeds, and sundry domestic disputes. What is particularly interesting is that the largest category of infraction (30–40 percent of cases) involved insults and defamation (Beleidigung), and this was true across every region and actually increased over the decades.61 But this hardly means that these books are not valuable as historical documents. While much of what they espoused may have had little impact on everyday life, the cottage industry of texts betrayed the GDR’s mission to build a new socialist culture on a new concept of selfhood and civilization after 1945. It was one in which the gestures and “small coin” of everyday life—eating, drinking, dressing, and conversing—were key elements of this new crusade to correct the “crooked timber of humanity.” Manners, morals, and Marxism were seen as inextricably linked, as perfectly expressed in the following passage: “Man in socialist society, when it is in full bloom, will have neither the opportunity nor the desire to behave badly. He will not dissemble, or bow or scrape, or swindle, neither will he eat fish off a knife, or drink champagne out of red wine glasses, any more than he will rob or exploit others.”62

Toward a New Civil Society What does the remarkable production of these courtesy books in Germany—to say nothing of similar developments elsewhere in Europe, North America, and beyond—reveal in the end? First, it seems that post-1945 societies—and again, this is hardly limited to Germany—commonly displayed a strong inclination toward developing codes of conduct and sets of social rules. This dimension of post-1945 life was in many ways a throwback to the nineteenth century, which witnessed a great flowering of etiquette books across the Western world, with Victorian England setting the tone. As one scholar has argued: “Mid-Victorian behavior, manners, etiquette and the beliefs which lay beneath them were all about following rules.”63 For Europeans after 1945, this was certainly part of the drive to return to a world ruled by law and strict moral codes in the aftermath of war and occupation. Nowhere was this impulse to recreate new legal cultures stronger than in Germany, to the extent that the Nazism was seen as a disastrous abrogation of law and civilized life. It is in this context that Meissner and Burkhart’s proud contention, in their 1961 West German book on tact, that Germans are seen as the “most rule-obsessed people in the world” can be best understood.64 Whatever else can be said about them, etiquette books were attempts to establish new bourgeois norms of civility, and it was precisely these norms that were clearly felt to be lacking in post-Nazi Germany. From this perspective, the keen interest in publishing so many etiquette books after the war

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was an earnest attempt to reassert the very thing that the Nazis had crushed beneath their jackboots and tanks—civil society. Secondly, we should be careful about dismissing the etiquette books’ motive to remake the world of civil intercourse as foolishly naïve and even embarrassing, especially from a post-1968 perspective. After all, the idea that manners could hold a society together is actually quite old, and enjoys a venerable tradition. In his observations of early nineteenth-century America, for example, De Tocqueville repeatedly noted the cohesive power of manners in the new republic, creating as they did patterns of belonging, thinking, and behaving. Similar sentiment found clear expression in late nineteenth-century German etiquette guides too, though they often concerned more exclusive notions of what used to be called “good society.”65 Indeed, the desire to democratize manners was precisely what inspired new courtesy manuals after the First World War, and it was also the reason why they looked to Knigge for guidance in forging new transclass civil bonds to hold together a German society in revolutionary upheaval. The post-1945 etiquette books writers were firmly in this tradition, and in their own way were equally concerned with helping create German civil society as a durable framework of postwar peace and propriety. Thirdly, it is worth returning to Elias’s point that the mission of civilization was predicated on the pacification of warriors, or in his case, transforming warriors into courtiers and eventually citizens. No doubt there is some value in rereading Germany history after 1945 along these lines, as Jarausch does. But it pays to recall that Elias’s analysis of the pacification of the nobility in early modern Europe was closely linked to the rise of absolutism, wherein Louis XIV’s court culture was driven by the overriding concern to neutralize the nobles’ ability to wage war. Civility thus begins where uncontrolled violence ends, and can only be maintained if a strong state is there to monopolize the means of violence and impose law and order. What is interesting here is that this seemingly does not fit very well with German history, since the historical peaks for the publication of etiquette books generally followed lost wars and were written against the backdrop of weak states in both the 1920s and 1950s. At those moments when the twentieth-century German state was at its most powerful, namely during both world wars and the Nazi period, the production of courtesy books dropped off significantly. But this may be not that contradictory after all. Recall one memorable passage from John Stuart Mill’s 1836 Civilization, in which he argued: As civilization advances, every person becomes dependent, for more and more of what most nearly concerns him, not upon his own exertions, but upon the general arrangements of society. In a rude state, each man’s personal security, the protection of his family, his property, his liberty itself, depend greatly upon his bodily strength and his mental energy or cunning: in a civilized state, all this is secured to him by causes extrinsic to himself. The growing mildness of manners

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is a protection to him against much that he was before exposed to, while for the remainder he may rely with constantly increasing assurance upon the soldier, the policeman and the judge; and (where the efficiency or purity of those instruments, as is usually the case, lags behind the general march of civilization) upon the advancing strength of public opinion.66

Germany in the late 1940s seems to follow his model rather well. With political and economic stabilization the rude struggle for survival was slowly ending, and the violence and chaos that had disfigured German everyday life since 1914, with the brief exception of 1924–1929, was giving way to an established social order in both Germanys. Thus the 1950s “mildness of manners” was in Mill’s sense the fruit of political stability and the demilitarization of everyday life, even if post-1945 German security (“the soldier, the policeman and the judge”) was being delivered by foreign powers. The transformations Mill discusses were taking place, and helped create the conditions for the slow (re)civilization of postfascist Germans. Manners were also a sphere in which the Germans could carry out their “reeducation” themselves, comparatively removed from the direct influence of their respective superpower patron. These etiquette books were, after all, calls to self-government. Lastly, it could be argued that these long-forgotten etiquette books from the 1950s were quite radical in their own way. If nothing else, what united manners manuals across the Cold War divide was an effort to imagine the connective tissue of German society and identity as something other than violence and aggressive political passion. Since 1914 German political culture had been characterized by a distinctive “culture of defeat” born of war loss and feelings of betrayal, one that fueled new and powerful martial fantasies of restored greatness and apocalyptic political reckonings of all stripes. Germans had to go back all the way to the Wilhelmine era to recall a society of order and decency, which took some imagination and not a little nostalgia. It seems to me that this palpable post-1945 fascination with late nineteenth-century propriety can be best read not as a love affair with the starched world of Wilhelmine class society, but rather as a desperate attempt to go back to the last era of German history when violence and hatred were not the affective bonds of German society, back to a time when civil society as such existed and was taken very seriously. What these guides propounded may have stopped far short of Habermas’s notion of a critical public sphere, but they did represent a significant assertion of bourgeois civility all the same. For them, this effort began with trying to banish the legacy of war and violence from the realm of daily interpersonal interaction. In this regard, it is not wrong to see these books as a formative element of what at the time was derisively called a 1950s world of “motorized Biedermeier,” insofar as the early postwar period harked back to nineteenth-century ideals of domesticity, comfort, and leisured mobility as post-catastrophic solace. And yet these guidebooks were also very much of their historical moment,

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endeavoring as they did to imagine what a post-Nazi civil society should look and act like.

Notes I would like to thank Corey Ross and Saul Dubow for their constructive criticism on an earlier draft of this essay. 1. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Violence, Normality and the Reconstruction of Postwar Europe (Cambridge, 2003). 2. A few key recent titles concerning Germany include Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, 2006); Robert G. Moeller, War Stories:The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2003); Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past (New York, 2002); Hanna Schissler, ed., The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton, 2001); Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill, 1995); and Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley, 1993). 3. Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies Home Journal, Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture (London, 1995); Hedwig Winter-Uedelhoven, Zur Bedeutung der Etikette (Frankfurt am Main, 1990); Peter Gleichmann et al., eds., Materielien zu Norbert Elias’ Zivilisationstheorie (Frankfurt, 1977); and most recently, Mary Fulbrook, ed., Uncivilizing Processes? Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture: Perspectives Debating with Norbert Elias (Amsterdam, 2007). See too the special “Domestic Design Advice” issue of Journal of Design History 16, no. 1 (2003): 1–77. 4. Anna-Sabine Ernst, “The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Everyday Life in the DDR in the 1950s,” in David E. Barclay and Eric Weitz, eds., Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990 (New York, 1998), 489–506. 5. Dan Diner, Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt, 1988); Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and the Holocaust (New York, 1989); and Michael Geyer, “War, Genocide and Annihilation: A Reflection on the Holocaust,” in Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, eds., Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003). 6. Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (New York, 2006), vi, 24. 7. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: vol. 1,The History of Manners (New York, 1978 [orig. 1939]), 84. 8. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books (New York, 1946) and Harold Nicolson, Good Behaviour, being a Study of Certain Types of Civility (London, 1955). 9. Horst-Volker Krumney, Entwicklungsstrukturen von Verhaltensstandarden: Eine soziologische Prozessanalyse auf der Grundlage deutscher Anstands- und Manierenbücher von 1870–1970 (Frankfurt, 1984), 27. 10. A good example is Franz Ebhardt, Gute Ton (Berlin, 1878), which went through 23 reprints by 1931. 11. Ingo Hermann, Knigge: Die Biographie (Berlin, 2007). 12. Iring Fetscher, “Adolf Freiherr von Knigge—Schicksal und Werk eines politschen Schriftstellers,” in Adolf Freiherr von Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen, 3d edition (Frankfurt, 1962 [1790]), 7. 13. Fetscher, “Schicksal,“ 24. 14. Karl Kleinschmidt, Keine Angst vor guten Sitten: Ein Buch über die Art miteinander umzugehen (Berlin, 1961), 21. 15. Jost Hermand, Kultur im Wiederaufbau, 1945–1949 (Berlin, 1989).

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16. See, e.g., Hans-Otto Meissner and Isabella Burkhard’s Gute Manieren stets gefragt: Takt Benehmen Etiquette (Munich, 1962), 44–51. 17.Von Ginök, Lebenskunst: Ein Buch vom guten Benehmen für Jedermann (Krefeld, 1950), 15. 18. W. A. Nennstiel, Richtiges Benehmen, beruflich und privat: Eine nützliche Anleitung für junge Menschen (Mannheim, 1949), 3. 19. Nennstiel, Benehmen, 5. 20. Markus Brezina, Ehre und Ehrenschutz im nationalsozialistischen Recht (Augsburg, 1987). Nazi-era etiquette books include Rumpelstilzschen, Wir benehmen uns! Ein fröhliches Buch für Fähnrich Gent und kleines Fräulein (Berlin, 1936) and Alfred Wendland, Überall gern gesehen: Neuzeitliche Ratschläge und Winke für gewinnendes Benehmen, gewandtes Auftreten und gute Umgangsformen (Mühlhausen i. Thur, 1941). 21. Cas Wouters, “Etiquette Books and Emotional Management in the 20th Century: Part One—The Integration of Social Classes” and “Etiquette Books and Emotional Management in the 20th Century: Part Two—The Integration of the Sexes,” Journal of Social History 29, nos. 1–2 (1995): 107–24 and 325–39, respectively. 22. Hans Martin, Darf ich mir erlauben...? Das Buch der Guten Lebensart (Stuttgart, 1949), 109, and W. von Hilgendorff, Gutes Benehmen, Dein Erfolg (Vienna, 1953), 160–61. 23. Meissner and Burkhard, Manieren, 43. 24.Volker R. Berghahn, “Recasting Bourgeois Germany,” in Schissler, Miracle Years, 326–40. 25. Walter Bodarius, Benehmen und Lebenszuschnitt in gebildeten Kreis (1924), cited in Krumney, Entwicklungsstrukturen, 69. 26. Nennstiel, Benehmen, 37. 27. Meissner and Burkhard, Manieren, 114–22. 28. Nennstiel, Benehmen, 46. 29. Ibid., 17. 30. Ibid., 25, 33. 31. Till van Rahden, “Wie Vati die Demokratie lernte: Zur Frage der Authorität in der frühen Bundesrepublik,“ Westend, 4, no. 1 (2007): 113–25. 32. S. Jonathan Wiesen, “The Modern Guild: Rotary Clubs and Bourgeois Renewal in the Aftermath of National Socialism,” in Frank Biess, Mark Roseman and Hanna Schissler, eds., Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity: Essays in Modern German History (New York and Oxford, 2007), 297–317. 33. Klaus Naumann, “Schlachtfeld und Geselligkeit: Die ständische Bürgerlichkeit des Bundeswehroffiziers,” in Manfred Hettling and Bernd Ulrich, eds., Bürgertum nach 1945 (Hamburg, 2005), 310–46. 34. Curt von Weissenfeld, Der moderne Knigge (Oranienburg, 1927), 5, quoted in Krumney, Entwicklungsstrukturen, 77. 35. See Ernst, “Politics of Culture,” 503, footnote 7. 36. Several manners guides were penned by prominent cultural apparatchiks, such as Karl Kleinschmidt, who was a Volkskammer deputy as well as Vice President of the Kulturbund. 37. Walter Ulbricht, Programmatische Erklärung des Vorsitzenden des Staatsrates der DDR (Berlin 1960), 57, quoted in Ernst, “Politics of Culture,” 497. 38. Gutachten on Kleinschmidt’s Keine Angst vor guten Sitten, 12 March 1958 DR1 / 5014a, Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter BAB). 39.W. K. Schweickert and Bert Hold, Guten Tag, Herr von Knigge! Ein heiteres Lesebuch für alle Jahrgänge über alles, was ‘anständig’ ist (Leipzig, 1959), 53. 40. Dorothee Wierling, Geboren in Jahr Eins: Der Geburtsjahrgang 1949 in der DDR: Versuch einer Kollektivbiographie (Berlin, 2002), 90–113. 41. Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation 1945–1949 (Cambridge, 1995), 398–464. 42. Kleinschmidt, Keine Angst, 18–19, as well as Karl Smolka, Gutes Benehmen (Berlin, 1974) 2. edition, 16.

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43. Kleinschmidt, Keine Angst, 39, 20, and Schweikert and Hold, Guten Tag Herr von Knigge, 62. 44. Karl Smolka, Gutes Benehmen von A bis Z (Berlin, 1957), 7–8. 45. “Im Deutschen lügt man, wenn man höflich ist.“ Schweikert and Hold, Guten Tag Herr von Knigge, 7 and 14. 46. Ibid., 251. 47. Ibid., 210–11. 48. Smolka, Gutes Benehmen, 17. 49. Gutachten on Smolka’s Gutes Benehmen von A bis Z, 20.7.1957, DR1 / 5078, BAB. 50. Gutachten on Smolka’s Benehmen ist nicht nur Glückssache, 23 May 1958, DR1 / 5078, BAB. 51. Ernst, “Politics of Culture,” 497. 52. Ina Merkel, … Und Du, Frau an der Werkbank: Die DDR in den 50er Jahren (Berlin, 1990) and Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton, 2006). 53. Kleinschmidt, Keine Angst, 233. 54. Ernst, “Politics of Culture,” 494. 55. Karl Smolka, Junger Mann von heute (Berlin, 1964), 8. 56. Gutachten für Smolka, Junger Mann, 18.3.1963. DR1 / 5078, BAB. 57. Michel Christian, “Le Parti et la vie privée de ses membres en RDA,” paper delivered at Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, 16 November 2007, and Felix Mühlberg, “Die Partei ist eifersüchtig,” in Katrin Rohnstock, ed., Erotik macht die Hässlichen schön (Berlin, 1995), 122–43. 58. Wolfgang Engler, Die zivilistorische Lücke: Versuch über Staatsozialismus (Frankfurt, 1992), 50ff. 59. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia (Berkeley, 1999), 236–38. 60. One press reader conceded that “[g]ood manners are a rare commodity in our republic. Kleinschmidt shows straight away that ‘our ways of getting along with each other are for the dogs.’ He’s right.” Gutachten, 6 June 1961, DR1 / 5014a, BAB. 61. Paul Betts, “Property, Peace and Honor: Neighborhood Justice in Communist Berlin,” Past & Present, no. 201 (November 2008): 215–54. 62. Schweikert and Hold, Guten Tag Herr von Knigge, 8, quoted in Ernst, “Politics of Culture,” 496. 63. Andrew St George, The Descent of Manners: Etiquette, Rules & The Victorians (London, 1993), xi. 64. Meissner and Burkhart, Manieren, 3. 65. Eufemia von Adlerfeld, Katechismus des guten Tons und der feinen Sitte (1899), cited in Krumney, Entwicklungsstrukturen, 165. 66. Mill, “Civilization” (1836), in J. B. Schneewind, ed., Essays on Literature and Society (London, 1965), 161, quoted in St George, Descent of Manners, 229.

[[[ CH AP T ER 12

“We Are Building a Common Home” The Moral Economy of Citizenship in Postwar Poland Katherine Lebow

T

HE SECOND WORLD WAR unleashed terror and suffering throughout Europe on a tragic scale, and yet Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction”—destruction, that is, as a necessary precondition for innovation—made instinctive sense to many who experienced this catastrophe.1 As Czesław Miłosz reflected during the Polish army’s chaotic retreat in September 1939, for instance, the sudden collapse of the Polish state felt like a “breakthrough” that stripped away the “lies, illusions, [and] subterfuges” upon which society had been built:

Something else was the mixture of fury and relief I felt when I realized that nothing was left of the ministries, offices, and Army. … The nonsense was over at last. That long-dreaded fulfillment had freed us from the self-reassuring lies, illusions, subterfuges; the opaque had become transparent; only a village well, the roof of a hut, or a plow were real, not the speeches of statesmen recalled now with ferocious irony. The land was singularly naked, as it can only be for people without a state, torn from the safety of their habits.2

Another East European writer, Sándor Márai, expressed similar emotions on returning to the rubble of his family home in Budapest: “I caught sight of my top hat and a French porcelain candlestick on the top of the mushy pile of ruins that was once my home,” Márai wrote in his diary, adding that he went searching for remnants of his rare book collection—“the bilingual Marcus Aurelius … [or] an old Hungarian edition of the Bible”—but could find only On the Care of a Middle-Class Dog. “I stuck the book in my pocket and cautiously climbed down from the rubbish pile to the ground floor. At this moment—I later thought about this a lot—I felt a strange sense of relief.”3

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The destruction of Márai’s home serves as a neat parable for the violent death of bourgeois civilization in Eastern Europe—likened here to the privileged existence of pampered pets. Márai’s relief at its demise suggests the depth and breadth of the conviction by the end of the war—held not only by leftists like Miłosz, but even by someone like the temperamentally conservative Márai—that social revolution in Eastern Europe was not only imminent, but necessary. The legitimacy of the region’s prewar regimes had been shattered by the disastrous course of the war, in which every country of the region had experienced not only occupation and defeat, but untold human suffering. The demographic impact of the war and its aftermath—the murder of the Jews, the heavy casualties taken by urban populations and traditional elites, and finally, the expulsion of the region’s Germans—had removed substantial segments of the former middle and upper classes. Nothing and no one was spared in the whirlwind of destruction, but, as usual, the common people had endured. Now, perhaps, it was their turn to build anew. In his article entitled “Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe,” Jan T. Gross argued for the need to explore causal links between the experience of war in Eastern Europe and the Communist takeovers of the late 1940s. Since the opening of Soviet bloc archives in 1989, a new generation of scholars has taken up the challenge of drawing out these connections in more detail.4 Central to this line of inquiry is a consideration of the social revolution accomplished by the war, how its destruction of old elites paved the way for the new regimes. Such arguments, however, often stop with the onset of Stalinism in 1947–48.5 If we think of the social revolution in Eastern Europe occurring in two waves, however—the first resulting from war and occupation, the second from Stalinist policies aiming to fundamentally restructure social and economic relations—we might wonder not only how the first helped to bring about the second, but how it shaped its contours, its likelihood of success or failure. In this essay, then, I propose to consider not so much how experiences of war laid the groundwork for the Communist takeovers, but how the destructive legacy of war shaped the outcome of Stalinist social revolution as attempted in one country, Poland. The very extent of the destruction wrought by the Second World War in Poland—and the consequent necessity of massive reconstruction and rebuilding—acted as a catalyst for the formation of popular ideas and attitudes that would greatly affect the course of postwar Polish history, even as these new ideas drew on historical legacies of the past. More specifically, a new popular understanding of citizenship emerged in Poland within the framework of postwar reconstruction—a conception that was deepened and expanded during the period of “building socialism” under Stalinism (ca. 1948–1956). A landscape of destruction became a landscape of opportunity; indeed, this conception of

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citizenship was itself a form of ideological “creative destruction” in which enduring tropes in the Polish national narrative were reappropriated and reconfigured. This emergent model of citizenship was bound up with a “moral economy” of production linked to both the reconstruction effort and the ideologically inflected project of “building socialism,” as I shall illustrate using the case of Poland’s “first socialist city,” the Stalinist new town of Nowa Huta.

Szlachta and lud Eastern Europeans were not alone in perceiving the war as a necessary catharsis. For E. H. Carr, for example, Adolf Hitler had performed “the perhaps indispensable function of sweeping away the litter of the old order … the point at issue was not the necessity for a new order but the manner in which it should be built.”6 But the “What next?” question arguably had special urgency for Eastern Europeans, and not only because the destruction wrought by war there was on a different order of magnitude.7 In particular, within this question, issues of social justice and national survival were conjoined in distinctive ways. Poles like Miłosz confronted the question of Poland’s future with the heavy weight of the past on their shoulders—a past seen to be characterized by Poland’s repeated failure to defend its national sovereignty, on the one hand, and to modernize economic and social structures, on the other. These two problems were viewed as inextricably linked, and shaped not only how Poles responded to the political options available from 1944 to 1948, but also how Soviet-style Communism was implemented and received. Miłosz’s reflections in extremis can yet again serve as an entry point here. In 1940, wishing to leave Soviet-occupied Wilno for German-occupied Warsaw, Miłosz traversed a part of the country that seemed to have changed little over the centuries, making a kind of journey back in time. In his memoir, he describes encountering peasants who could have stepped out of a nineteenthcentury novel: they are in turn simple and pious or canny and calculating; cautious, but also avaricious (many are engaged in smuggling)—in short, not to be trusted. When Miłosz passes through a village populated by the “barefoot” descendants of the gentry, however, the contrast is stark: though poor, unlike common peasants they live without fear, risking their lives to help him without thought for reward.8 It is the classic Polish dichotomy of szlachta versus lud (gentry versus commoners)—the former ever ready to throw themselves on the barricades, the latter more or less indifferent to politics if left unmolested by those in power. Miłosz is therefore not surprised when one of his peasant contacts turns him over to the Germans for a bounty prize. An anti-romantic, he consciously refuses to be deluded like national insurgents of old—those who discovered, to their misfortune, that the lud were apt to support whichever fac-

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tion offered most relief for their woes, remaining unmoved by any appeals to national brotherhood.9 Miłosz’s bitterness toward the interwar status quo echoes that of nineteenthcentury democratic and Positivist critics who argued that Poland would always succumb to foreign domination so long as the szlachta and its descendants maintained their jealous hold on the nobility’s historic privileges. These were both economic and political—the latter dating back to the Polish nobility’s “golden liberties” in the pre-partition Commonwealth, constituting the szlachta as a selfgoverning political community, the noble natio. Even after Poland’s partition by Austria, Prussia, and Russia, the szlachta remained pathologically reluctant, according to its critics, to embrace the lud as an equal partner endowed with the rights and responsibilities of a modern citizenry. The stereotype of peasant as cham (boor), untrustworthy and venal, thus remained a self-fulfilling prophecy, as peasants had no reason to view their betters as anything but hated panowie (masters) and ruthless exploiters.10 Thus divided, so the argument went, Poland fell. Nor did the advent of independence and universal suffrage significantly erode the almost racial sense of difference between descendants of the nobility and the lud, “two closed worlds [that] lived side by side” in interwar Poland.11 Indeed, research on Polish society during the Second World War testifies to the endurance of a deep rural-urban division that gave rise to fundamentally different ways of experiencing war and occupation. According to Klaus-Peter Friedrich, for example, contrary to postwar myths of a nation united in its hostility to the occupiers, there was “significant divergence in the attitude towards resistance in the Polish cities—and above all Warsaw—and the country.”12 Wartime resistance was disproportionately the affair of educated, urban elites, and as Miłosz’s reminiscences would suggest, feelings of cross-class solidarity did not automatically flourish during the war, even though Poland was threatened with national extinction by two of the most brutal occupying forces in history. The Second World War, however, dramatically changed the social balance of power between the two groups. Perhaps even more than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the occupiers pursued a deliberate policy of “decapitation,” targeting the urban and educated; the war against the Jews and postwar expulsion of the Germans completed the evisceration of prewar urban elites.13 Moreover, modern warfare is a great social equalizer, with the well-heeled often forced to learn strategies of survival from their social inferiors.14 Together, these factors inexorably required the reconfiguration of long-standing social paradigms. However, it was the experience of the years immediately after the war (from 1944 to roughly 1956)—specifically, the period when Poland had to be put back together again, physically, socially, and politically—that shaped a set of tropes that would remain in place, with important consequences, for the years to follow.

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“We Are Building a Common Home” Jan T. Gross speculates that under German occupation, “work … lost its capacity for binding the social fabric together.”15 But in the aftermath of war, it was work that would provide the foundation for a new notion of national community and of the rights and obligations of citizenship. This was not just a “top-down” process resulting from Communism’s productivist orientation. It reflected the ways in which “ordinary” Poles—in large part, migrants from the countryside—seized upon the opportunities provided by reconstruction, rebuilding, and “building socialism” to redefine their place in the social order. Polish collective memory has preserved no precise parallel to Germany’s Trümmerfrau as an icon of postwar recovery, although there was rubble enough: in proportional terms, Poland’s losses during the Second World War quite possibly exceeded those of any country in Europe.16 Epitomizing this devastation was the hollowed-out shell of Warsaw. Razed by the Wehrmacht in retribution for the uprisings of 1943 and 1944, between 80 and 90 percent of its buildings lay in ruins. One might imagine, then, that remembered images of the immediate aftermath of war in the capital, of life in the rubble—old ladies selling pastries from makeshift stands in a lunar landscape; families living exposed to the elements in apartments whose walls and rooms were half sheared away17— would have the same kind of mnemonic potency for Poles as the Trümmerfrau for Germans.18 But such images rarely appear alone; instead, it is the “before” and “after” scenes of Warsaw—depicting the city’s rapid reconstruction—that dominate the visual iconography of the capital’s postwar years today, as countless popular albums or postcards attest.19 In contrast to Germany, where the image of the Trümmerfrau evokes the slow, painful process of rebuilding lives shattered by war, in Poland the frame seems sped up, as in an old silent movie: a pile of rubble one day miraculously turns into an office or apartment building the next. A street is lined with ruins, but our attention is taken rather by the newly reinstated tram service driving past the piles of debris. These are visions of heroism, not pathos, eliciting awe for the impressive achievement of rebuilding as much as pity for the suffering that preceded it. Such images perfectly illustrate the famed “Warsaw tempo” popularized in official pronouncements of the late 1940s,20 serving a regime intent on both demonstrating the efficiencies of socialist production and stifling memories of the Red Army’s complicity in the city’s destruction.21 But even foreign observers were stunned by the rapidity of Warsaw’s miraculous “resurrection.”22 It was as if liberation had unleashed a torrent of pent-up energies. If Gross is right that work under the Occupation was devoid of meaning, now it was work that gave meaning to individual and collective existence, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Reconstruction was infused with hope that soared in inverse pro-

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portion to the extent of destruction, with architects proclaiming that Warsaw would soon be transformed into “one of the most modern, pleasant, and human cities in the world.”23 According to contemporary visitors, a tremendous vitality indeed pulsed in the city’s ruins. Visiting a dramatics class in 1946, the British writer H. Foster Anderson described this energy in terms that were both admiring and uneasy: … the students broke off to gaze at us. … Then three women formed themselves into a row and three men stood behind them. By standing close, they made a single compact body. They recited in unison, their bodies rigid and with sharp marionette movements of hand or head. It was effective, even menacing. I felt that could I interpret correctly the emotions that these men and women read into … the poem they recited, I should have an insight into what is taking place beneath the surface in Poland.

Anderson, while lacking the vocabulary to name it, hints at the totalitarian tendency possibly inherent in this newfound collective energy. What did it all mean? He shrugs: “All I knew was that it portrayed something powerful and perhaps reckless.”24 Reconstruction was the outgrowth of powerful and varied social forces. Although these were increasingly channeled and contained by a repressive single-party regime, projects like the rebuilding of Warsaw’s Old Town remained genuinely popular, despite deepening opposition to Communist rule.25 From the outset, then, the logic of war’s destructive sweep and the popular legitimacy of reconstruction efforts led Polish Communists to emphasize an “ideology of construction.”26 Full-blown Stalinism, in this sense, represented an intensification of, rather than a shift in, rhetorical strategy. If anything, tropes of building became even stronger once reconstruction was (hypothetically) complete, as the language of “building socialism” came to saturate the public sphere following the adoption of the Six-Year Plan. The most famous Polish socialist realist painting is Aleksander Kobzdej’s “Pass Me A Brick” (1950): in it, a mason reaches out impatiently, seemingly as much to the viewer as to his assistant, suggesting that no one could remain a bystander in this collective effort. Those who “contributed” a portion of their wages toward the new Party headquarters in Warsaw in 1949 received a certificate proclaiming, “We Are Building A Common Home.”27 Building, in Stalinist discourse, would bind together a social and political body that had been blasted apart by fascism and war. Nowa Huta—a new town centered on a giant steelworks, the showcase project and key investment of Poland’s Six-Year Plan (1950–55)—was the ultimate expression of Polish Stalinism’s ideology of construction. Planned as a model city for a population of 100,000 and situated some ten kilometers east of Kraków, Poland’s “first socialist city” served as a kind of shorthand for all that the regime stood for (and against)—its syllables “so pregnant with meaning as to require no expositions.”28 From the digging of Nowa Huta’s first founda-

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tions in 1949 through the mid-1950s, the nation was bombarded with stories of the builders’ onward march in the news media, feature films, and literary and musical compositions. Across the country, youth attended talks with titles like “We Build the Huta—The Huta Builds Us” and “There Are Stakhanovites from Our County in Nowa Huta.”29 Literary scholar Wojciech Tomasik argues that the propaganda surrounding Nowa Huta, with its emphasis on digging and building, sent a message of “compulsion, violence, and terror” to contemporaries (“metallurgical combine = foundation, foundation = grave”). To be sure, for some Poles, Nowa Huta was a symbol of a hated new order. But others clearly liked what they heard about Nowa Huta, because tens of thousands freely made their way to the “great building site of socialism” to seek their fortunes. Migrants sought not just a paycheck but vocational training, housing, anonymity, adventure, independence, or all of the above. In the long term, Nowa Huta offered an escape from the vulnerability of rural and working-class life. But this came later, once life in the new town stabilized, toward the end of its first decade. In the early to mid-1950s, the chaotic building site offered migrants, above all, an opportunity for self-reinvention—not least, the chance to move from the margins of Polish history to its newly constructed center stage.

New Heroes Nowa Huta’s political narrative is rich in irony. The new town, built around the massive Lenin Steelworks, was the premier investment of the Six-Year Plan (1950–55) and the intended laboratory for the new regime’s programs of mobilization and social transformation. Those who built and settled in Nowa Huta—overwhelmingly young, rural Poles from southeastern Poland’s most immiserated backwaters—were to have been forged into “new men,” a conscientized, regime-loyal proletariat, as hard as the steel produced there. And yet, Nowa Huta and the behavior of its citizens was, from the outset, a thorn in Warsaw’s side. At first, its unruly, young, often drunken workers attracted unwanted attention from reformers who, during the “thaw” that followed Stalin’s death in 1953, publicly pointed to Nowa Huta as a failure of the “civilizing mission” that the regime had proclaimed vis-à-vis the Polish masses.30 But by the 1980s, Nowa Huta had become one of the most militant and best-organized bases of support for Solidarity (and home to its largest workplace chapter). The strike that began in the Lenin Steelworks in 1988 helped bring about the Round Table talks leading to free elections in 1989. “What one Lenin began,” it was said at the time, “two Lenins will end” (i.e., the Lenin Shipyards in Gdan´sk and the Lenin Steelworks in Nowa Huta). Nowa Huta is also notable in the annals of opposition for its “struggle for the Cross” of April 1960—two days

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of rioting occasioned by official withdrawal of permission to build a church in the new town. In one version of Poland’s postwar history, Nowa Huta’s heritage of protest makes it a “symbol of the defeat of ideology”—proof, as one local Solidarity activist puts it, that “it is not possible to build something entirely torn asunder from the traditions and culture of the Nation.”31 In this narrative, the Stalinist years, with their emphasis on re-sculpting society and re-shaping identities, are fairly irrelevant to Polish history (a “brief, black episode,” as French sociologist Alain Touraine put it), leaving no imprint on the nation’s psyche.32 On the contrary, however, I would argue that Nowa Huta demonstrates the opposite: that Stalinism’s impact was far-reaching, that its mobilization campaigns—experienced when wartime memories were still fresh and raw—made a deep impact on working-class identities and Polish political culture. It is to sites of Stalinist mobilization and transformation such as Nowa Huta, then, that I will now turn in search of the “creative destruction” that lay behind Poles’ postwar reimagining of citizenship and “solidarity.” The propaganda surrounding Nowa Huta in the late 1940s and early 1950s rarely dwelt on visions of what life in the town would be like once it was completed, but it revisited ad nauseam the act of building itself—the builders and their productive feats, and the way that work in Nowa Huta had changed their lives. Again and again, the building of physical structures was presented as a metaphor for the “building” of people or “new men.” As writer Marian Brandys enthused: “it was wonderful, beautiful, and wise that in Nowa Huta, along with the walls, arose new people. … People raised the walls. The walls raised with them people. That was Nowa Huta.”33 Given this pedagogical emphasis, it was natural that “youth” would be especially associated with Nowa Huta. Thus, Poland’s closest counterpart to the Trümmerfrau might just be the junak, or youth brigade worker, thousands of whom performed the most basic and backbreaking labors on Nowa Huta’s construction sites. We might see this junak in a yellowing photograph from Nowa Huta’s daily paper, We Are Building Socialism, in khaki fatigues and a red tie, shovel in hand. He and his mates are digging deep in the clayey mud or smiling raffishly at the camera; a crane rises in the background. He is fifteen or sixteen; he is tan and lean, even undernourished. It is about 1950. Near him hangs a banner: “The Entire Nation Builds Nowa Huta,” echoing slogans used in the reconstruction of Warsaw.34 As in Warsaw, he works to a special tempo, the tempo zetempowskie (from the initials for the Union of Polish Youth, ZMP). He appears truly to believe, as Sejm deputy Jerzy Morawski put it, that “everything that youth accomplishes in people’s [Poland], it does for itself.”35 Like the majority of Nowa Huta’s builders, this junak hails from one of Poland’s poorest rural areas, perhaps from Kraków or Rzeszów province; he is unlikely to have completed more than a few years of primary school. His was

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a “lost generation” that had experienced the traumas of war—the death of parents or siblings, resettlement, and/or slave labor.36 The typical junak would have been too young and/or far from the centers of armed resistance (largely urban-based) to have participated in the armed struggle against the Nazis.37 But Stalinist propaganda offered young people like him a chance to join the ranks of Polish heroes: as the young Sławomir Mroz˙ek wrote, “thousands of young people long for heroism,” but luckily, the tasks of building socialism offered an opportunity for a form of self-sacrifice that was just as heroic as armed struggle. Edmund Chmielin´ski, a junak who became active in the Union of Polish Youth (ZMP) in Nowa Huta, put it this way: “Once it was the pathos of heroic armed struggle with a hated enemy, today the romance of ZMP’s call-up in raising the great edifice of socialism. … I firmly believed that with a common effort we would in several years build a splendid city in which I would live and work.”38 Warsaw hoped “new men” like Chmielin´ski would constitute a loyal proletarian army, but the law of unintended consequences put paid to these plans. In fact, authorities found themselves locked in a constant struggle for control of Nowa Huta’s workforce and terrain, a struggle that would not cease until Communism’s collapse in 1989. With transport from Kraków irregular and difficult well into the mid 1950s, Nowa Huta in its early years resembled a remote, muddy island in a sea of undulating wheat fields—and to some, Nowa Huta’s workers seemed hardly less savage than the imagined natives of some South Seas outpost. Junacy routinely attacked members of the citizen militia, or police force, and terrorized “civilian” workers.39 Squatters seized spaces in Nowa Huta’s unfinished buildings; when the militia tried to evict them, they were beaten by angry residents.40 Unfortunate party agitators, venturing into the new housing settlements, had hot coffee poured on their heads by women from windows above.41 In practical terms, managing a fluid and growing population on such a massive scale without a developed infrastructure or experienced personnel was bound to be problematic. At a deeper level, the stated intent of Stalinist social policy—the rapid, far-reaching transformation of culture and class in Poland—unleashed forces that were difficult to control. This helps explain the basic paradox of life in Nowa Huta during the Stalinist period: how it could be both “gray,” in the metaphorical sense often associated with everyday life under Communism, and “colorful” at the same time; or how Poland’s “first socialist city” could be remembered as a place where one felt “more free” than in Warsaw.42 More than one activist wondered at the seeming contradiction between such unruly behavior and the “healthy militancy” these same residents displayed at work; as one brigade leader wrote, the very same junacy who preferred jazz to mass songs and speakeasies to “red corners,” and who regularly drank themselves into oblivion on their days off, nonetheless “enthusiastically strove for record-breaking achievements, completing their work commitments ahead of

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schedule.”43 One former junak described how members of his brigade, initially suffering from low morale, gradually became infected with “some other spirit” when labor competition was introduced: “The brotherhood was simply hot to work. … After dinner the majority of colleagues hurried under the score board where the results [of the day’s work] were hung.”44 Young workers especially were often attracted by the competitive team spirit that such campaigns elicited.45 Leopold Sułkowski, a teacher at the Lenin Steelworks’ vocational training center, remembered attending ceremonies in which some of his students were designated model workers: Labor heros were hung with sashes [on which was written] what per cent of the norm they had achieved, of course there was an orchestra … and it was all very festive. I looked into the faces of these workers. They were convinced what they were doing was right; they were filled with the satisfaction that it gave them, and worked with unheard-of self-sacrifice. … The norms were a fiction but the fact that they were exceeded was a reality, the result of the authentic engagement of these people in their work.

Such enthusiasm faded, Sułkowski avowed, only when it became clear that “nothing that had been promised had come to pass.”46 For these young people, as for those studied by Padraic Kenney in Wrocław in 1946, “ideology was not a prime motivator” for participating in Stakhanovite campaigns. While Stalinist discourse lent labor competition an ideological meaning, workers themselves, like those in Wrocław, “talked not about the future or the party but about nation, pride in their skill, and personal well-being.”47 Stalinist rhetoric continually linked collective effort (under the Party’s guidance and tutelage) to the construction of a new sort of civic community, a “splendid city” or “common home” writ large—rhetoric undergirded by strong, often unspoken patriotic sentiment. For many who responded to the call, “building socialism,” unlike reconstruction, meant not just repairing the immediate damage done to Poland during the war, but overcoming the flaws that had left the country weak and vulnerable for centuries. Central to this was eliminating the broad gulf between góra i doły, haves and have-nots. For those members of the intelligentsia—descendants of Poland’s historic political classes—who supported the Communist project, this motivation—raising the lud, integrating and assimilating them once and for all into the natio—was sometimes a strong motivation for supporting Communism.48 By contrast, for the sons and daughters of the peasantry, taking part in “building socialism” meant a chance to claim, for the first time, active membership in the national community. While patriots of the past had shed their blood in Poland’s name, they would measure their sacrifice in sweat. And whereas in the past, freeing the Fatherland from foreign subjugation had been the goal, now liberating Poland from economic backwardness formed the common object of collective efforts.

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With work now the badge of membership in a new civic community, Nowa Huta’s residents highlighted their own productive contributions in order to lay claim to social goods. In a letter seeking help from Central Committee member Józef Cyrankiewicz in obtaining an apartment, Anna N., for instance, shared her biography: as a 25-year-old, she wrote, she had left her village for Nowa Huta “the moment work began” on the new town. She got a job as a cleaner, but as she wanted to find “more productive and fruitful work … serving our beloved People’s Fatherland,” she trained as an engine-driver, became a przodownica (labor hero), and earned the bronze Cross of Service. “I fell in love with my profession and work and I want to give everything of myself in building these beautiful and glistening furnaces that the People’s Government is building for us,” she concluded. “Looking at them and at my work, … I would hate to leave [Nowa Huta].” But without an apartment of her own, she would be forced to give up her dream of earning further distinctions, and would have to return home to care for her sick mother. As a result of this letter, Anna N. was put second on the waiting list for apartments allocated to her workplace.49 Anna N.’s rhetoric was, of course, instrumental: apartments in Nowa Huta were distributed, as one official document explained, “‘to each according to his work,’ resulting from the deep sense of the just distribution of material goods in proportion to the size of an individual’s share and contribution in building a system of social justice.” As a minor-league labor hero, however, Anna N. was lucky to meet with such success. In practice, criteria for housing distribution put semi-skilled manual workers almost last in line, behind technical personnel, administrators, and highly skilled manual workers; only unskilled workers ranked lower.50 Petitioners with no particular qualifications would normally receive a letter reminding them of their status as “an ordinary manual worker without special qualifications” and their consequent ineligibility to be allocated an apartment in the near future.51 Far from measuring an individual’s productive contributions in sweat, then, officials used a set of criteria that seemed to betray many who had responded enthusiastically to calls to “build socialism.” As one disabled worker wrote in 1952: When I could [still] work I was the first worker, wading up to the knees in the mud and mire, sleeping at night in a field under the naked sky. … They were very hard times … Now I’ve lost all my strength, and have visited every office with the goal of getting an ‘Apartment’ … Let Director Julian Lipski remember his debts and to whom an apartment is owed, namely to the Worker, who was first to labor and build the foundations of Nowa Huta, who sunk in the muck … and slept in wet workingman’s rags, who doesn’t [work] in an office like he does, where it’s all about corruption and favoritism.52

As it turned out, this was advice that Poland’s rulers would have done well to remember.

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The Moral Economy of Citizenship As enthusiasms initially sparked by Stalinist mobilization began to cool, Stalinism’s productivist rhetoric became a dangerous two-edged sword. Those representatives of party and state seen by workers to have removed themselves from the community of collective effort would, increasingly, be regarded not as “us” but as “them.”53 The crucial distinction between those who worked for a collective goal and those who worked for their own gain—or who didn’t “work” at all—would appear in reminiscences by older Nowohucians collected in the early 1990s. “Przodownicy were people with fire in the belly. They were engaged, didn’t ask about money, were given to sacrifices. There was such an enthusiasm after the war—a conviction that one must do something.”54 By contrast, “those activists were do-nothings, they talked and wandered around more than they worked. … After a year a guy like this ended up as a drunk and a bum because he had too much money.” Ultimately, the enthusiasts’ efforts were betrayed by such false friends: “The poor steelworker/Achieved the norm/And broke his legs.”55 In the nineteenth century, spokesmen for the Polish peasantry stressed the virtue of the class that, they argued, was grounded in piety and a life of industrious toil. By contrast, they argued, the szlachta were the least virtuous of Poles because they had “done nothing for this Polish land.”56 Nowa Huta’s peasants-turned-workers infused Communist ideological forms with the ethos of Poland’s old social groups. On the one hand, they carried forward the peasantry’s traditional view of a world divided into producers and non-producers, one in which the poor laborer’s toil, likened to Christ’s suffering on the cross, ennobled him in God’s eyes. On the other, they now claimed the gentry’s assertion of its own higher mission, one in which individual well-being was to be sacrificed for a “noble” aim (whether defending “golden liberties,” fighting for freedom, or overcoming economic backwardness). This allowed the beneficiaries of Poland’s social revolution to claim their place as a new szlachta—a “labor nobility,” even—and, ultimately, to resist Communist efforts to define “building socialism” in narrow ideological terms. In conclusion, several points would seem to flow from the above reflections. First, we should reconsider the conventional bipartite periodization of the Polish “postwar,” which posits a caesura between reconstruction (ca. 1944– 48) and Stalinism (ca. 1948–56). The point is not to minimize the significance of the turn toward Stalinist organizational and, especially, economic models after 1948, nor of the expansion of surveillance and terror. But continuities between the two periods have too often been neglected. In particular, viewing these two periods “from below”—that is to say, from the standpoint of the majority of Poles who spent wartime and its immediate aftermath outside the country’s urban centers—can help illuminate broad continuities that tied

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Poland’s postwar experience to earlier moments in its past, including but not limited to the war itself.57 Second, the legacy of the “two Polands” also helps explain the potency of the idea of unity, or “solidarity,” in popular thought in postwar Poland. “Solidarity” posits a moral community in which individuals subordinate their own disparate aims to a common goal. In postwar Poland, I have argued here, this community was sometimes imagined as the product of collective labor in the most literal sense. Thus, while most scholars have emphasized the distributive aspects of state-socialist citizenship, understanding its productivist elements is also important. It helps explain why, in Poland, initial enthusiasm among “new” workers for Stalinism—conceived as continuous with reconstruction, as patriotic, and as enabling those formerly excluded from full membership in the nation (themselves) to assume a central historical role—quickly turned sour. It was not just that the state failed to come up with the promised goods (housing, consumer durables), but also that it simply did not “work,” and indeed, it squandered and wasted the work of others.58 It helps explain why the descendants of new workers (e.g., in Gdan´sk) were at the forefront of Solidarity. And these workers’ implicit view of themselves as heirs to the Polish nobility helps us understand their militancy and self-confidence. Finally, it may be worth thinking about how this productivist model of citizenship and governance measures up against parallel models in postwar Western Europe. If Poles demanded that their leaders “work,” were Western Europeans content with rulers who “managed”? Certainly, in the West, getting rich off the work of others did not, as in Poland, place one outside of the bounds of the moral civic community. The Second World War was an unprecedented catastrophe, yet, whether liberated or defeated, Europeans after the war proved the depth of the human urge to create, to see and enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. This powerful force, as much as a desire for stability or “normalcy,” shaped the course of postwar history.

Notes 1. As Schumpeter wrote in 1942: “The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.” Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, 1975), 83–84. 2. Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (New York, 1968), 204. 3. Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary, 1944–1948 (Budapest, 1991), 112–13. 4. Jan T. Gross, “Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 3, no. 2 (1989):

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198–214; see, e.g., Bradley F. Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European Revolution,” in East European Politics and Societies 16, no. 3 (2003): 623–64. 5. For some exceptions, see Norman Naimark, “Revolution and Counterrevolution in Eastern Europe,” in Christiane Lemke and Gary Marks, eds., The Crisis of Socialism in Europe (Durham, 1992), 61–83, and John Connelly, Captive University:The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill, 2000). 6. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1999), 183. 7. Abrams, “Second World War,” 637. 8. Miłosz, Native Realm, 226. 9. Ibid., 224–25. Examples include the jacquerie of 1846 in Galicia, when Polish peasants loyal to the Habsburg emperor slaughtered thousands of noble insurgents, and 1863 in Russian Poland, when the tsarist regime undercut support for the January Rising by preemptively freeing Polish serfs. 10. For the peasants’ view, see Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village:The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1918 (Ithaca, 2001), passim. For the peasant as cham, see Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation (Princeton, 2006), 187–8. 11. Unknown author quoted in Jerzy Sulimski, Kraków w procesie przemian´. Współczesne przeobraz˙enia zbiorowos´ci wielkomiejskiej (Kraków, 1976), 155; Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village, 3–10. See also Witold Gombrowicz, Polish Memories (New Haven, 2004), 1–41, passim. 12. Klaus-Peter Friedrich, “Collaboration in a ‘Land Without a Quisling’: Patterns of Cooperation with the Nazi German Occupation Regime in Poland during World War II,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (2005): 739. See also John Connelly’s discussion of current debates over Polish wartime collaboration in the same issue: “Why the Poles Collaborated So Little—and Why That Is No Reason for Nationalist Hubris,” Slavic Review 64, no. 4 (2005): 791–98. 13. See, e.g., Naimark, “Revolution and Counterrevolution,” 68–69. 14. See Sulimski, Kraków, 155–56. 15. Gross, “Social Consequences,” 202. 16. One in five Poles was killed and more than a third of the country’s wealth was destroyed during the war. For discussion of economic losses, see Aleksander Bochen´ski, We˛drówki po dziejach przemysłu polskiego 1945–1970 (Kraków, 1997), passim, and Sheldon Anderson, A Dollar to Poland Is a Dollar to Russia: U.S. Economic Policy Toward Poland 1945–1952 (New York, 1993), 7. 17. See, e.g., H. Foster Anderson, What I Saw in Poland (Slough [Bucks, Eng.], 1946), 11– 43; William Cary, Poland Struggles Forward (New York, 1949), 12–16; and Ann Vachon, ed., The Photographs and Letters of John Vachon (Washington, D.C., 1995). 18. See http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/Nachkriegsjahre/DasEndeAlsAnfang/truemmer frauen.html. 19. David Crowley, Warsaw (London, 2003), 27–28. 20. For further discussion, see ibid., 34. 21.The Red Army halted its advance on Warsaw in 1944, allowing the Wehrmacht to eliminate Polish armed resistance before the city’s “liberation” by the Soviets. 22. H. Foster Anderson, What I Saw in Poland, 57. The New York Times reported that “the reconstruction achieved in this short period [the last quarter of 1948] takes one’s breath away.” Quoted in Cary, Poland Struggles Forward, 24. 23. Helena Syrkus quoted in Cary, Poland Struggles Forward, 23–24. 24. H. Foster Anderson, What I Saw in Poland, 43. 25. Crowley, Warsaw, 30. 26. The phrase is Alison Stenning’s in “Living in the Spaces of (Post-)Socialism: The Case of Nowa Huta,” ESRC end-of-award report, n.d., http://www.nowahuta.info/reports/reports.shtml. 27. Crowley, Warsaw, 108. 28. Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History (New York, 1992), 151.

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29. Archiwum Akt Nowych (hereafter AAN) ZMP Zarza˛d Główny 451/VI-40, k. 118. 30. See, e.g., Marci Shore, “Some Words for Grown-Up Marxists: ‘A Poem for Adults’ and the Revolt From Within,” in The Polish Review 42, no. 2 (1997): 131–54. 31. Introduction to Ryszard Terlecki et al., ed., Nowa Huta: Miasto walki i pracy (Kraków, 2002), 7; Mieczysław Gil, “Paradoks historii: rola Nowej Huty w walce o system demokratyczny w Polsce,” in Dziedzictwo kulturowe Nowej Huty w rozwoju obszaru strategicznego Kraków-Wschód: Materiały konferencyjne (Kraków, 1997), 73. 32. Alain Touraine, Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement: Poland 1980–1981 (Cambridge, 1983), 15. The Institute of National Remembrance’s volume on Nowa Huta does not contain a single chapter on the Stalinist period. Terlecki et. al., ed., Nowa Huta. 33. Quoted in Bogdan Hillebrandt, Zwia˛zek Młodziez˙y Polskiej (Warsaw, 1980), 363–64. 34. Cały naród buduje swoja˛ stolice˛ —the whole nation builds its capital. 35. Jan Hellwig, Powszechna Organizacja Słuz˙ba Polsce (Warsaw, 1977), 19. 36. Or all three–see, e.g., Edmund Chmielin´ski, “Tu chciałem z˙yc´ i pracowac´,” in Aurelia Szafran-Bartoszek et al., eds., Robotnicze losy. Z˙yciorysy własne robotników (Poznan´, 1996), 444. On the background of migrants to Nowa Huta, see Sulimski, Kraków, 133–46. 37. Quite a few of Nowa Huta’s older workers, however, had spent time in the so-called Western Territories, the lands “recovered” from Germany through the Potsdam Agreement, helping reconstruct its devastated cities and industries. Settlers in the Western Territories tended to have rural roots, whether from the lost territories to the East, or from the southeastern provinces that later fed Nowa Huta; thus reconstruction in these areas, far more than in Warsaw, was synonymous with social revolution as peasants stepped into the shoes of evicted German burgers and workers. In this sense, the early postwar history of the Western Territories can be seen as anticipating the demographic wave of urbanization and upward mobility unleashed by Stalinist industrialization. On the making of Wrocław’s “new” working class, see Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland:Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, 1997), 135–85. 38. Chmielin´ski, “Tu chciałem z˙yc´ i pracowac´,” 454. 39. E.g., APKr SPKr 100, k. 28; APKr, SPKr 158, kk. 178–9; AAN, ZMP Zarz. Gł., Wydz. Młodziez˙y Rob. 451/XI-32, k. 159a. 40. AAN KC PZPR Wydz. Przem. Cie˛z˙kiego, 237/IX - 45, k. 8; APKr, KD PZPR 60/ IV/10, k. 99. 41. APKr KP PZPR 60/IV/5, kk. 235–44. 42. Józef Tejchma, Poz˙egnanie z władza˛ (Warsaw, 1996), 42; interviews conducted by the author with Franciszek K. and Władysław M., Kraków, 1998. 43. APKr SPKr 109, kk. 101–102. 44. “Elf ” (pseud.), “Najgorszy był jednak pocza˛tek,” in Stefan Kozicki and Zbigniew Stolarek, eds., Krajobraz ogni. Antologia reportaz˙y o Nowej Hucie (Warsaw, 1971), 51. 45. See Hubert Wilk, “Realia współzawodnictwa pracy w Nowej Hucie (1949–1956),” Dzieje Najnowsze 39, no. 2 (2007): 97–116. 46. Radio Kraków, Relacja Leopolda Sułkowskiego (audio program). 47. Kenney, Rebuilding Poland, 254. 48. See, e.g., Tejchma, Poz˙egnanie z władza˛, 37. 49. APKr DRN 9, Skargi i zaz˙alenia, letter of 31.VIII.1954. 50. APKr KD PZPR 60/IV/17, kk. 40–41, 54. 51. APKr DRN 44, n.p. 52. APKr DRN 44, Skargi i zaz˙alenia, letter of December 1952. 53. See Teresa Toran´ska’s book of the same name, Them: Stalin’s Polish Puppets (New York, 1988). 54. Similarly: “People lived by those norms. They went to volunteer activities after work; there was an enormous enthusiasm. Przodownicy were idealistic people who believed in what they were doing. Those young people who came to build [Nowa Huta] didn’t ask how much they’d be paid, but what was to be done, and whether they’d succeed. Spontaneity and enthusiasm were

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everywhere.” Dorota Gut, “Nowa Huta w s´wietle publikacji z lat 50-tych i w s´wiadomos´ci jej mieszkan´ców” (Master’s thesis, Jagiellonian University, 1991), 74. 55. Gut, “Nowa Huta,” 74–75. 56. Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village, 196. 57. A similar point is made by Naimark, “Revolution and Counterrevolution,” 64. 58. For a comparison between Polish industry and the far more functional East German model, see Małgorzata Mazurek, Socjalistyczny zakład pracy. Porównanie fabrycznej codziennos´ci w PRL i NRD u progu lat 60 (Warsaw, 2005).

[[[ CH AP T ER 13

From the “New Jerusalem” to the “Decline” of the “New Elizabethan Age” National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1945–56 Sonya O. Rose

T

SECOND WORLD WAR was a major catalyst in the breakup of the British Empire. It also spurred the empire to come “home” as people from the colonies and former colonies migrated to the metropole in its aftermath. On the narrowly domestic front the war was critical in generating what became known as the “postwar settlement,” in the form of the welfare state that instantiated new rights for Britons. Much of the historiography of Britain in the 1940s and 1950s is made up of works concerned either exclusively or primarily with domestic politics or the “postwar settlement,” and of those that deal with the empire or with immigration. In this essay I bring these literatures together to ask what it is we can learn from them about the aftereffects of conceptions of nationhood and citizenship inherited from the Second World War in the period from 1945, when the nation emerged victoriously from battle, to the end of 1956, when Britain suffered the ignominy of a failed and deceitful war with Egypt and the loss of control over the Suez Canal. Peter Hennessy has written: “Postwar Britain cannot be understood at all without a proper appreciation of the great formative experience which shaped it and dominated its economics, its politics and its ethos for at least three decades—the war itself.”1 As I argued in Which People’s War?, there was no uniform or singular experience or emotional response that characterized wartime Britain.2 The wartime experiences of Britons and the consequences of those experiences for understandings of nationhood and citizenship varied by class, gender, region, and so forth. Yet the war years produced a sensibility, a “structure of feeling” to use Raymond Williams’s suggestive term, that was heroic, HE

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populist, and utopian.3 This sensibility generated both the hopes and desires that led to the formation of the welfare state, and to the demand for a better life that only the affluent society of the later 1950s might begin to satisfy. Importantly, it also informed and was shaped by the overarching postwar myth or memory of the British nation at war.4 That dominant image, focusing on Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz, figured Britain as a nation of “ordinary” people, emerging victoriously from the war having stood alone against the enemy, and together in solidarity as they survived the massive air bombardment of the Blitz and provided the men and equipment to fight the enemy on the battlefront.5 Furthermore, in contrast to Britain’s continental wartime allies and enemies, the British mainland did not endure enemy occupation. In a book of essays celebrating Englishness, edited by Ernest Barker and published in 1950, Oxford historian E. L. Woodward rejoiced that since 1066 England has never been conquered by a foreign army. This ability to ward off the enemy, he wrote, is “a quality not shared by any other European people.”6 Richard Weight has argued that such ideas “fostered a more insular attitude to the world, reinforcing ancient prejudice about the continent and undermining attempts to develop a European community.”7 But there were other consequences of this insularity as well. My reading of the scholarship on the first decade or so of the postwar period suggests that conceptions of British nationhood or national identity inherited from the war provided significant sections of the British public with an emotional and conceptual framework for understanding Britain as their rightful inheritance: their country was the proud head of the empire/commonwealth. This understanding of Britain was an old one refurbished for the times, figuring the country as a proud, ancient “island nation” that was and would remain a great world power. The people of this island nation, whatever their differences, shared a deep, common history—most recently of their collective sacrifices under fire—that united them. Taken for granted in this national attitude was the presumption, which increasingly would become articulated in the 1950s, that it was a white man’s country—one whose rightful inhabitants were at minimum of European, if not more specifically of Anglo-Saxon stock.8 It was this understanding of nationhood that was to confront the loss of empire “abroad” and the arrival of nonwhite British subjects “at home” within a domestic context of a modicum of social security, first in an atmosphere of austerity and then in the ambience of the birthing years of the affluent society. The title of Peter Hennessy’s first book on the postwar years, Never Again, suggests his focus that after the war there would never again be the kind of poverty and unemployment that had so affected vast numbers of British people in the 1930s. Although there is disagreement among historians as to the degree of consensus that existed across classes and parties about the welfare state, the weight of evidence and historical analysis suggests, as did Hennessy, that a basic

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understanding about the state’s responsibility for its “citizens” was hegemonic through to the 1970s. The state’s promise of social security from the “cradle to the grave” and a better life to come was recompense for their heroic wartime effort. The reforms inaugurated during the Labour Party’s tenure in office from 1945 to 1951 offered the elderly, children, the poor, and the ill some needed safeguards. The promise of full employment was meant to guarantee that a reasonable, or “decent” standard of living could be attained by everyone, and that no one would be subject to the vagaries of economic forces as they had been in the depression years that preceded the war. Ross McKibbin aptly summarizes the nature of the reforms put in place by 1951—reforms that, as he maintained, would have been impossible in 1939: “the visitor would have found the institutions of civil society almost wholly recognizable and the old ‘ideological apparatus of the state’ largely intact. Aside from (limited) nationalization and various social services, the visitor would not observe a social democracy. Social democracy had not entrenched itself in civil society or civic culture.”9 Scholars agree that such modest, “welfare-minded” reforms of the early postwar years endured.10 This is not to say that everyone in Britain welcomed even these mostly moderate changes. Alan Sinfield has argued, for example, that the elite were more than slightly uneasy about the changing nature of the social world and that this anxiety was reflected in the literature of the times.11 Conservative MP Richard Law, formerly a parliamentary undersecretary in the Foreign Office during the war, undoubtedly reflected the dominant Tory point of view in his essay for Barker’s book, The Character of England (1950). He wrote that the Englishman’s fundamental “social instinct” is “the instinct to do things for himself, with others and without the assistance of the State.”12 Expressing more than a little unease about the state of the nation, he continued, The question of how to reconcile the freedom of the individual with the claims of the community is a world question. May it not be that England holds in her hands the answer? Far from being, as is so often asserted in these days, the outdistanced competitor in the race of history, the small, antiquated country obscured by the power of the giant communities of East and West, may it not be that England is the predestined mediator between the past and the future? The earliest solver of the crucial problem which faces mankind today, she is still capable of solving it … provided only that she does not, by her own act, dry up the sources of her strength by weakening the sense of responsibility of the individual Englishmen for his own … future.13

Law’s concern about England/Britain’s decline as a world power was a muted but persistently expressed sentiment, especially as colonial independence movements increasingly challenged Britain’s imperial status, issues to which I will return. At this point, it is important to underscore Law’s apprehension about the consequences of state welfare provision. The welfare state also was brought up

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as an issue by those who questioned Black British subjects’ motives for moving to the UK. The connection between immigration and the welfare state should be understood within the context of the various and changing meanings of citizenship in Britain in the immediate postwar period. One aspect of the contemporary understanding of the term “citizenship” was instantiated in the rights guaranteed by the state in the “postwar settlement”; another referred to the question of who belonged to the nation. These became fused in the minds of those who portrayed “colonial immigrants as welfare parasites.”14 Writing for the newly founded Institute of Race Relations in 1958, James Wickendon observed that one of the obstacles to the successful integration of Black migrants was the general feeling on the part of Britons that the welfare state should not “extend its expensive benefits to all recent immigrants—particularly from Commonwealth countries.”15 Since these migrants were not the rightful inheritors of the British nation, they did not deserve social rights. During the war the term “good citizenship” was common in public discourse.16 Good citizenship, referring to the obligations of citizenship, was a phrase with a lineage stretching back to late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury New Liberalism, which viewed the state as the source of the common good. The welfare state, with its promise of “never again,” was generated, in part, in the context of the idealized “good citizenship” displayed by the ordinary people fighting the People’s War. It was within a postwar milieu shaped by wartime notions of citizenship that T. H. Marshall conceptualized social rights as a new phase in the development of citizenship rights. As political theorist Will Kymlicka has argued, extending citizenship to include social rights was a tool of “nation-building, intended in part to construct and consolidate a sense of common national identity and culture.”17 The Beveridge Report, published in 1942, which addressed the need and created public demand for “cradle to grave” social security, repeatedly stressed the importance of the link between national unity and welfare provision.18 Furthermore, William Beveridge was an “eager imperialist” who envisaged the welfare state as ensuring “the adequate continuance of the British Race and of the British Ideal in the world.”19 Thus in its very inception the welfare state was fashioned with particular beneficiaries in mind. It is no surprise, then, that starting in the late 1940s the tabloid press as well as officials were concerned that colonial immigrants would be a burden on the welfare state.20 The influential Conservative Lord Salisbury, for example, believed that “the main cause of the influx of Blacks is, of course, the welfare state.” What is at stake, he said, “was the whole fabric of British society and who was entitled to be a British resident.”21 Public expressions of concern about colonial immigration and welfare not only recalled the nineteenthcentury distinction between the deserving and the undeserving, but reinforced the understanding of the British nation as white.

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As the welfare state was being built, another discussion about citizenship, now referring to nationality, was taking place. The resulting 1948 British Nationality Act was prompted by Canada’s adoption in 1947 of its own citizenship law that preempted what Britain had long insisted upon—the common or “equal” status of the British subject across the empire. As a result of Canada’s legislation, Canadians would be British subjects by virtue of being Canadian citizens, making Canadian nationality primary and defining a national citizenship to be legislated from Ottawa rather than from London. The 1948 act was a product of the concern for Commonwealth unity, given the increasingly restive dominions and colonies. As Kathleen Paul has noted, “the decision to create a single community of the United Kingdom and Colonies was a political maneuver designed to ward off potential calls for colonial independence.”22 The act created a new category of imperial citizenship—citizen of the United Kingdom and colonies—and maintained the British parliament’s legal capacity to grant British subject status while acknowledging the right of the independent nations of the Commonwealth to determine their own citizenship laws.23 The act underscored the government’s commitment to keep the Commonwealth “under its wing” as a grouping of peoples who all would be British subjects. Unintentionally, it also reinforced the right of nonwhite people from the colonies or former colonies to reside and work in Great Britain. One of the act’s legacies was the term “Commonwealth immigrant” or “New Commonwealth immigrant,” which distinguished nonwhite migrants from other immigrants. But in spite of continuing discussions among officials about legally restricting immigration, it was not until 1962 that legislation created a skill-based quota system designed to reduce the flow of “racial others” into Great Britain.24 As the debates in Parliament leading to the approval of the 1948 British Nationality Act were being concluded, Empire Windrush landed at Tilbury Docks near London carrying 492 Jamaicans coming “home” as migrants to the “mother country.” Many of them had spent some of the war years either in the RAF or working in British industries for the war effort. The war, then, was a catalyst of sorts in stimulating immigration, first from the West Indies and then from Africa and the Indian subcontinent.25 The numbers of Black migrants slowly increased in the years between 1948 and 1954 but remained small, especially relative to the number of immigrants from Eire (who were considered “honorary” British subjects even though Eire had withdrawn from the Commonwealth). Migrants coming from the West Indies increased in number from 2,000 in 1952 to 10,000 in 1954 as a consequence of new legal restrictions in the US limiting Caribbean immigration. In the 1940s, as well as earlier, Black British subjects in the metropole faced various forms of discrimination.26 Although Kathleen Paul argues that it was government ministers who so desired to keep Britain white that they took

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it upon themselves to foster “a public climate of hostility,”27 others have maintained that popular public opinion opposed an open door policy for Black British subjects. According to Hansen, three decades of postwar polling data consistently reveal that a majority of those surveyed opposed New Commonwealth migration.28 An important indicator of popular anxiety about the presence of Black people in Britain was the persistent concern about miscegenation in tabloid as well as other media.29 Picture Post in October 1954 featured the article “Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Negro?”30 Young women who dated Black men were vilified as “good-time girls,” just as they had been during the war.31 Bill Schwarz has written that in the 1940s and 1950s “the language of miscegenation was the central issue in terms of white perceptions of race, defining the boundaries of England and signifying the inviolate centre which could brook no impurity.”32 As a letter in a trade union journal purportedly proclaimed: “You talk about [the] colour bar. Can you blame the people? This is our country, a white man’s country. We are proud of it and want it to stay that way.”33 Increasingly, the presumption that Britain was “a white man’s country” became articulated, and occasionally slogans such as “Keep Britain White” were displayed in public places.34 Neither is there any doubt, meanwhile, of the “hostility of successive British governments and civil servants towards New Commonwealth immigration.”35 Officials in both the Labour and Conservative governments monitored immigration from the West Indies and attempted to restrain the numbers coming into the country by putting pressure on colonial governments to restrict issuing of passports, for example. Government officials and special committees throughout the period attempted to assess the consequences of colonial immigration and to consider how it might be restricted by legislation. Along with their concern that migrants would become dependent on welfare, ministers and their staff members were convinced that the presence of Black British subjects would foment public disorder.36 The government’s fear that Black people’s presence within Britain would produce racism is reminiscent of the British government’s position with regard to anti-Semitism and Jewish immigration during the Second World War and immediately after it. During the war the government was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism, and its first priority was to avoid stimulating it.37 Therefore, the government refused to address the issue publicly. Officials indicated that “fear of domestic anti-Semitism was at the bottom of the government’s refusal to allow anything other than a trickle of refugees into the country.”38 After the war, in spite of a severe labor shortage when the government brought workers from Poland and elsewhere in Europe into the country, it not only opposed immigration from the colonies but it also put Jewish displaced persons at the bottom of the list of desirable immigrants.39 The British government’s resistance to assisting Jewish displaced persons extended to children.40 As Tony Kushner has so aptly

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commented on the “racist and ethnocentric basis of post-war immigration policies,” “a clear strategy was developed in the acceptance of immigrants based essentially on their ability to assimilate—which outsiders could become British?”41 He comments, with reference to the Jews, that they “were still blamed for the existence of anti-Semitism, even after the evidence of the Nazis’ extermination programme.”42 Bringing these two distinctive but similar instances of racism and exclusion together underscores the troubling problem of difference for British or English national identity. In spite of the Holocaust, about which David Cesarani argues there was a “blithe absence of interest,”43 unless Jews could or would assimilate— that is, become English/British—they didn’t belong. With regard to Jews, however, even Anglicized Jews were in danger of being seen as “different,” as alien. Assimilation for Black colonial migrants, because of the significance of colour in British culture, meant something different. It meant “miscegenation”—producing “half-caste” children—“muddying” the “whiteness” of Britain. The previous discussion suggests that the sense of what it meant to be British that was bequeathed by the war became more explicitly white and continued to be insular during the 1950s in response to Commonwealth immigration and in the context of the construction of the welfare state. How, then, were the proud and heroic aspects of Britishness shaped by both the collective myth of the war and the exigencies facing the country in the decade that followed it? Those exigencies included severe and repeated economic crises and persisting austerity into the 1950s as Britain remained financially indebted to the United States and militarily overextended. In the immediate postwar years the British continued to live with food shortages, and rationing lasted into 1954. Thus it was not until the mid 1950s that the austerity of the war years ended.44 Economically enfeebled, Britain’s claim to world power status rested on its being leader of a vast empire. But in the words of historian D. George Boyce, “the decade after the Second World War revealed that, for various reasons, British rule was being tested, as discontent became channeled into nationalist ideologies.”45 India and Pakistan became independent in mid August 1947, followed quickly by Burma and then Ceylon early in 1948. The British left its mandate in Palestine in 1948, and the country’s military became involved in colonial wars in Malaya, Cyprus, and Kenya; the military was also sent to British Guiana, and colonial police fired on unarmed former Gold Coast servicemen who were protesting the lack of jobs and housing. The mythic memory of the Second World War, from which the British, having stood alone, emerged victorious, was reworked in the postwar years and helped to sustain the prideful sense of British nationhood as a heroic world power in the face of economic crisis and the evident fragility of the British Empire. This insular and heroic sense of the British nation was reinforced both by representations of and silence about empire-related issues.

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In a recent book, Wendy Webster has examined the various ways that loss of imperial power was inflected in popular culture and figured in narratives of nationhood.46 One of Webster’s main points is that postwar films and other media “forgot” about the colonial empire’s wartime contributions. While during the war, she argues, imperial forces were portrayed as manly and heroic, that sense of manliness and heroism was transferred to the British military in postwar representations of Britain at war. The victory parade on the streets of London in June 1946, she writes, was one of the “last displays of imperial martial masculinity” in the metropole.47 Representations of empire at the 1951 Festival of Britain, unlike similar festivals that had taken place over the preceding century, were either absent or, if present, muted.48 According to Richard Weight, the Colonial Relations officer had warned Herbert Morrison, in charge of mounting the festival, “that there are powerful nationalistic elements in many of the Dominions and it would be at least doubtful whether they would welcome the idea of an exhibition … emphasizing the British contribution to civilization.”49 But this is not the whole story. The festival was planned, according to Becky Conekin, as a “‘pat on the back’ to the people of Great Britain for winning the war, as well as ‘a tonic to the nation’ in the age of austerity.”50 It was meant to project “the belief that Britain will have contributions to make in the future.”51 The festival, therefore, was staged as a primarily national celebration that emphasized Britain’s past alongside science, engineering, and planning for the future. Visitors to the festival would have been left with the impression that “the British were a people who had been born and bred in the British Isles for generations and generations—more generations than anyone could count in fact. … Taken together it was an imagining of an all white, self-contained British nation residing in the British Isles,” Conekin suggests.52 Kenneth Morgan put it this way: “the main impression left by the Festival was not its innovation but its insularity … it served to celebrate past glories, age-old institutions, and hallowed and cherished folkways. … The point of reference was the Victorian or Edwardian past.”53 One might add that it was the Victorian or Edwardian past minus the Empire. The British government also made an effort to manage the news about the colonial wars, portraying colonial turmoil as the fault of terrorist insurgents or as having been fomented by communists, and by depicting nationalist leaders as irresponsible.54 A major example of this was how the underground movement and revolt among Kikuyu in Kenya, Mau Mau, was handled. According to Susan Carruthers, contemporary explanations of Mau Mau in the British press included its being a form of “collective madness.”55 Another interpretation popular at the time was that Mau Mau resulted from the inability of the Kikuyu to adapt to modern, Western civilization.56 Some projected the belief of Mau Mau as an “atavistic reversion to primitive savagery” due to a “pecu-

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liarity within Kikuyu which rendered many of them incapable of responding to the challenge of civilization.”57 Even Fenner Brockway, a Labour backbencher who championed the cause of African independence and spoke out against the atrocities perpetrated by the British and the Colonial Government against the Kikuyu, wrote: “[i]t cannot be denied that many of the practices of Mau Mau represent a reversion to a primitive barbaric mentality … I am thinking … of the cold-blooded oath-taking ceremonies with their filthy obscenities, reflecting the power which crude witchcraft still has over some Kikuyu minds.”58 Although there was no evidence that communists were involved with Mau Mau, some observers could not resist linking the Kikuyu to communists or their sympathizers. In a book published in London in 1954, Ione Leigh maintained that “the Mau Mau organization is too complex to have originated from a primitive mind. The Kikuyu knows nothing of strategy and tactics. … Mau Mau it is now suspected, has both Indian and Russian support. … The whole Mau Mau organization follows the Communist pattern.”59 The Daily Mail correspondent from Kenya reported that Ethiopian communist agents trained by Russia had disguised themselves as Kikuyu tribesman to strengthen their organization.60 And Governor Baring of Kenya sent an anxious message to Secretary of State for the Colonies Oliver Lyttleton stating that a “well-thumbed copy of Teach Yourself Russian had been found in a Kikuyu hut.”61 Anti-colonialist voices in the UK also entered the discussion about Kenya and publicized the atrocities committed by the colonial police and British forces.62 But even so, public discussion was largely dominated by the various explanations for Mau Mau that deflected blame from the colonizers and rejected the idea that Mau Mau stemmed from long-standing Kikuyu grievances. Britain, the Kenyan government, and the settlers thus were absolved of contributing to the uprising.63 If the West was blamed at all, it was in the guise of what Dane Kennedy referred to as the “liberal paternalist” position. This position is best exemplified by Louis Leakey, then the leading expert on the Kikuyu, who portrayed Mau Mau “as a manifestation of the moral void produced by the disintegration of traditional religious and social norms under the impact of the West, which had failed to instill modern alternatives.”64 This underscored the role that Britain had yet to play in East Africa as it offered a “discourse of diagnosis and cure rather than of judgment and damnation.”65 The British government did what it could to convince both international and British public opinion that the uprisings leading to the states of emergency or colonial wars did not stem from colonial nationalism. Rather, the Colonial Office’s approach to indigenous political opposition was to “discredit and criminalize … [their] opponents.”66 The dominant view projected by the British government, especially for metropolitan consumption, was that Britain gave up its colonies rather than losing them.67 As Frank Furedi has concluded, “decolonization was explained as definitely not a response to nationalist pressure

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but as a bold experiment taken on Britain’s initiative.”68 If there was very little public outcry about the waning of the empire, it was because it was possible “to inoculate public opinion against the pessimism, anxiety or resentment experienced by other powers in decline.”69 This was aided by the emphasis placed by the government on the Commonwealth (the term increasingly used in contrast to empire), a “voluntary but close association of former British territories which, it was implied, would wish to remain part of a Great Britain-centered world system for economic and diplomatic purposes.”70 It also, in large measure, was an aspect of the sense of the British nation inherited from the war as having stood alone and having emerged unconquered and victorious. Contributing as well to the positive “spin” on decolonization was the Labour government’s management of the story of Indian independence for domestic British (as well as international) consumption. After the wartime suppression of Congress and the state’s failure to deal with the Bengal famine, Britain’s reputation on the subcontinent was badly tarnished. But the British government depicted the transfer of power as a long-expected part of the British Empire’s beneficence. According to Prime Minister Attlee, it was “the fulfilment of Britain’s mission in India.”71 Independence Day ceremonies in Delhi underscored the transfer of power as a “British triumph” and received extensive media coverage. The BBC sent reporters to gather material on “the British record of achievement in India.”72 Ceremonies were also held at British embassies and high commissions as the government regarded the occasion as “an important opportunity for emphasizing the liberal and progressive character of the British Commonwealth.”73 Once again, Great Britain could celebrate victory—this time in the field of diplomacy and because of its supposedly long-standing imperial policy. In spite of the fact that the immediate consequence of the transfer of power was “the most violent … in the history of British decolonization … it continued to be widely regarded as a model of orderly, dignified, and peaceful withdrawal.”74 Scholars have identified Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation (1953) as a ceremonial occasion that was particularly important to postwar identity formation.75 To many observers it brought to mind the “wartime spirit” at the same time as it was thought to usher in a “New Elizabethan Era.”76 At the end of 1953 Edward Shils and Michael Young published a sociological study, “The Meaning of the Coronation.”77 Analyzing the coronation as a “ceremonial occasion for the affirmation of the moral values by which the society lives,”78 they wrote that “[o]n sacred occasions, the whole society is felt to be one large family, and even the Nations of the Commonwealth represented at the Coronation by their prime ministers, queens and ambassadors, are conceived of as a ‘family of nations.’”79 As Anne McClintock has reminded us, however, the family as a figure of speech is “indispensable … for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests.”80

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The event, which included a spectacular coronation procession in which military contingents from all parts of the empire and commonwealth participated, recalled images of imperial wartime unity.81 Importantly, the queen was the first monarch to take the title “Head of the Commonwealth.” In the cases of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, though not Burma or Ireland, Britain had successfully convinced the newly independent nations to remain in the Commonwealth. But in 1953 the Commonwealth itself was no longer made up of nations whose denizens thought of themselves as “kith and kin”—words that for at least fifty years had been used to indicate the “racial” ties between the white settler colonies.82 It was now a multiracial/ethnic Commonwealth. Thus Shils and Young, in the above quote, emphasized that “even” the Commonwealth was considered within “the British family of nations.” Unlike the 1951 Festival of Britain, which had all but excluded the empire/ commonwealth, the coronation featured it.83 As the imperial military contingents and other representatives from across the empire paid homage to the queen and through her to Great Britain, the public was reminded once again of Britain’s standing as a world power. The Daily Telegraph boasted about the loyalty shown by “all her scattered family from sheep farmers of New Zealand to fuzz-haired dancers of Figi.”84 A Queen is Crowned, the most popular film at box offices in 1953, was praised by the Sunday Express for its images of “soldiers from Pakistan, Ceylon and from the Colonial territories marching proudly and splendidly with the New Zealanders and Australians in the brotherhood of Empire.”85 These “family members” from “across the seas” who came to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II would return to their proper homes, unlike those loyal British subjects of the Commonwealth who had begun to arrive in the United Kingdom to live. During her Christmas message of 1953, the queen announced a “new conception” of Britain’s imperial role. The Commonwealth, she said, “bears no resemblance to the empires of the past.” Rather, it is a “world-wide fellowship of nations, of a type never seen before.” Now “the United Kingdom is an equal partner with many other proud and independent nations, and … is leading forward yet other still backward nations to the same goal. … To that one conception of an equal partnership of nations and races, I shall give myself heart and soul every day of my life.”86 The queen broadcast this Christmas message while she was on her first royal tour of the Commonwealth as monarch. The tour was yet another celebration of Britain’s worldly importance that consumed the British public’s attention. It received extensive media coverage and was commemorated, as was the coronation itself, by numerous books, pamphlets, and filmstrips. Two major messages were communicated in these materials. One was that by virtue of the Commonwealth, Britain was a world power. The other was its racial diversity. In the House of Lords, Lord Salisbury commented that the queen’s visits sym-

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bolized the unity of the Commonwealth, which, “were [it] to fall it was very doubtful whether free humanity would survive.” Salisbury equally emphasized “the world-wide character of the British Commonwealth of nations … and the essential part of the Crown in welding into a single unity that vast and infinitely varied association of races and peoples.”87 “Race” also was stressed in the teaching notes that accompanied a filmstrip for children published by the Daily Mail School-Aid Department. The purpose of the film was to use the tour as an occasion to teach children “something about the colonies, dominions and other areas” visited by the queen and “how beloved was the Queen to the people residing in the lands she visited.”88 The notes carefully pointed out the numbers of “Europeans” living in the various places on the tour. There were, for example, 13,000 Europeans out of 38,000 people in Bermuda; Jamaica had 13,000 out of a total population of 1.5 million.89 The notes also drew the children’s attention to the picture of the three regents of Baganda paying homage to the queen in ceremonial robes, being presented by the governor of Uganda, a region of 5.5 million people with “only 5,600 Europeans.”90 The Sunday Graphic’s Royal Tour Picture Album included a forward with the poem, “Welcome Home!” by Sir Alan Herbert. The third stanza underscored racial difference at the same time as it proudly celebrated Britishness: So many parliaments in British rig, So many lands that live the British way, Tropical skies that know the Speaker’s wig, And coloured men who study Erskine May.91

Less well advertised was the criticism the government received because no Blacks had been invited to the queen’s dinner in Bermuda, and the fact that there had been unrest among the Baganda because Britain had deported their king for demanding a separate independence from Uganda. Representations of the royal tour were meant to reassure the British that their monarch was truly the beloved head of a great and far-flung interracial Commonwealth of Nations. The representation of racial difference may have had another consequence for Britishness, however. Racial difference was something that had to do with the Commonwealth “over there,” not Great Britain here. Both the coronation and the royal tour underscored the idea that Britain, in contrast to the interracial Commonwealth, was a “white man’s land.” The coronation, with its associated events, reinforced the legacy of wartime national identity, reminding the British that it was a proud and heroic nation that rejoiced in its solidarity. It reassured Britain of its status as a major world power. It also, however, brought the empire home in ways that undermined the idea that Britain could stand alone. For Great Britain to retain world power status, the country depended on the empire/Commonwealth. The government thus apparently believed it had to manage decolonization in such a way

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that the British public believed colonial independence was a reward given by the “mother country” to deserving colonies. Colonial nationalism had nothing to do with it. Furthermore, when colonies became independent, they would still be a part of the Commonwealth with Great Britain at its head. The empire, therefore, was not dissolving; rather, it was in a state of transition.92 The coronation also was accompanied by an atmosphere of optimism, although the Scots were more than a little uncomfortable with Elizabeth being named Queen Elizabeth II. Furthermore, at the same time that some prognosticators were heralding a “new Elizabethan Age,” others registered more than a tinge of anxiety about decline. This was clearly evident in 1953. In his book The New Elizabethans, Philip Gibbs, author of nearly sixty books of fiction and nonfiction including The Romance of Empire, wondered: Is our old quality of the spirit dying down to the white ash of tired decrepitude? Or is the spirit of adventure still with us? Have we other dreams and visions to lead us on to new achievement? Can we save our souls, our songs, our humour, our laughter, even if we lose our Empire and our former wealth?93

The coronation was supposed to lift the “lack of hope, energy, leisure and spirit in the country” that Cyril Connolly had described two years after the end of the war. Using gender imagery to figure decrepitude and comparing Britain to the US, he said in 1947 that the outstanding difference at this moment between the English and the Americans is that in America … a man is completely a man, or a woman a woman—vain, confident, affable and aggressive. Here, the go is at half pressure; most of us are not men or women but members of a vast, seedy, over-worked, over-legislated, neuter class with our … stricken, old world apathies and resentments.94

Shortly before the coronation, the prominent liberal activist Violet Markham expressed her hopes that with the new queen on the throne, there would no longer be the “unworthy murmurs that we, with our great past and great traditions, are now a second-class power.”95 But by 1955, the American sociologist Edward Shils would write that “[t]he New Elizabethans who were conjured up in aspiration two years ago as the carriers of British tradition have petered out into thin air.”96 Thus anxiety rippled through the postwar period, and as it did so, the memory of the wartime nation—a victorious nation standing alone and united—must have offered some wistful solace.97 This was a nostalgic view that re-imagined Britain as an ancient, white island nation with world power status even as the Commonwealth abroad became increasingly interracial and members of that Commonwealth came “home” to live in the “mother country.” Decolonization was already underway, and what had been a vast empire was shrinking. And if there was a “New Elizabethan Age,” it certainly was not to survive the Suez debacle and its “aftermaths.”98

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Notes 1. Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951 (London, 2006), 2. On the very longterm impact of images from the Second World War on the decades after it, see Kenneth O. Morgan, Britain Since 1945:The People’s Peace, 3d ed. (Oxford, 2001), 4–5. 2. Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2003). 3. Ibid., 70. On this utopian mood of optimism, see also Geoff Eley, “Finding the People’s War: Film, British Collective Memory, and World War II,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001): 818–838, and for its aftereffects see Alice M. Ritscherle, “Opting Out of Utopia: Race and Working-Class Political Culture in Britain During the Age of Decolonization, 1948–1968,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2005). 4. See Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London, 2000). 5. For a recent analysis of this myth, see Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow, 2004). 6. Ernest L. Woodward, “The English at War,” in Ernest Barker, ed., The Character of England (Oxford, 1950), 529–49, quote on 530. Clearly, here England means England and not Britain. 7. Richard Weight: Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000 (London, 2002), 27. 8. For a suggestive discussion of England as a “white man’s country” see Bill Schwarz, “‘The Only White Man in There’: The Re-racialisation of England, 1956–1968,” Race and Class 38, no. 1 (1996): 65–78. I am suggesting that the idea of England as a “white man’s country” was a taken-for-granted assumption that became reinforced in the immediate postwar period. See also Schwarz, “Black Metropolis, White England,” in Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea, eds., Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London, 1996), 176–207. Historians whose scholarship has contributed to my argument about the inherited sense of nationhood that informed Britishness in the aftermath include especially Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939–1965 (Oxford, 2005); also Webster’s Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945–64 (London, 1998); Chris Waters, “‘Dark Strangers’ in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963,” Journal of British Studies 36, no. 2 (1997): 207–38; Weight, Patriots; Connelly, We Can Take It!. 9. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), 536. 10. In Kenneth Morgan’s words, for example, “[t]his basic core of economic and social ‘middle-way’ moderation survived.” Morgan, Britain Since 1945, 6. 11. Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Berkeley, 1989), 16–19, esp. 19. 12. Rt. Hon. Richard Law M.P., “The Individual and the Community,” in Barker, The Character of England, 54. 13. Ibid., 55. 14. James Hampshire, Citizenship and Belonging: Immigration and the Politics of Demographic Governance in Postwar Britain (Basingstoke, 2005), 80. Hampshire’s analysis has been central to this portion of my essay. 15. James Wickendon, Colour in Britain (London, 1958), 8. 16. Rose, Which People’s War? 17. Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2d ed. (Oxford, 2002), 329. 18. Hampshire, Citizenship, 84. 19. Susan K. Kent, Citizenship and Power in Britain, 1640–1990 (London, 1999), 320. 20. Hampshire, Citizenship, 87. 21. D. W. Dean, “Conservative Governments and the Restriction of Commonwealth Immigration in the 1950s: The Problems of Constraint,” The Historical Journal 35, no. 1 (1992): 184. 22. Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, 1997), 23.

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23. For a thorough discussion of the law and the debates in Parliament about it see ibid., 14–24. 24. There is a great deal of scholarly contention about the implementation of restrictions as well as about the absence of immigration restrictions in the 1950s. On the latter, see, for example, Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford, 2000). 25. Zig Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration: Immigration, ‘Race’ and ‘Race Relations’ in Post-war Britain (Oxford, 1992), 11. 26. The National Council for Civil Liberties issued a pamphlet, most likely in 1955, “to arouse moral outrage against the colour bar and promote legislation to deal with racial discrimination.” See “It isn’t Colour Bar but….” (London, probably 1955). 27. Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 32. 28. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 4. 29. See Hampshire, Citizenship and Belonging, chap. 5; Schwarz, “Black Metropolis,” 197; Webster, Imagining Home, 33, 51; Webster, Englishness and Empire, 158–59. 30. Trevor Philpott, “Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Negro?” Picture Post, 30 October 1954, cited in Webster, Englishness and Empire, 152. 31. Webster, Imagining Home, 51. 32. Schwarz, “Black Metropolis,” 197. 33. National Council for Civil Liberties, “It isn’t Colour Bar,” 2. 34. Wickendon, Colour in Britain, 21. 35. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 5. As Ian R. B. Spencer has put it, “the set of the official mind was always opposed to the permanent settlement in Britain of Asian and Black communities.” Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939: The Making of Multi-Racial Britain (London, 1997), 18–19. 36. Layton-Henry, Politics of Immigration, 33. Spencer, British Immigration Policy, 34. 37. Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society during the Second World War (Manchester, 1989), 137–38. Also, see my discussion of anti-Semitism in Rose, Which People’s War, 92–105. 38. Kushner, Persistence of Prejudice, 155. 39. Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford, 1994), 235. 40. Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth Century (London, 1999), 206–14. 41. Tony Kushner, “Anti-Semitism and Austerity: The August 1947 Riots in Britain,” in Panikos Panayi, ed., Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, rev. ed. (London, 1996), 160. 42. Kushner, Holocaust, 227. 43. David Cesarani, “Lacking in Conviction: British War Crime Policy and National Memory of the Second World War,” in Martin Evans and Ken Lunn, eds., War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1997), 32. 44. For an extensive analysis, see Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford, 2000). 45. David G. Boyce, Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1775–199 (Houndmills, 1999), 125. 46. Webster, Englishness and Empire, 3. 47. Ibid., 56. 48. For a thorough analysis of the almost absent empire, see Becky E. Conekin, The Autobiography of a Nation:The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester, 2003), chap. 7. 49. PRO CAB124/1220, 24 July 1948, as quoted in Weight, Patriots, 197. 50. Conekin, Autobiography of a Nation, 2. 51. Ibid., 4.

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52. Ibid., 193. 53. Morgan, Britain since 1945, 110. 54. For an excellent analysis see Susan Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-insurgency 1944–60 (London, 1995). 55. Ibid., 137. 56. Ibid., 139. 57. Ibid., 157. 58. Fenner Brockway, African Journeys (London, 1955), 181. 59. Ione Leigh, In the Shadow of the Mau Mau (London, 1954), 17, 20. 60. Joanna Lewis, “‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Mau Mau’: The British Popular Press & the Demoralization of Empire,” in E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, eds., Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration (Oxford, 2003), 240. 61. Carruthers, Winning Hearts, 265. 62. See, e.g., Stephen Howe, Anti-colonialism in British Politics:The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford, 1993), 200–207. For recent works on the Kenya atrocities see David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged (New York, 2005) and Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York, 2005). 63. Ibid,. 157. For an extensive analysis of the various explanations for Mau Mau, see John Lonsdale, “Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya,” Journal of African History 31, no. 3 (1990): 393–421. 64. Dane Kennedy, “Constructing the Colonial Myth of Mau Mau,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (1992): 252. 65. Ibid., 260. 66. Frank Furedi, Colonial Wars and the Politics of Third World Nationalism (London, 1994), 96. 67. Ibid., 273. 68. Ibid., 272. 69. John Darwin, The End of the British Empire:The Historical Debate (Oxford, 1991), 35. 70. Ibid. 71. Nicholas Owen, “‘More than a Transfer of Power’: Independence Day Ceremonies in India, 15 August 1947,” Contemporary Record 6, no. 3 (1992): 422. 72. Ibid., 438. 73. Ibid. 74. Webster, Englishness and Empire, 61. 75. Ibid., 13 and chap. 4. See also Weight’s excellent analysis of the revival of patriotism and the meaning of the coronation in Patriots, 227–39. 76. See Robert Hewison’s discussion in Culture and Consensus: England, Art and Politics since 1940, rev. ed. (London, 1997), 66–68. 77. Edward Shils and Michael Young, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” The Sociological Review 1, no. 1 (1953): 63–81. 78. Ibid., 67. 79. Ibid., 78–79. 80. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York, 1995), 45. 81. Weight, Patriots, 230. 82. See Kathleen Paul’s discussion of metaphorical imperial familial relationships in Whitewashing Britain, 20–21. 83. Weight, 230. 84. Quoted ibid. 85. As quoted by Webster, Englishness and Empire, 92. 86. Tom Fleming ed., Voices Out of the Air: the Royal Christmas Broadcasts 1932–1981 (London, 1981), 74 as quoted in Webster, 93.

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87. Times, 20 November 1953, 3, col. A. 88. John Knox, Royal Tour 1953–1954 (London, 1954), 1. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Sunday Graphic, Royal Tour Picture Album, story by Elizabeth Morton (London, 1956), 1. 92. John Darwin speaks of this as an “anaesthetizing rhetoric.” See John Darwin, “Decolonization and the End of Empire,” in Robin W. Winks, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. V: Historiography (Oxford, 1999), 547. Also see Stuart Ward, “Introduction,” in idem, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001), 7–9. 93. Philip Gibbs, The New Elizabethans (London, 1953), 19. 94. Cyril Connolly, “The Coming Crises—I,” in idem, ed., Ideas and Places (London, 1953), 142. This was an editorial originally published in Horizon in April 1947. 95.Violet Markham, “The New Elizabethan Age,” The Listener, 28 May 1953, as quoted in Webster, Englishness and Empire, 92. 96. Edward Shils, “The Intellectuals I. Great Britain,” Encounter 4 , no. 1 (1955): 16. 97. Chris Waters argues that the myth of the war shaped ideas about race as the country faced multiple crises at the end of the 1950s in the context of immigration. Waters, “‘Dark Strangers,’” 215. 98. Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (London, 2006), 245.

[[[ PA RT V

In the Shadow of the Bomb: Military Cultures

[[[ CH AP T ER 14

The Great Tradition and the Fates of Annihilation West German Military Culture in the Aftermath of the Second World War Klaus Naumann

T

HOSE WHO STUDY WEST

German military culture in the postwar period are familiar with the Staatsbürger in Uniform, the “citizen in uniform,” the symbol of the Bundeswehr’s new beginnings, its foundations in parliamentary democracy, and the new ideal of a soldier integrated into society. In short, the “citizen in uniform” symbolized the decision to leave behind the country’s military past. But as soon as we direct our attention to the realities of the practices and policies of the military profession, this new image is obscured by an ominous shadow. The German armed forces’ professional legacy, as well as the self-conception associated with that legacy and the conceptualization of the military profession more generally, continued to bear the mark of a tradition that characterized the military in the modern era in numerous societies. In the German context, however, that tradition had more farreaching and devastating effects. The key to this tradition and thus to a better understanding of German military culture in the postwar era can be located in a concept that was much more than a military doctrine and was perceived in the twentieth century as epitomizing the German way of warfare and the construction of the soldier associated with it: the idea of annihilation.1 The complex semantic connotations of this concept—at one extreme viewed as a military option on the battlefield and at the other equated with the practice of genocide—illustrate the confusing spectrum of explicit practices, implicit basic assumptions, social characteristics, and political implications upon which the concept is based. Recent military historiography has pointed out (quite rightly) the concept’s paradigmatic significance for military culture.2

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This chapter aims to illuminate post-1945 German military culture by focusing on the legacy of the idea of annihilation and the symbolic practices that it entailed within the Western alliance’s nuclear defense strategy. Retracing this idea and its symbolic manifestations in this period leads, I would argue, to a critical examination of the reality of the concept of the “citizen in uniform.” Underlying this approach is an examination of the relationship between ends and means in using military force. This not only suggests comparisons with modern military cultures, but also leads to the more general question of how means can come to contradict ends and develop a destructive life of their own. The argument I will present here—namely, that the concept of annihilation represents the key to a better understanding of German military culture and its traditions—is linked to a theoretical assumption that concerns the relationship between institutional mechanisms, practices shaped by organizational culture, and social contexts.3 What might be called the art and practice of war (Militärhandwerk) can be understood as an ensemble of various elements, including institutional structures (e.g., hierarchies), specific means of securing order (e.g., discipline), forms of self-presentation (as manifest in programmatic documents, public depictions of the profession, training programs), policies that regulate behavior (e.g., official manuals), symbolic systems (e.g., tradition), perceptions of the world, and role models. Such institutional structures and mechanisms are perpetuated—and this is a crucial part of my argument—because the schemes they develop in the interests of stabilizing military institutions and providing orientation are internalized and become habitual. As a consequence, they represent more than merely acquired knowledge or implanted ideologies. Institutional mechanisms are shaped in and through social milieus (or subcultures) that embody moral principles. These milieus do not map neatly onto political systems, and they produce their own histories, which in turn continue to exert an influence even after the organizational framework has ceased to exist, whether permanently or temporarily, as was the case in Germany after 1945. Institutional mechanisms act as “ambivalent filters” in the sense that their influence can be energizing or restrictive, depending on prevailing conditions.4 In the following essay I will center my analysis of German military culture on this web of habitual practices, hidden assumptions, and unquestioned cognitive frames; space does not permit a discussion of possible parallel developments in other modern military cultures. This much can be noted, however: although the developments in Germany are an extreme case in military history, comparable concepts of war and the military profession can be observed in other Western societies. Thus, rather than constituting a unique Sonderweg, the German example demonstrates the destructive potential inherent in the “military extremism” of modernity. Exploration of the military “legacy” of the postwar era directs our attention to the undercurrent of fundamental convictions held by military professionals

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that are manifested in the key concept of annihilation and that originated and gained ascendancy well before the years 1933 to 1945. I focus on the military as a profession and in particular on the officer corps, its prevailing images of war, its self-conception, and its understanding of military professionalism. I begin by reviewing the genealogy of a legacy that in 1945 was perceived as inherited from the Wehrmacht but in fact had its roots in a much earlier era. This is followed by an analysis of the military reform of the 1950s, which I interpret as an expression of a framework that represented a compromise, influenced by the politics of memory. The various effects of this compromise are reflected in the strategic responses to the nuclear constellation, which lent themselves to a reconstruction of the fate of the annihilation idea on a very concrete level. Finally, I will discuss the military relevance of strategic discourses in professional circles and examine how institutional learning is shaped in “strong” organizations; this last issue can best be examined from the perspective of the history of generations.

Annihilation — a Paradigm of German Military Extremism The annihilation of opposing forces was first formulated as a goal of modern European warfare by Carl von Clausewitz and others (and shared by numerous contemporaries). Annihilation was instrumental in the sense that it was a means—and indeed perhaps even the decisive means—of forcing one’s will upon an opponent with the use of physical violence.5 In the German context, beginning with the so-called wars of unification in the period from 1864 to 1871, the military extremism inherent in this concept developed along an unparalleled trajectory, due to the prevailing political context.6 Under the influence of what was perceived as Germany’s “central position” in Europe, “encircled” by other nations and the German elites’ desire to attain “international standing,” a specific school of military thought began to gain ascendancy toward the end of the nineteenth century. This new school of thought formulated and internalized professional concepts of interpretation and action grounded in the notion that precarious situations could be coped with successfully and definitively by means of risk-taking strategies, short campaigns, strategic flexibility, the concentrated deployment of forces, and rapid decisive battles. This mode of military thinking was based on a kind of gambler’s logic of “all or nothing,” rather than on worst-case scenarios that, from the outset, cautiously factored in setbacks and failures. This strategic voluntarism was paired with an ideal of the officer as a “person of strong will”7 whose character, callousness, ruthlessness, decisiveness, and selflessness were considered more important than academic qualifications, the formation of moral character (Persönlichkeitsbildung), or a history of military achievements. The fact that since the 1890s the officers’ corps had been gradually opened to those formerly excluded was by no means a con-

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tradiction. Now, the traditionally aristocratic structure of the military’s higher echelons was slowly being abandoned in favor of admitting individuals who demonstrated “nobility” of character as well as bourgeois expertise in the use of force. As this new professional ideal became established, it shaped the structures, procedures, attitudes, and basic assumptions that were to set the standards for German military culture for nearly a century.8 This was the context in which the organizational culture of the German military evolved. Of special significance were responses to extreme situations, and their effect was particularly ominous when expectations that victory would be achieved quickly were dashed in the face of unforeseen opposition. In such constellations, which occurred for the first time during the Franco-German War of 1870–71 and subsequently during the two world wars, the German military reacted in a manner typical of “strong organizations,”9 i.e. by radicalizing its basic assumptions: overreaction became the norm. In the face of changed circumstances and as an extension of operational routines, what was planned as a battle of annihilation mutated into a radicalized mode of warfare, culminating in a war of annihilation. “Total mobilization” multiplied the resources employed, the annihilation paradigm was generalized (by “bleeding out” the opposing forces or repressing the civilian population), and strategic standards dictated by “military necessity” (rather than internationally recognized codes) determined the conduct of war. This process was accompanied by the construction of a new type of military leader, the frontline officer (Frontoffizier) or leader of shock troops (Stoßtruppführer), who was judged to bear the charismatic qualities previously reserved for commanders and who was to become the role model for the Nazi Volksoffizier.10 The Nazi regime’s genocidal war of annihilation exacerbated existing tendencies of extreme aggressiveness, marked by ruthless modes of warfare, unrestrained exploitation of occupied countries, and the destruction of entire societies (in Eastern Europe). All of these elements took for granted the physical annihilation of the population and were paralleled by the “internal war” against the Jews.11 These developments became possible not only because of a set of shared ideological values, but also because they corresponded to—or apparently did not fundamentally contradict—the standards of military professionalism. In the Endkämpfe, the final struggles of the last years of the war, the idea of annihilation climaxed in its most murderous form: annihilation became self-annihilation. The Wehrmacht’s fight until “five after twelve” resulted in unprecedented losses among German soldiers and civilians and represented a unique legacy in German memory.12 These occurrences triggered a further transformation of military professionalism. As the war progressed and a younger generation of wartime officers entered the forces, frontline experience and proof of one’s mettle in action eclipsed military doctrine and training as a measure of professional worth. The prototypical aristocratic officer, who was

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militaristic in the classic sense, practically ceased to exist. Now, the idea of annihilation was existentialized, as it were, not only in callous and ruthless battles but also in its ultimate form: persevering and enduring in a hopeless situation.13 This development was closely paralleled by the civilian population’s pride in persevering (“attitude good, spirits bad”). While this new union of Volk and army was based on common ideological ground, the glue that held it together was a mixture of fear, tenacity, and a misguided will to survive. This brief genealogy of the annihilation concept suggests the foundation of the discourse and day-to-day practices that were written into the conceptions of profession, self, and war that shaped the habitus and attitudes of an entire military socio-moral milieu. No German postwar army could escape this legacy. Can, then, to paraphrase Max Horkheimer, those who wish to speak of the more recent military extremism of the Wehrmacht be silent about the idea of annihilation that predated it?

Military Reform between Tradition and Innovation Against this background, we can recognize just how challenging it was to implement a democratic reform of the armed forces and establish a practice of military professionalism that was compatible with democracy after 1945. The project was even more precarious because it was bound up with the new option of nuclear annihilation. Moreover, the Cold War conditions that shaped foreign and security policy and formed the context in which West Germany joined the Western alliance and established the Bundeswehr were exceedingly ambivalent. The Western allies’ paramount aim was, first, to establish a strong military presence with divisions stationed along the Central European frontline that divided the Eastern and Western blocs, and second, to ensure that the new West German member of the alliance was kept under its control—in other words, to quote the definition of the alliance’s function offered by the first NATO general secretary, Lord Ismay, “to keep the Germans down.” Military reforms, in contrast, were important in terms of political control but nonetheless secondary in comparison to the expected enhancement of fighting power. For the Western allies, such expectations were shaped primarily by images associated with the Wehrmacht. The former military men who, beginning in 1955, joined the Bundeswehr were by no means hopeless hardliners. Like other German functional elites, they had embarked upon the path of becoming bourgeois citizens and, after overcoming a feeling of injured citizenship, ultimately became loyal civil servants.14 But the demands and implications of mid-1950s military reform, which targeted the military’s professional self-conception, must have seemed paradoxical and unreasonable to many war veterans.15

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Within military circles, the far-reaching changes in the constitutional framework applicable to the military (the Wehrverfassung reform enacted in 1956) were supported by only a small group. But these pro-reformers cooperated with policymakers, the media, and youth organizations to make the “citizen in uniform” a successful model of a new kind of soldier rooted in both the democratic state and in pluralist society. For the first time in German history, issues of defense, the development of the armed forces, and military strategy had to be justified to the country’s parliament and the public. But the public and politics represented two sectors of society for which traditional professional concepts of the German military were quite foreign. Moreover, both the general public and politicians had begun questioning military leaders’ attempts to exculpate themselves with respect to the Nazi past. The military elites presented themselves, and were generally accepted, as politically innocent experts on the use of force who could not be held responsible for political decisions. The new constitutional framework for the military—and the basic assumptions about a new military culture outlined implicitly therein—called upon them to recognize the prerogative of politics and to develop a genuinely political understanding of the profession, the consequences of which were to extend down to the lowest levels and most arcane routines of the “art” of military leadership (with as yet unclear consequences).16 The result was a smoldering, long-term conflict that lasted into the 1970s and was steeped in the highly charged politics of German history. This controversy over the foundations and basic assumptions of the military in a democratic civil society regularly ignited public protests, triggered internal skirmishes, and sparked debates about concepts of military tradition. Those who, beginning in 1955, were to become the officers of the newly established Bundeswehr could not seriously be accused of challenging the primacy of politics. In contrast to other Western European countries, the Bonn Republic experienced neither violations of the constitution, nor attempts to oust the government in a coup, nor other excursions by the military outside the bounds set by politics. Nonetheless, the military’s public commitment to the primacy of politics often resembled mere lip service. Behind this façade, the traditionally “non-political” image of self and profession was maintained. According to this notion, the military constituted a unique sociocultural milieu (“sui generis” was the controversial term used as of the late 1960s) that followed its own rules, which had little or nothing in common with the developments of modern society, the industrial organization of work, and civil education or values.17 Based on a specific self-understanding rooted in military culture, this concept was so dominant that key reform projects associated with the establishment of the Bundeswehr proved to be, at least temporarily, unrealistic. Plans to reorganize training and education along more academic lines were thwarted; until the early 1970s, training for members of the staff and general staff were modeled after the standards of the Wehrmacht’s training. Until the

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1980s, “tactics” was the subject that held top priority within the hierarchy of the Bundeswehr’s curriculum. It was here—and not in spectacularly controversial issues of tradition (such as naming barracks after former officers or the use of symbols)—that the enduring professional core of Germany’s military legacy left its mark. Linked to these elements was the image of military leadership that despite all attempts at modernization emphasized operational skills, character development, and soldierly virtues as more significant for shaping the military personality than academic education. There was little support for a politically defined understanding of the military profession.18 There can be no doubt that the sophisticated construction of a “citizen in uniform” and the philosophy of leadership and organizational structures referred to as Innere Führung did not make it easy for officers who had served during the Second World War to comprehend and relate to the implications of West German military reform.19 These concepts called for awareness of an individual officer’s responsibility as a citizen, his capacity to reflect on his professional actions, and his understanding of the role of the armed forces as strictly defensive. In contrast to the Wehrmacht or the Reichswehr (which adhered to the concept of “the state within the state”), the Bundeswehr was neither to isolate itself from society nor to become independent of it. The tradition of “unconditional obedience” was abandoned in favor of a concept of discipline based on the rule of law and the dictates of conscience. Mindful of the wars of aggression and annihilation waged in the past, the overriding military aim was now to be the prevention of war through deterrence. In characterizing this new mandate, federal president Gustav Heinemann remarked that peace had become the “acid test” of a soldier’s mettle.20 If one took these demands seriously, then a “non-political” understanding of the job had to be abandoned. But precisely this implication aroused misgivings among Bundeswehr officers who had served in the Second World War. It proved to be extremely difficult to convey an understanding of the fact that the new call for a politicized military entailed not only heightened awareness of legal norms and anti-communist convictions but also a transformation of basic assumptions about the conduct of warfare and the role of the military. The new conception of the military took hold only among a minority of soldiers. At first, the military reformers headed by Graf Baudissin were isolated. Their assumption that the military profession had become in essence political—an idea developed on the basis of perceptions of total war and “global civil war” and then applied to the new nuclear constellation—had far-reaching implications.21 Baudissin justified this reasoning in the 1960s in an analysis of the modern (nuclear) image of war and reached conclusions that were similar to those of his contemporary, Morris Janowitz, with respect to the trend toward the development of “constabulary forces.”22 According to Baudissin’s assessment, earlier forms of the idea of annihilation that had relied on the concentrated use

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of military means, rapid attacks, and equally rapid victories would now, in the nuclear constellation, fail to produce the desired results. The general’s analysis marked nothing less than a change of paradigm, fundamentally challenging traditional military culture. In the face of a continuum of conventional and nuclear weapons, every use of weapons had become a highly political action that required a political and strategic understanding of the situation; not only politicians but also military leaders on the battlefield had to face this challenge. On paper, at least, the idea of annihilation was now obsolete. But what was the reality of the Western alliance’s defense, and what was the reality in West Germany’s military subculture? Did the legacy of the Wehrmacht promote adjustment to the new conditions or hamper it?

Confl icting Role Models in the Bundeswehr The resolution of this dilemma was the center of an ongoing controversy in the Bundeswehr that persists to the present day. In the public sphere, this conflict was visible in vehement debates about tradition that continued into the 1990s, focusing in particular on the armed forces’ relationship to the Wehrmacht, but it was also related to military culture and was played out (for the most part, beyond the gaze of the public) in the highest echelons of West German military leadership.23 Two position papers from high-ranking officers illustrate the extreme positions in this debate. In 1980, Jürgen Brandt, at the time general inspector of the Bundeswehr, declared that “fostering tradition [is] an essential source of motivation, an instrument of leadership in training soldiers.”24 Another former general inspector, Ulrich de Maiziére, who played a key role in the shift to a flexible response strategy in the 1960s, voiced his skepticism in an interview conducted in 1992: “With respect to operative leadership, if defense should become necessary, there [were] role models, but not with regard to strategic issues. We neither had role models … for the idea of deterrence, nor did we have models for integrated leadership within the army of an alliance. … There were no models for any of that.”25 In the face of these contradictory statements, we must ask to what extent the change in strategic precepts led to a revision of operative concepts and therefore to a transformation of the military’s self-conception. Did traditional principles continue to determine actual practice on the lower level of command, as a source of motivation for the fighting troops, while the general staff officers and integrated staffs were forced to adopt what was for them a novel mode of military thinking? If so, then this split not only contradicted the integration paradigm of postwar reform and the Bundeswehr’s mission as defined by policymakers; it even failed to comply with traditional military tenets that called on military leaders and the troops to dem-

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onstrate unity in thought and action. But if the dualism was unacceptable, what had become of the basic assumptions of Germany’s great military tradition? Until well into the 1990s, the “old” (i.e., pre-1989) Bundeswehr with its commitment to the Western defense alliance remained a compromise army in which conflicting concepts coexisted under the umbrella of normative guidelines and values.26 Officially, any express reference to the legacy of the Wehrmacht was proscribed, but the controversy continued to smolder with respect to role models, training curricula, and professional self-understanding. Nonetheless, it was remarkable to observe how military leaders forced to come to terms with the dilemma of home defense in the atomic age underwent a change of attitudes that opened up new perspectives for military codes of conduct and modes of thinking,27 despite the fact that, since the mid-1960s, conditions for such transformations were anything but favorable. Public opinion prioritized security, rejected nuclear arms for the Bundeswehr, and persisted in favoring a nuclear fatalism that characterized international developments as uncontrolled and ominous.28 Politicians generally viewed the armed forces as an instrument of (power) politics but were only marginally interested in how strategic goals defined by the NATO alliance were implemented on an operative and tactical level. There were tangible reasons for this reluctance.29 As successors to the defeated and now divided German state, West and East Germany had relinquished some of their sovereignty as well as their right to strategic self-determination (this was due in part to the Allies’ decision to protect themselves from a potential future threat from Germany as a military power, and in part to the new mutual defense alliances). Moreover, the political guarantees associated with NATO membership were linked to specific strategic-operative restrictions that were quite novel for higher-ranking officers trained at the Wehrmacht’s war academy, a fact illustrated by an example cited by General de Maizière. “We knew that the alliance was strictly a defense alliance,” he explained. “There was no order that foresaw the boot of an infantryman crossing the border. This was a completely new strategic-operative element, in comparison to what I once learned, in the sense of training according to Schlieffen or Moltke, Seeckt or Manstein.”30 The military received the new constellation with mixed feelings. Military expertise and experience in the “East” were once again called for; NATO offered new opportunities. But the restrictions that accompanied these opportunities were an affront to professional pride. It was only, as General de Maizière said, in the course of a “long internal struggle to re-think, [moving] from the focus on operative defensive planning to the priority of what was meant by deterrence”31 that the higher officer corps began to adapt to the new circumstances. The need for new insights, attitudes, and positions crystallized around the paradoxes and dilemmas of the new nuclear constellation, but the effect,

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in terms of revised codes of behavior, training curricula, and conceptions of professionalism, was limited.32 This tendency was heightened by the fact that debates within the military revolved exclusively around issues of “military necessity,” whereas questions related to the laws and customs of war, the Geneva Convention, or other international agreements played no discernible role. Moreover, discussions remained for the most part limited to the inner circle of the military; communication between the various branches of the armed forces was rare and marked by mutual rivalry. Until the 1980s, a strategic community that represented a forum in which public controversies could be played out was practically non-existent. There was little common ground to be found in the answers formulated in response to the strategic challenges of the postwar period. Agreement was apparent only with respect to the uncomfortable questions of whether the maxim of mutual defense within the alliance was indeed the appropriate means of defending West German territory and how the demands of defending the country while also defending the alliance were to be balanced. The military’s responses to repeated changes in strategic-operative thinking oscillated among three typical formulations. They reflect the various fates of the idea of annihilation in the practice of military leadership during the Cold War. In the following section, I will illustrate these three responses by briefly retracing three complexes of strategic-operative planning that I consider especially useful in reconstructing relevant positions within post-1945 West German military culture.33

Operative Traditionalism Until the early 1960s, a style of thinking that might be referred to as operative traditionalism was predominant among West German military leaders and planners.34 The challenges of the new nuclear constellation and the NATO alliance were met by drawing on traditional leadership knowledge, and the first plans for defending Central Europe against a Soviet attack resembled the largescale operations of the Second World War. Indeed, former members of the operations department of the Wehrmacht, the old OKH-Clique, in fact held decisive positions in the new armed forces. Nonetheless, what was reflected in these earliest plans was a mixture of pride, fear (or at least concern), and hope. Military leaders were convinced that they were in possession of superior operative capabilities and, particularly in their dealings with American counterparts, were apt to refer to their experience in the East. But there was a flipside to this coin, since the Russians were the Germans’ most feared opponent (something generally admitted in internal discussions only), an adversary they hoped to avoid confronting.35 At least until the second half of the 1950s, the German military had only limited knowledge of the atomic bomb’s effects and the conditions under which it could be deployed. In view of the incalculability of the

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new nuclear weapons, the search for “alternatives to nuclear war” began early on. This search was also fueled by fears that employing nuclear weapons as foreseen in the NATO massive retaliation doctrine would lead to “annihilation of the substance of the Volk.”36 The response to this challenge, in contrast, incorporated some of the traditional assumptions of German notions of war and the military profession. Nuclear weapons were either downplayed or characterized as of negligible importance for the outcome of a possible war, or their tactical effect on the battlefield was ignored and integrated into a slightly modified version of conventional warfare. Exemplary is a controversial statement of Chancellor Adenauer, according to which nuclear weapons were “nothing more than a further development of artillery.”37 In short, despite the skepticism that was occasionally voiced, the concepts of war and operative plans that prevailed during the Bundeswehr’s early phase remained bound up in the traditional standards of German warfare. The same can be said of the army’s unstated basic assumptions: West German military thinking in this period was founded on a few core convictions in which the faded glory of traditional German military thinking centering on best-case scenarios remained recognizable. The incalculable threat of a nuclear war could be met, it was hoped, and victory on the battlefield secured thanks to superior leadership knowledge, operative skills, rapid attacks, and the capacity to persevere for a defined period of time. The slogan of the military manual Truppenführung 62 (Troop Leadership 62) was a modified version of a motto borrowed from Schlieffen: “The spirit of all warfare is the annihilation of the enemy through attack.”38 This mode of thinking was accompanied by a conception of the soldier that contrasted with the image of the “citizen in uniform.”

Primacy of Politics on the Battle Ground That the matter did not rest there was a result, ultimately, of the pressure for change within NATO that came with the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s.39 I will not attempt here to answer the question of whether changes in German military plans resulted more from internal influence or, instead, from pressure brought to bear within the alliance. In any event, it was remarkable to observe how military planners mediated the new orientation of NATO’s flexible response strategy with the daunting problems of home defense. What was finally presented in January 1967 (to a chosen few and as a top-secret plan) under the title “German Strategic Concept”40 implicitly abandoned fundamental traditions in German military history and especially traditions upheld by the Wehrmacht.41 This momentous step was preceded by massive internal critique of the military’s nuclear fatalism. “I believe,” remarked one leading military planner, “that we have in the past been too preoccupied with the manifestations of general, unlimited war and have at times capitulated in the face of this idea.

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In doing so, we have supplied ourselves with a comfortable alibi.”42 Abandoning this kind of thinking, however, was not possible until military leaders grasped the political and strategic effects of the deterrence doctrine on military operations and tactics. This was more than an intellectual challenge; it also meant questioning professional military knowledge and experience. In order to restore the political options that the rigid procedures of massive retaliation seemed to rule out—that is, possible alternative avenues of action in a crisis—military leaders had first to learn to think in political and strategic terms, right down to the lowly depths of the kind of operational planning that had previously been reserved for traditionalists. Once military leaders arrived at this juncture, they discovered that reform was essential. If the aim was to deescalate political and military conflicts in Central Europe—which for the moment meant conflicts on a limited scale—then any form of thinking and acting based on the timetested maxims of rough-and-ready operationalism was inappropriate. What was needed was a credible operational plan that signaled determination to the enemy but did not preclude alternative courses of action. Soft categories of gradualism, credibility, and appropriateness superseded the rigid dogmas of annihilation on the battlefield, forcing a decision, or attempting to realize “final victory.” Action on the battlefield during a limited conflict of whatever kind would have been, no doubt, brutal. But as military leaders now had to learn, political crisis management might mean they would be forced to make decisions that were problematic from the standpoint of military expertise or would lead to considerable losses, if such decisions better served the goal of deescalation.43 Military reformer Graf Baudissin explained this conclusion some years later, after the shift to a strategy of “flexible response” had already taken place. In doing so, he expressly repudiated the strategy of annihilation: “Victory in the classical sense is something that (cannot and must not) occur; for … whoever is seriously threatened tends, … in order to turn the tide, to escalate the intensity of warfare, which leads to mutual destruction. The aim is then not to be victorious, but rather to avoid defeat. … [I]t is simply about reinstating the status quo—today the instrument of the military is incapable of achieving more. … The dangerous automatism of the military,” which had determined the NATO strategy of massive retaliation, “[is], as far as possible, no longer operative and the primacy of politics [will be established], down to the smallest tactical action.”44

Renaissance of the Operative Legacy Although such considerations might at first appear to be of little practical significance, they in fact constituted, in a rather surprising way, a confirmation of what had been conceptualized and codified on a very elementary and routine level as the “citizen in uniform.” But mediating between these two poles of

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soldierly conduct proved to be difficult. It was not the persistence of the Wehrmacht legacy and the deficits of leadership training alone that resurfaced again and again and impeded the transformation of military culture. In times of crisis, military leaders also tended to react as if ruled by reflexes—the product of what they had learned from traumatic experiences—and relied on a purportedly time-tested, indeed, timeless stock of organizational knowledge and great traditions.45 In the mid 1980s (shortly before the end of the Cold War), public debate about the deployment of Pershing II/cruise missiles in Europe as well as the military’s eroding confidence in the efficacy of the twenty-year-old precepts of home defense (Vorneverteidigung) led to a renaissance of the operative legacy that was accompanied by renewed esteem for the Wehrmacht.46 Rather than addressing the operative challenges that followed from the defensive strategy formulated by policymakers within the alliance (a strategy that called for defending Germany’s immediate borders) or, alternatively, campaigning in the political arena for a further change of strategy, the military elite began producing position papers and programmatic documents that reanimated the tradition of pure operationalism.47 In contrast to the 1960s, however, these attempts to resolve the tensions between heritage, mission, and limited means can be characterized as voluntaristic and historically regressive. Whereas in the 1960s there had been hard-won recognition of the fact that nuclear weapons, as “political weapons,” would dominate operative events “whether they were used or not,”48 now army officers renounced any such politicization of the battlefield and advocated sweeping defensive operations (à la Manstein) on German territory, based on the premise that nuclear weapons would not be employed.49 In emphasizing the timeless principle of leadership action, this mode of thinking renewed the legacy of Schlieffen and again separated operative thinking from the political context (in this case, that of the Western alliance). Such ideas shaped military culture because their implicit and explicit conclusions linked them to concepts of military leadership and training goals for officers and the general staff. For the author of the position paper cited above, the “tensions” that delimited leadership action were now shifting from the analysis of the possible (goals, forces, time, space) to the incalculability of the “art of leadership” (daring, the willingness to take risks), thus “depriving this sphere of leadership of its … calculability.”50 While this shift might have been appropriate with respect to tactical troop leadership in battle, there was a danger that it would become mere voluntarism as soon as the strategic framework of operative planning was no longer the focus of attention. This highlighted the problematic aspect of such position papers, revealing that they were indicative of a unique and persistent syndrome of military culture: the tendency to think purely in terms of optimizing decisions specific to a unique military situation, paired with the implicit expectation that the art of leadership and sheer willpower would suffice as a means of compensating for questionable strategic

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assumptions about home defense. These position papers reflected more than merely the views of individual officers, as the leadership manuals of the 1980s and 1990s adhered to similar tenets.51 The soft, gradualistic, communicative, and systemic components of military leadership formulated in the 1973 manual (Führungsvorschrift HDv 100/10) were abandoned, in the decades that followed, in favor of a concept that relied on the personal characteristics of charismatic leaders (character, morals, proven skills in battle) and on an instrumental understanding of organization (organization as a “trivial machine”).

Learning What from Military History? This kind of operative thinking illustrates a “counter-phobic” response pattern.52 In order to deny and avoid confronting their troubled past, German officers instead drew on the ostensibly uncompromised ideas and attitudes of an earlier era and on purportedly timeless standards and practices. But these ideas and practices were an element of the professional potential for “military extremism” that had been involved in the genesis of extreme violence, annihilation, and self-annihilation. Prominent proponents of such attitudes were among the founding generation of the Bundeswehr. These men had been socialized in the Reichswehr and now drew on their experience in the supposedly unblemished “normalcy” of a “peacetime army.” A second line of tradition, resulting from the continuation of operative leadership knowledge tested under the real conditions of the Second World War, emphasized the positive qualities of this knowledge, in contrast to the effects of Hitler’s interventions. Despite their willingness to practice self-critical restraint, bourgeois inconspicuousness, and political adaptability under the new conditions, military leaders continued to subscribe to the belief that they had only fallen into disrepute as a result of external political—and thus “unqualified”—interventions. Discussions in military circles ignored the possibility that a certain potential for extremism might be inherent in the professional routines of military action under violent societal regimes. The basic assumptions of military practice shaped the lens through which a large majority of former Wehrmacht officers viewed military reforms and the new challenges of the nuclear constellation. Nonetheless, there was another side to this pattern of response. The diverse and at times wholly contradictory assumptions reflected in rival military styles of thought in the new compromise army were responses to what military men perceived as a shock and an indignity in the recent past. Although the search for alternatives to nuclear war was no doubt the result of power politics, it was also an expression of the desperate desire for a national military concept that would reduce the tensions between home defense and defense of the alliance and, at the same time, ensure that Germany would not become the battlefield

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on which the bloc confrontation was played out. The appalled reactions of German officers in the second half of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, upon first learning of the alliance’s plans for nuclear war, are testimony to the fact that this search for alternatives was indeed taken seriously and that it was related to their personal experience with catastrophic violence.53 General Hans Röttiger, the first general inspector of the army, underlined this perspective when he made the unusual suggestion that Bundeswehr soldiers might consider refusing to participate in nuclear defense plans.54 The crucial question that divided German military leaders into two camps was whether there was a willingness to abandon the great tradition of the German army in the face of the nuclear dilemma. The implications of military reform in the 1950s and its new role model, “citizen in uniform,” as well as the conceptual innovations of a more flexible and politicized defense concept in the 1960s, were in effect challenges to the legacy of German military culture. Although both of these new concepts had been accepted, legitimated, and implemented on a political level, an influential group of military leaders opposed these innovations and their implications. Even in the late 1980s, these dissenters—whose position was firmly grounded in German norms of training, the preservation of tradition, and modes of troop leadership—continued to believe that they could sidestep the nuclear dilemma by implementing visionary operative schemes and tried-and-true leadership practices. The reactivated great tradition associated with this dissent can be distinguished, however, from similar revivals in the late 1940s and 1950s. When former Wehrmacht officers put down on paper their ideas of what war could mean and how it was to be waged in the decades immediately following the war, they were working within the horizon of their own experience. By the 1980s, in contrast, a new generation of officers had entered Bundeswehr leadership circles; born in the 1930s, they had not seen active duty during the Second World War. Secondary reactions to the nuclear dilemma, which sought what was perceived as security in a renewal of the “legacy of the fathers,” were an apparent element of this generation’s narrative.55 In speaking of annihilation, they might indeed have been employing this word purely as a concept of military tactics. But as a symbol of military practice, the use of the term testified to the desire to perpetuate a specific kind of wishful thinking—about military solutions, the strength of sheer willpower, and the superiority of a great military tradition—that these men were not yet willing to abandon.

Notes Translated from German by Paula Bradish 1. See Jehuda L. Wallach, Das Dogma der Vernichtungsschlacht: Die Lehren von Clausewitz und Schlieffen und ihre Wirkungen in zwei Weltkriegen (Frankfurt am Main, 1967).

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2. See Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2006). 3. See Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Die stabilisierende ‘Fiktionalität’ von Präsenz und Dauer: Institutionelle Analyse und historische Forschung,” in Reinhard Blänkner and Bernd Jussen, eds., Institutionen und Ereignisse: Über historische Praktiken und Vorstellungen gesellschaftlichen Ordnens (Göttingen, 1998), 381–407; Edgar Schein, Unternehmenskultur: Ein Handbuch für Führungskräfte (Frankfurt am Main, 1995). 4. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Ambivalente Filter,” in Max Niller and Hans-Georg Soeffner, eds., Modernität und Barbarei. Soziologische Zeitdiagnose am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt 1996), 290–305. 5. See Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn, 1973), book IV, chap. 11, 467ff.; see also Wallach, Dogma, chap. 1; Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Das Rätsel Clausewitz: Politische Theorie des Kriegs im Widerstreit (Munich, 2001). 6. See Hull, Absolute Destruction, chap. 2. 7. See Ulrike Breymayer, Bernd Ulrich, and Karin Wieland, eds., Willensmenschen: Über deutsche Offiziere (Frankfurt am Main, 1999). 8. See Michael Geyer, “The Past as Future: The German Officer Corps as Profession,” in Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad Jarausch, eds., German Professions, 1800–1950 (New York, 1990), 183–212. 9. See Edgar Schein on “trauma learning” in “How Culture Forms, Develops, and Changes,” in Ralph H. Kilmann, ed., Gaining Control of Corporate Culture (San Francisco, 1985), 17–43, here 24–27. 10. See Michael Geyer, “Krieg, Genozid, Ausrottung: Der Krieg gegen die Juden in einer Ära der Weltkriege,” in Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, eds., Zerbrochener Spiegel: Deutsche Geschichten im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 2005), 126–74; Bernhard R. Kroener, “Auf dem Weg zu einer ‘nationalsozialistischenVolksarmee’: Die soziale Öffnung des Heeresoffizierkorps im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Martin Broszat, ed., Von Stalingrad zur Währungsreform (Munich, 1989), 651–81; on the German general staff see Geoffrey P. Megargee, Inside Hitler’s High Command (Lawrence, 2000). Confirmation is now offered by Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Munich, 2006). 11. For a summary see Christian Hartmann, Johannes Hürter, and Ulrike Jureit, eds., Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Bilanz einer Debatte (Munich, 2005). 12. See Michael Geyer, “Endkampf 1918 and 1945: German Nationalism, Annihilation, and Self-Destruction,” in Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod, eds., No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century (Göttingen, 2006) 37–67. 13. See Kroener, “Nationalsozialistische Volksarmee,” 678ff. 14. See Michael Geyer, “Der Kalte Krieg, die Deutschen und die Angst: Die westdeutsche Opposition gegen Wiederbewaffnung und Kernwaffen,” in Klaus Naumann, ed., Nachkrieg in Deutschland (Hamburg, 2003), 267–318; Ulrich Herbert, “Deutsche Eliten nach Hitler,” Mittelweg 36, no. 3 (1999): 66–82. 15. See Klaus Naumann, Generale in der Demokratie: Generationengeschichtliche Studien zur Bundeswehrelite (Hamburg, 2007). 16. A first impression can be found in Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, Handbuch für Innere Führung (Bonn, 1956). 17. The main spokesperson of this “traditionalist” school was Heinz Karst, the general responsible for training and education; see Heinz Karst, Das Bild des Soldaten: Versuch eines Umrisses (Boppard am Rhein, 1964). 18. See Martin Kutz, Reform und Restauration der Offizierausbildung der Bundeswehr: Strukturen und Konzeptionen der Offizierausbildung im Widerstreit militärischer und politischer Interessen (BadenBaden, 1982). 19. See Hanns Schubert, “Zur Entstehung, Entwicklung und Bewährung der Konzeption der Inneren Führung,” in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, ed., Vom Kalten Krieg zur

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deutschen Einheit: Analysen und Zeitzeugenberichte zur deutschen Militärgeschichte 1945 bis 1995 (Munich, 1995), 297–322; see also Wolf Graf von Baudissin, Soldat für den Frieden: Entwürfe für eine zeitgemäße Bundeswehr, ed. Peter von Schubert (Munich, 1969). 20. Bundespräsident Gustav Heinemann, Speech in the Bundestag, 1 July 1969; see Christoph Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation: Deutsche Geschichte 1955–1970, 2d ed. (Bonn, 1997), 548. 21. See for example Wolf Graf von Baudissin, “Gutachten zur Wehrverfassung (April 1953),” in Baudissin, Soldat für den Frieden, 140–51, here 145. 22. See Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (New York and London, 1971), 417ff. 23. See Donald Abenheim, Reforging the Iron Cross:The Search for Tradition in the West German Armed Forces (Princeton, 1988). 24. Generalinspekteur Jürgen Brandt, “Weisung für Ausbildung, Erziehung und Bildung in den Streitkräften im Jahre 1980 (August 1979),” as quoted in Martin Kutz, “Tradition und soldatische Erziehung: Zu den gegenwärtigen historischen Leitbildern der Offiziersausbildung der Bundeswehr,” in Karl-Egon Schulz, ed., Streitkräfte im gesellschaftlichen Wandel: Sozialwissenschaftliche Analysen und Selbst- und Umweltverständnis moderner Streitkräfte (Bonn, 1980), 219–34, here 219. 25. General a.D. Ulrich de Maizière, interview by Axel Gablik, 17 November 1992, transcript, 12, in possession of the author. 26. Martin Kutz, “Militär und Gesellschaft in Deutschland in der Nachkriegszeit (1946– 1995),” in Ute Frevert, ed., Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1997), 277–313. 27. The work of the Nuclear History Program is of fundamental importance here, in particular Axel F. Gablik, Strategische Planungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1955–1967: Politische Kontrolle oder militärische Notwendigkeit (Baden-Baden, 1996). 28. On the early 1960s see Geyer, “Der Kalte Krieg, die Deutschen und die Angst.” 29. See Helga Haftendorn and Thomas Riecke, eds., “…die volle Macht eines souveränen Staates”: Die Alliierten Vorbehaltsrechte als Rahmenbedingungen westdeutscher Außenpolitik 1949–1990 (Baden-Baden, 1999). 30. De Maizière, interview, 14. 31. Ibid., 16. 32. On the nuclear dilemma of the Federal Republic of Germany see Jeffrey Boutwell, The German Nuclear Dilemma (London, 1990); on the subsequent paradoxes of the history of the Bundeswehr see Klaus Naumann, “Machtasymmetrie und Sicherheitsdilemma: Ein Rückblick auf die Bundeswehr des Kalten Kriegs,” Mittelweg 36, no. 6 (2005): 13–28. 33. On the following see Gablik, Strategische Planungen; Frank Buchholz, Strategische und militärpolitische Diskussionen in der Gründungsphase der Bundeswehr 1949–1960 (Frankfurt – New York, 1991). 34. See Buchholz, Strategische und militärpolitische Diskussionen, chap. 2. 35. This is revealed in the conversations between Hans Speier and former members of the military in the years 1952 to 1955; see Naumann, Generale in der Demokratie, chap. 2. 36. Studie Nr. 3, “Grundlagen-Sammlung für den deutschen Verteidigungsbeitrag,” 16 November 1956 (Führungsstab Bundeswehr), as quoted in Helmut R. Hammerich, “Kommiss kommt von Kompromiss: Das Heer der Bundeswehr zwischen Wehrmacht und U.S. Army (1950 bis 1970),” in Helmut. R. Hammerich, ed., Das Heer 1950 bis 1970: Konzeption, Organisation, Aufstellung (Munich, 2006), 17–351, here 103. 37. This phrase is generally attributed to the shortsighted perspective of then Federal Chancellor Adenauer. See Hans-Peter Schwarz, Adenauer: Der Staatsmann, 1952–1967 (Stuttgart, 1961), 332f. Similar perceptions can also be found in contemporary military position papers. See Bruno Thoß, NATO-Strategie und nationale Verteidigungsplanung: Planung und Aufbau der Bundeswehr unter den Bedingungen einer massiven atomaren Vergeltungsstrategie, 1952–1960 (Munich, 2006), 332ff.

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38. Heeresdienstvorschrift 100/1, October 1962, 149, as quoted in Gablik, Strategische Planungen, 402. 39. On the change of strategy see Johannes Steinhoff and Reiner Pommerin, Strategiewechsel: Bundesrepublik und Nuklearstrategie in der Ära Adenauer-Kennedy (Baden-Baden, 1992). 40. Deutsches Strategisches Konzept, Führungsweisung Nr. 1, 26 Januar 1967 (Führungsstab Streitkräfte), as quoted in Gablik, Strategische Planungen, 469ff. 41. Nevertheless, the strategy of flexible response embodied crucial dilemmas. See Dieter Krüger, “Schlachtfeld Bundesrepublik? Europa, die deutsche Luftwaffe und der Strategiewechsel der NATO 1958 bis 1968,” Historische Zeitschrift 56, no. 1 (2008): 171–225. 42. Brigadegeneral Albert Schindler, Ausarbeitung für eine “Studie Hauptprobleme,” 26 April 1965, as quoted in Gablik, Strategische Planungen, 399ff. 43. Baudissin also pointed this out; see Graf von Baudissin, “Kriegsbild.” 44. Wolf Graf von Baudissin, “Nato-Strategie im Zeichen der Friedenserhaltung, Vortrag bei der Hessischen Hochschulwoche für staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung, Bad Wildungen, 15.4.1969,” in Wolf Graf von Baudissin, Nie wieder Sieg! Programmatische Schriften 1951–1981 (Munich, 1982), 96–118, 105f. 45. This is a reaction that was also common in US military history, for example after the Vietnam War. Studies published in the 1970s and 1980s attempted to draw conclusions about the “fighting power” of the Wehrmacht for use in the reorganization of the US Army. See Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performances, 1939–1945 (Westport, 1982); also David Schoenbaum, “The Wehrmacht and G.I. Joe: Learning What from History? A Review Essay,” International Security 8, no. 1 (1983): 201–7. 46. See Martin Kutz, “Operative Führung als Denkfigur und Handlungskonzept der Heeresführung der Bundeswehr: Implikationen und Gefahren einer Wiederbelebung Schlieffenscher Denkmuster,” in Martin Kutz, Realitätsflucht und Aggression im deutschen Militär (Baden-Baden, 1990), 49–86. 47. See Inspekteur des Heeres, ed., Denkschriften zu Fragen der operativen Führung (VS – Nur für den Dienstgebrauch) (Bonn, 1987). 48. Ulrich de Maizière, “Gemeinsame Führung (Vortrag in der Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr, 5.9.1964),” in Ulrich de Maizière, Bekenntnis zum Soldaten: Militärische Führung in unserer Zeit (Hamburg, 1966), 21. 49. See Oberst D. Brand, “Grundsätze operativer Führung,” in Inspekteur des Heeres, ed., Denkschriften, 38f. 50. Ibid., 43. 51. Jürgen Keller, “Leadership – ein folgenschwerer Irrtum? Eine Kritik militärischer Führungsvorstellungen,” in Martin Kutz and Petra Weygand, eds., Europäische Identität? Versuch, kulturelle Aspekte eines Phantoms zu beschreiben (Bremen, 2000), 140–77. 52. See Dan Diner, Kreisläufe: Nationalsozialismus und Gedächtnis (Berlin, 1995), especially the chapter “Kontraphobisch: Über Engführungen des Politischen,” 95–112. 53. See the evidence in Gablik, Strategische Planungen, 131, 132, 136, 151, 153, 201, 203. 54. Hans Röttiger, “Atomdienstverweigerung,” Wehrkunde 6, no. 10 (1956): 517f. 55. Portraits of individual members of the generations of officers in the Bundeswehr can be found in Naumann, Generale in der Demokratie, chap. 3; see also Frank Pauli, Wehrmachtsoffiziere in der Bundeswehr: Das kriegsgediente Offizierkorps der Bundeswehr und die Innere Führung, 1955–1970 (Paderborn, 2009).

[[[ CH AP T ER 15

The Soviet Military Culture and the Legacy of the Second World War Mikhail Tsypkin

T

Second World War is arguably the most enduring and important artifact of the Soviet epoch in Russian history. Rebranded by Stalin as the Great Patriotic War after the German attack against the USSR (perhaps to make the Soviet public forget that until 22 June 1941 the Soviet government blamed the Second World War on the warmongering of the Anglo-French imperialists), this conflict that took more than 20 million lives in the USSR was successfully used by Stalin and his successors to legitimize their regime. In the apt phrase of Martin Malia, “[b]efore the war the regime’s only legitimacy was its alleged mandate from the logic of history; after the war the regime derived a far more real legitimacy from its role as organizer of the national victory.”1 The legitimacy formula, first introduced by Stalin in his victory banquet toast in 1945, also designated the Russian nation as a greater contributor to victory than the other nations of the USSR, a circumstance that allows the postcommunist regime in the Russian Federation to look for legitimacy in the sacrifice and victory of more than half a century ago. Indeed, the Second World War continues to occupy a unique position in the Russian popular mindset. Up to this day the Russians refer to the Second World War as “the war.” Even today, 78 percent of Russians consider the victory in the war to be the most important event in their nation’s history in the twentieth century; in 2003, 87 percent named it as the one event they were most proud of.2 The tremendous politicization of victory in the conditions of total ideological control by the Communist Party practically guaranteed that much of the professional military discourse in the Soviet Union was conducted with the reference to “the war.” Even today analyses of the Second World War experiences of the Soviet Armed Forces regularly appear in Russian professional military publications, where they are presented as relevant for the future. How profound was the impact of the Second World War on the Soviet military culture? HE LEGACY OF THE

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It is difficult to provide a rigorous answer to this question, because the history of the Soviet military after the Second World War is still a book barely open. Access to the military archives for that period is restricted even for Russian scholars, let alone Western ones. The declassification of Soviet-era archives is proceeding very slowly: in 2005, the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense had 10 million documents dating to the Second World War, only two million of them declassified. The Second World War military archives were not yet declassified in 2007, when Minister of Defense Anatoliy Serdyukov ordered complete declassification of the archival holdings for 1941–45, but the process is painfully slow.3 During the presidency of Vladimir Putin (2000–2008) the access to archives became even more difficult,4 and to date (April 2010) no improvement has been noticed. Despite the difficulties, much has been done both by Western and Russian scholars to study the history of the economic aspects of the Soviet defense policy after the Second World War on the basis of declassified archives.5 The situation is much more difficult with the military policy as such: bits and pieces of archival evidence have been declassified to selected Russian authors.6 Important documentary evidence about Soviet military policy has also been found in the archives of the nations that once were members of the Warsaw Pact.7 Little documentation, however, has been made available on military strategy formulation, resource allocation, and threat assessments by the Soviet high command and political leadership.8 Two other types of historical evidence are available to us: oral history and memoirs. Both have their shortcomings: memory failures, biases, self-censorship, and the impossibility of cross-checking their information against documents.9 Nevertheless, an oral history study (interviews with high-ranking Soviet officers) conducted in the early 1990s has provided valuable insights into Soviet military strategy and policy making that are helpful for understanding their military culture.10 Some of the memoirs of Soviet military officers and other officials have also contributed to our knowledge of the subject matter.11 The available evidence, however, is incomplete at best. It lacks mobilization and operational plans, decisions of the Politburo and other policy-making bodies, preparatory documents for such decisions, and so on. Therefore, my assessment of the Soviet military culture in the aftermath of the Second World War has an admittedly preliminary character. What can be stated with relative certainty is that in the years directly following the Second World War, Soviet military culture had three important characteristics: emphasis on space as an immense defensive barrier, emphasis on mass, and an ambiguous attitude to military professionalism. The legacy of the war also made the Soviet adjustment to the realities of nuclear weapons very slow and difficult. The experiences of the Second World War in fact left a number of different legacies throughout the USSR. Indeed, the divergent readings of the wartime

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suffering today constitute one of the points of contention between the Russian government, which views the war experience as a narrative of a black-andwhite struggle between good (represented by the Soviet Armed Forces) and evil (represented by Germany and its allies), and the view of the war, prevalent in the Baltic nations, as a disaster visited upon the good and the weak by the German and Russian predators. The owners of the victory were the Soviet partymilitary-industrial elites, which rose to the fore in the course of the war. These elites were, from the ethnic point of view, predominantly Great Russians who, before the experiences of the war, had been shaped by the Great Terror, during which they survived and even prospered. They were basically Stalinist in their outlook, i.e., Russian nationalist, xenophobic, fearful of new ideas, and imperialist. These elites demonstrated exceptional political longevity: their representatives ran the Soviet Union until the early 1980s, long after their Western counterparts had retired. Dmitrii Ustinov, for instance, Stalin’s minister of armaments during “the war,” ended his life and career in 1983 in the position of the USSR minister of defense. These elites shaped the Soviet-Russian narrative of the Great Patriotic War, as well as making the national security policy for four decades. Culture, including military culture, rarely demonstrates severe and wideranging discontinuity. No discussion of Soviet military culture during and after the Second World War can limit its historical reach only back to 1939, for this Soviet military culture was the product of both the pre-1917 Russian tradition and the enormous, perhaps unprecedented in modern history, political turbulence of the first two decades of communism. Several “persistent factors” (to use Alfred Rieber’s phrase)12 shaped this Russian military culture. From the early nineteenth century (and possibly earlier) until the Second World War, one such factor was space: whatever the reasons for the expansion of the Russian state, its huge size obviously affected its military culture. Space provided a cushion, a security buffer, as was seen during Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, when the Russian army managed to trade space for time until overextended and vulnerable lines of communication doomed the French forces. To be sure, space presented a serious challenge to the Russian military as well, for two reasons. First, defending the huge realm without natural borders required a large standing military. This became a particularly aggravating problem by the late nineteenth century, when Russia had to plan for a possible war in Europe against Germany and Austria-Hungary, and in the Far East against Japan, while maintaining control over Central Asia and facing down Turkey in the Transcaucasus.13 Second, space was not just territory: along the periphery it was imperial space, populated by people hostile to Russian rule. Trading imperial space for time was politically risky, complicated Russian military planning, and robbed it of flexibility. The Soviet regime had engaged in the spatial reorganization of its domain since 1918, when Lenin moved the capital from what was then Petrograd, dan-

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gerously close to the embryonic communist state’s western borders, into Moscow, Russia’s historic heartland. By the early 1920s, Lenin’s government had increased the protective layer of space by reconnecting most of the periphery of the Russian empire to the communist state. In the process of industrialization in the 1930s, Stalin established a new industrial center east of the Urals, safe from any imaginable attack by land or air. The most controversial spatial augmentation of the Soviet Union before the war was the acquisition, through the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939, of an additional territorial layer along the USSR’s western periphery. Stalin had a choice of either maintaining a buffer (consisting of Poland and the Baltic states) between the USSR’s existing western borders and Germany, or acquiring direct control over these territories at the price of losing a buffer between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Stalin chose the latter. One may argue that the Soviets made poor use of the seized territories, or even that these territories became an Achilles’ heel for the Soviets because German intelligence, before the attack in 1941, easily recruited many spies and saboteurs among the disgruntled local population.14 Still, space appeared to be the salvation of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Red Army avoided annihilation by retreating, buying time for mobilization of additional manpower and industrial resources while Stalin and his generals learned their trade as strategists. Russia’s relative economic backwardness was another persistent factor that had a profound impact on its military culture. Backwardness meant not only inferior weapons, but also inferior, uneducated conscripts and a slow rate of mobilization because of underdeveloped transportation, something of great importance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, the “Russian style of warfare” was “based on the expendability, endurance and courage of its peasant conscripts.” After the debacle of the Crimean War (1854– 55), some reformers in the military argued that Russia needed technology as modern as that of her potential Western adversaries. Opponents of reform, skeptical of Russia’s ability to match its more developed opponents in technology, insisted “that Russian soldiers possessed compensatory qualities [religiosity, Slav racial characteristics] that might allow them to fight with inferior equipment yet prevail notwithstanding.”15 The outcome of that struggle was that in the First World War Russia had to rely on “bravery, endurance and leadership” to compensate for technological, economic, and social backwardness.16 Russia’s economic backwardness also resulted in chronic shortages of armaments, inhibiting efficient use of manpower. During the First World War Russia produced, for instance, 28,000 machine guns, 11,700 artillery pieces, and 67,000 artillery shells, while England produced respectively 239,000, 26,400, and 218,000, and Germany 280,000, 64,000 and 306,000.17 Endurance, although it did not provide a magical recipe for victory, was nevertheless an important characteristic of Russian military culture. The Rus-

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sian army sustained tremendous losses in the First World War—the number of troops killed in action was 2,254,369—and yet the troops mutinied only when the central authority collapsed. Out of the 15,500,000 soldiers Russia put under arms, 9,347,300 were killed, wounded in action, or taken prisoner. This was 60.3 percent of the total number of those in military service. By comparison, the losses of the nations defeated in that war, Germany and AustriaHungary, which continued to fight for one more year after Russia quit the war, were somewhat smaller, 59.3 and 54.2 percent respectively, while England and France respectively lost 34.8 and 55.9 percent.18 The last, but by no means the least, factor was the strong and very close relationship between the regime’s survival and its military power. This relationship had two aspects: external and internal. Externally, Russian politicians knew, after the experience of the Russo-Japanese war, that a military defeat could lead to a revolution and the collapse of the Russian state. Such concerns should have stimulated the government to encourage development of a highly professional officer corps. Internally, however, the Russian political system relied on the military for its survival in the face of domestic challenges. This undermined military professionalism because the regime, in promoting officers, paid more attention to political loyalty than proficiency. In 1917, the poor performance of the Russian military was a major contributing factor to the regime’s destabilization, which, together with the military’s general reluctance to support the old regime played a major role in the collapse of the Russian state.19 The Second World War demonstrated how the Soviet regime combined its modernization policies with the established patterns of Russian military culture in order to be victorious. Relative backwardness continued to be a problem, but the Soviets came up with various methods of reducing its impact and making better use of the traditional strengths of the Russian military culture. The additional space acquired by Stalin as a result of the 1939 pact with Germany was probably not used as effectively as it might have been. Still, it is difficult to argue with the proposition that a smaller country would have been defeated in 1941. The huge size of the USSR allowed the Red Army to generously trade space for time without losing all of the Soviet manpower and industrial base. Even so, Soviet territorial losses in 1941 were such that it took the Red Army nearly three years of large-scale offensive operations to retake the territories lost to the Wehrmacht in the first three months of the Soviet-German war. Soviet industrialization policy improved the USSR’s transportation network to facilitate mobilization, while the campaign to eradicate illiteracy gave the Red Army a large number of recruits who were better-educated than their First World War predecessors. The 1930s saw a massive effort aimed at maximizing the number of Soviet citizens available for military service. Under a law adopted in 1938, practically all the male population of the USSR from the age of eighteen to the age of fifty could be mobilized for military duty. All of them

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underwent compulsory military training, creating a force of 14 million Soviet men who had received at least rudimentary military training. Several categories of women, primarily physicians and nurses, were also subject to compulsory draft in case of war.20 Compulsory participation of schoolchildren in military preparedness programs of Osoaviakhim (Union of Societies of Assistance to Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the USSR) introduced millions of young people to the basics of military service (shooting, handling hand grenades, etc.) and, even more importantly, socialized them to the idea of military service. The huge defensive and offensive operations of the war would have been impossible without great sacrifices of manpower by the Soviets, made possible by the conscription of more and more men. A system of universal military training and fear of the repressive machinery of the state allowed the mobilization of huge numbers of people. Between 22 June and 30 June 1941, 5.3 million reservists were called up; by 1 December 1941, ninety-seven existing divisions had been deployed to the west and 194 new divisions were created. This allowed the Red Army to lose 100 divisions in 1941 and still continue to fight.21 Altogether, the number of people mobilized for military service was 29,574,900.22 At the beginning of the war, the Red Army had 303 divisions; in the course of the war, the Soviets were able to form 661 additional divisions. The irreplaceable losses of Soviet military personnel were 11,285,057.23 The total losses of the USSR in the Second World War, including those among civilian population, are estimated to have been a staggering 26,600,000 people.24 Not only did the Soviets mobilize more people for the war than their tsarist predecessors, but they also armed them quite well. Despite continuing relative economic backwardness, the Soviet regime found a way to compensate for it and arm millions of conscripts by relying on industrial mobilization and mass production. Recent research has shown the extraordinary degree to which the industrial development of the 1930s was largely subordinated to the needs of mobilization. The new sectors of industry were “truly dual-purpose,” including automotive, tractors, aviation, and chemical industries, which in case of war were to shift to military production.25 Thanks to this the USSR, once it effected the huge evacuation of industry from the German-occupied western areas to the areas east of the Urals, succeeded in producing more than Ger many in most classes of weapons. Soviet industry produced 99,488 tanks and self-propelled guns against 58,200 produced by Germany, 453,000 artillery pieces against 87,000 by Germany, 136,911 aircraft against Germany’s 99,339.26 It is noteworthy that the Soviet generals of the Second World War were not entirely happy with the performance of the industry before the war. Marshal Georgiy Zhukov, for instance, pointed to insufficient accumulation of stockpiles of weapons and other materiel before the war as one of the main errors in preparation for the war.27 The lesson derived from the stupendous losses

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suffered during the first months of the war was that the armed forces needed to accumulate a huge stock of supplies in advance. Military professionalism had been severely damaged by the communist rule between the revolution and the Second World War. Political loyalty and connections became the most important criteria for promotion, much more so than under the tsarist system. Oversight by political officers undermined the standing of military professionals. The Great Terror claimed the lives of the most experienced and talented officers, and destroyed the morale of the officer corps. In such circumstances, the high command was too disoriented and fearful to provide the political leadership with adequate threat assessments and strategies. The rapid buildup of the armed forces from a relatively modestly sized force of 1.5 million on 1 January 1938 to over 5 million men by June 1941,28 also diluted the professionalism of the officer corps, since the majority of the new officers had received only rudimentary military training. Stalin’s policies before and during the Second World War demonstrated his acute preoccupation with the relationship between regime survival and the military’s loyalty and performance. Stalin knew the history of the First World War and viewed the future war through the prism of its predecessor, as demonstrated by his expectation of a protracted conflict on the Western front and his refusal to mobilize the Red Army because mobilization, in his opinion, was likely to lead to war, just as it had in 1914.29 His thorough purge of the military in 1937–38, especially its high ranks, suggests that he doubted their loyalty. The failure to foresee the character of the German attack was related to this diminution of military professionalism. Fear of Stalin, who did not want to confront the dangers inherent in his policy toward Germany, deterred the military from undertaking a sober analysis. As a result, they failed to understand the nature of blitzkrieg and the fateful consequences of being surprised at the beginning of hostilities.30 Thus, the concerns about political loyalty of the military trumped the requirement of having a truly professional officer corps to deal with an external threat. It was only in the course of the war, when threatened with defeat and collapse of his regime,31 that Stalin allowed partial restoration of military professionalism: he learned to listen to advice of his generals, reduced the role of political officers, and stopped using secret police terror against generals as a routine measure for maintaining his authority. The post–Second World War period in Soviet military culture can be summed up as a long attempt to fit the lessons of that war into the reality of the nuclear age. However, this attempt at integration never completely succeeded. Victory in the Second World War left the USSR in control of much of Central Europe, providing it with a very large defense buffer as well as a springboard for a possible offensive into Western Europe. For the next four decades the Soviet political and military leaders were preoccupied with keeping this buffer firmly in their hands. Indeed, the USSR used military force after the Second World

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War primarily to reestablish its control over rebellious Warsaw Pact members: in 1953 in East Germany, in 1956 in Hungary, and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. The paradox, apparently ignored by the Soviets, was that this space was a security burden and a source of tension between the USSR and NATO; indeed, NATO might not have existed at all if not for Soviet control of Central Europe. Apparently no one ever questioned the need to expend material and political resources on maintaining the spatial buffer in an era of extremely powerful long-range weapons. Keeping the Soviet possessions in Central Europe under control further boosted the Soviet military’s appetite for manpower. It is another paradox that nowadays, with the loss of both its Central European barrier and the space that constituted the western periphery of the USSR itself, objectively Russia’s security situation has become better than at any time in modern history: there is no danger of a military confrontation in the western theater, no threatening King Charles of Sweden, Friedrich the Great, Napoleon, Kaiser William, Hitler. Still, the Russian military today are bemoaning the loss of the defensive space and the threat posed by NATO, notwithstanding the fact that even during the Cold War NATO did not have offensive plans and now it cannot find a small number of soldiers to complement its very modest force in Afghanistan. More often than not, the Russian reaction to the loss of its imperial space is irrational: just witness the howls of protest against the plans to deploy elements of US missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic. The protestations of the Russian military do not cite any concrete threat to Russia, nor do they mention that the US national missile defense is so far unable to credibly intercept even one missile, let alone threaten the retaliatory potential of the Russian strategic nuclear forces. For the Russian military, “their” space being taken over is enough to prompt a strident defensive response. One of the lessons Soviet military leaders learned from the Second World War was that they needed to overwhelm the enemy with mass. Between 1968 and 1987 the armed forces’ “strength grew from 2 million and 138 divisions to 5.2 million and over 220 divisions.”32 Since the Soviet Union preserved the pre–Second World War mobilization system, it accumulated a huge number of reservists. By 2005 in the Russian Federation alone, which inherited about half of the population of the USSR, the compulsory reserve officer training programs surviving from the Soviet days continued to graduate 60,000 (!) reserve officers per year, though only 6,000 of them were required for active duty.33 Even today approximately 70 percent of the Russian armed forces are the socalled cadre units, capable of combat only after mass mobilization, which is supposed to bring the size of the military from its peacetime strength of approximately 1.2 million up to 7 or 8 million personnel.34 Another lesson of the Second World War was that the Soviet military forces—all the Soviet propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding—were inferior in quality compared to their Western opponents (again recalling the factor

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of backwardness. Therefore, the Soviets anticipated great manpower losses in a confrontation with NATO. The result, according to the former Deputy Chief of General Staff Col. Gen. Andrian Danilevich, was an enormous accumulation of weapons: in 1991, for instance, the USSR had 63,900 tanks, a fleet six times the size of NATO’s. This was necessary, according to Danilevich, in view of the Second World War experience, when the USSR had 15,000 tanks in 1941 in the western theater: Germany had only 3,000 in the same theater, but the Red Army nevertheless lost all its tanks in the west during the first month of the fighting.35 Soviet industry had to produce and stockpile enough “mobilization reserves,” i.e., raw materials and parts, to produce weapons for the first three to four months of a war. The mobilization plans that existed during the last several years of the Soviet Union envisaged production in the first year of war of tens of thousands of tanks, aircraft, etc.36 A system of interlocking interests of the military, which required masses of conscripts and weapons, and industry, which received fat orders to produce weapons and mobilization stockpiles, gradually came to depend on wildly—and consciously—inflated threat assessments. According to a former high-ranking Soviet military intelligence official, the General Staff insisted on a hugely overblown assessment of US industry’s ability to produce 50,000 Abrams tanks yearly, ignoring all evidence that in reality the US could produce a maximum of 1,800 tanks a year. When the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (signed in 1999) required large cuts in the Soviet men and materiel, the Soviet high command, apparently still preparing to fight battles on the scale of the Second World War, demanded an increase in the mobilization capacity of the Soviet defense industry to compensate for the reduction of standing forces.37 The Soviet command was so mesmerized by the experience of the Second World War that in the 1970s and perhaps even later they believed that since the US could produce up to 70,000 tanks a year during that war, it could—and intended to—build as many in case of the Third World War.38 By the 1980s the appetite for expendable manpower was increasingly at odds with the social, demographic, and security realities. The Soviet public, predominantly urban and well educated, could no longer produce enduring, expendable, and courageous soldiers, to use William Fuller’s description of peasant recruits. The source of the best conscripts—Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian families—became mostly one-child families. As a result, there were fewer and fewer of these conscripts, and their parents were less inclined to give up their children to military service. Meanwhile, the poor conditions of that military service continued to be suited for the expendable conscripts of years past, resulting in alienation between the public and the military that erupted into an open civil-military conflict during Gorbachev’s glasnost. Even President Putin’s crackdown on civic protest did little to put this particular genie back into the

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bottle, and Russian parents (at least, the better-educated and prosperous ones) remain dead set against surrendering their children to the military, which still treats them as expendable. It took the marginal performance of the Russian military in the war of August 2008 against tiny Georgia to finally convince the Russian political leadership and some members of the high command that the century-plus-old military system based on mass mobilization should finally go. In October 2008, Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov announced drastic changes in the strength and structure of the Russian armed forces. The cadre units and officers providing a peacetime skeleton staff in anticipation of wartime mass mobilization along the lines of July 1914 and June 1941, are to be finally phased out in several years.39 The lessons of the Second World War concerning the importance of military professionalism were not easy to assimilate for either the Soviet military or the Communist Party. As noted earlier, Stalin’s complete domination of the military at the beginning of the Soviet-German war resulted in a number of serious defeats. Subsequently, Stalin learned to defer, at least on some occasions, to the military’s professional judgment. But once the war was over, he reasserted his primacy by humiliating and demoting his own deputy supreme commanderin-chief, Marshal Zhukov, and jailing several prominent generals and admirals. Even though some of the top Soviet officers had bitter feelings about Stalin, they all recognized him as their commander-in-chief who had led them to victory. This became a problem for Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, who had to deal with a military command to whom Stalin had promised, in the last years of his life, the armed forces that they wished for: large enough to take on any and all opponents in battles along the lines of their Second World War triumphs. Khrushchev believed that this kind of warfare was outdated, and that the next war, if it happened, would be fought by nuclear weapons delivered by missiles. Accordingly, he cut conventional forces, against considerable resistance from the marshals. The cuts also freed up resources for improving standards of living, one of the mainstays of Khrushchev’s political program. Khrushchev’s “interference” with the domain of military professionals was bitterly resented by the officer corps because his ideas threatened their professional autonomy as well as their self-interest, and because they did not fear him nearly as much as they had his terrifying predecessor. Khrushchev never succeeded in completely overcoming the military’s resistance to his ideas. The price he paid was the loss of support among the military, which contributed to his ouster in 1964. Khrushchev’s successors expected complete loyalty from the officer corps, and in exchange were more deferential to their professional opinions than Stalin or Khrushchev. The Brezhnev leadership took the position that while the political leadership determined the military-political aspect of Soviet military doctrine (i.e., who the enemy was), the military were left to determine the

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military-technical aspect of the doctrine (i.e., the structure, strategy, and weapons of the armed forces) under the overall guidance of the Communist Party. This was most probably so because the Brezhnev leadership valued internal political stability above all else, and the unhappy experience of Khrushchev’s bureaucratic battles with the military certainly discouraged his successors from interfering in details of military affairs. Here the lessons of the Second World War gave the Soviet marshals powerful political ammunition, for had not Stalin’s interference in professional military affairs nearly ended in disaster in 1941–42? The military was the sole repository of expertise on military affairs: civilians in the Soviet Union did not study the military policy of the USSR or of its potential opponents. Still, the Communist Party discouraged military professionals from conducting unfettered inquiries into the challenges presented by new developments in military affairs. This limitation of military professionalism, combined with the military’s tendency to pursue its corporate interests and the innate conservatism of a strictly hierarchical military organization, was most pronounced when it came to understanding the impact of nuclear weapons on modern warfare. A discussion of developments in the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons policy and their role in the military culture is both obviously important and particularly difficult, because the evidence, as we will see below, is rather limited and often contradictory. While Soviet scientists and industry were frantically working on developing nuclear and thermonuclear weapons between 1945 and 1953, little innovation occurred in Soviet military thought. Between the end of the Second World War and his death in March 1953, Joseph Stalin was the sole and unchallengeable owner of the war legacy. All military wisdom was to be limited to the five “permanent” operating factors formulated by Stalin in February 1942: stability of the rear, morale of the troops, quantity and quality of divisions, weapons, and organizational ability of the command personnel. Stalin made any critical discussion of the war experience impossible, since the role of strategic surprise, like that visited by the Wehrmacht on the Red Army with such devastating success in 1941, could not be discussed at all. This, of course, was bound to be an early obstacle to understanding the revolutionary nature of nuclear weapons that could decide the outcome of a war in a surprise attack. Only after Stalin’s death could the highest echelons of the Communist Party, the military high command, and several top managers of the defense industry at last discuss the military implications of nuclear weapons. Elaborate plans for the use of nuclear weapons were made over the course of the subsequent four decades, and huge material and human resources were invested in developing nuclear weapons, their delivery systems, and infrastructure. Meanwhile, relatively little changed in the Soviet/Russian military culture. There is nothing surprising or unique in the initial predisposition of the Soviet military to see nuclear weapons as just bigger and more powerful in-

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struments of warfare that could be used toward rational ends. Their American counterparts had the same initial reaction. The striking thing is that throughout the decades spent in the nuclear shadow, the basic characteristics of Soviet/ Russian military culture that had made it victorious in the Second World War remained unchanged. The Soviets continued to prepare for a long global conflict that would require mobilization of manpower and industry on the scale of the past war; they also continued to view space as a crucial factor in their security. Soviet “strategists explained nuclear weapons simply as significantly more destructive arms that fit readily into the canon on conducting and winning a world war.”40 The Soviet strategy, derived from the inflexible ideological guidance of the Communist Party, anticipated that the next war would be not only global but also “decisive” in its goals; i.e., it would lead to political destruction of one of the opponents, just as Nazi Germany was destroyed in 1945. Logically, this desperate struggle for survival would trigger the use of nuclear weapons. Then why maintain the system for mobilizing and arming a multimillion military? Soviet strategists avoided the basic contradiction between the maintenance of a military organized along the lines of the two world wars, and the existence of huge nuclear arsenals that made another world war either impossible, or short and destructive beyond anything in the human experience. One of the most important lessons learned by the Soviet military in the Second World War was how overwhelming a surprise attack could be. A major study of the initial period of war published by the Soviet Ministry of Defense in 1974 simply made no reference to any change in the lessons of the Second World War that might be warranted by the appearance of nuclear weapons.41 The lesson of the blitzkrieg—that he who strikes first gains a strategic advantage—was projected by the Soviets onto the nuclear strategy. As a result, the Soviet high command found it difficult to understand the concept of nuclear deterrence. The goal of deterrence is strategic stability: to make a nuclear war extremely unlikely by presenting a party that may be tempted to attack first with the certainty of a devastating retaliation. In 1968, when the top Soviet officials were discussing the issue of hardening ICBM silos in order to provide for a survivable deterrent, thus increasing strategic stability, Defense Minister Marshal Andrei Grechko objected: outraged by the idea of a strategic posture based on the need to survive a first strike by an aggressor, he said that he would not allow for the repetition of a German surprise attack of 1941.42 In 1969, the commander-in-chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces, Marshal Nikolai Krylov, suggested that the Soviets solve the problem of vulnerability of their land-based ICBMs by delivering a first strike in a crisis.43 According to one participant in the strategic nuclear policy-making, military officers were inclined to view nuclear weapons “through the prism of the experience of the Great Patriotic War.”44 Very well-informed Russian authors note that the idea that nuclear war, unlike the Second World War, could not be won was accepted in the Soviet

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Union only at the beginning of the 1970s, with “many conditions and reservations,” and only at this late date was deterrence recognized as the only mission for nuclear weapons.45 The difficulty of acknowledging the radical change in the character of warfare introduced by nuclear weapons, and of making deterrence the official posture of the strategic nuclear forces, was due to political reasons and the inertia of self-interest on the part of institutions of national defense. The Soviet political leaders probably came to view the prospect of nuclear war as an unmitigated disaster as early as 1954, when four top Soviet nuclear scientists, all of them leading personalities in the nuclear weapons complex, all of them highly respected by the Soviet political leaders, wrote a report addressed to the Soviet leadership that described the effect of the use of thermonuclear weapons as an end to life on Earth. The scientists hoped to publish the report, but the political leaders, fearful that its implications would challenge the dogma of the inevitable victory of “socialism” over “capitalism,” refused to allow this. When one of the Politburo oligarchs, Georgiy Malenkov, said in a public speech that a thermonuclear war was unwinnable, he was quickly attacked by his colleagues, primarily Nikita Khrushchev, and “was forced publicly to repudiate his heresy by issuing the confident (if hollow) assertion that any atomic aggression by the West would be ‘crushed by the same weapons’ and lead to the collapse of the capitalist social system.”46 The shift to nuclear deterrence required recognition that “strengthening” one side to the detriment of the other was not a practical approach. This ran into mutually reinforcing ideological barriers and military culture. The nuclear and conventional armed forces … were to be ready for … victory, to which end they were to work to achieve supremacy over the enemy and be ready to undertake offensive action. The thought that these preparations in themselves could cast doubt upon “peaceful” Soviet policy and impel the other side to undertake countermeasures was considered a monstrous heresy. Through the late 1960s, expressing such a thought could cost individuals their freedom, and even through the early 1980s could result in drastic career consequences.47

Even after deterrence was recognized as the only practical mission for strategic forces, in the late 1970s and early 1980s “the strategic nuclear force corresponded more closely to the model of forces for warfighting (about 70 percent of warheads were on silo-based ICBMs with MIRVs).”48 Despite statements made by Soviet leaders in the late 1970s and early 1980s that nuclear war could not be won and should not be fought, it appears that such pronouncements did not affect military thinking and planning. According to Gen. Danilevich, the Soviet high command finally dropped the idea of nuclear preemption (a nuclear first strike designed to disable the enemy nuclear forces) only in 1980.49 A number of high-ranking Soviet officers interviewed by American researchers in the early 1990s maintained that from the 1970s on, the Soviet high com-

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mand viewed nuclear war as nothing short of a disaster.50 At the same time, it appears that in the 1980s the idea that the nuclear war was unwinnable had not penetrated military plans: the military, while no longer instructed to use nuclear weapons first, was still supposed to be ready to use them not just for retaliation, but for winning wars. Available documents suggest that in the late 1970s the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies continued to discuss winning in Europe by massive deployment of nuclear weapons.51 Even in the 1980s, these plans appeared to remain in force. At a meeting of the Consultative Committee of Party Secretaries of the Warsaw Pact nations in Budapest on 11 June 1986, in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, the Warsaw Pact leaders seized the opportunity presented by Mikhail Gorbachev’s discussion of the nuclear disaster to impress upon the Soviets their fears of the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons in Europe. It appears that the Warsaw Pact leaders were concerned that the Soviet military command was still planning for a winnable nuclear war in Europe. The Polish leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, whose previous job as the minister of defense of Poland afforded him very good insight into Soviet military planning, said that it would be necessary “to examine all the plans and concepts, as well as all the military exercises of our alliance, and to approach them more realistically. For instance, no one should have the idea that in a nuclear war one could enjoy a cup of coffee in Paris five or six days later.”52 The heritage of the Second World War had a lot to do with this reluctance to recognize the reality of nuclear warfare. The victory in that war had a nearly miraculous quality, since the conflict began with defeats unparalleled in Russian history and ended with the greatest expansion in history of Russian military and political power. This fact by itself reduced the stimulus for innovative thinking. The Soviet political leaders were dependent on the Second World War victory as an important device for legitimizing their power and therefore were not inclined to review its lessons. The military establishment, not prodded by politicians, was well positioned to use the Second World War victory, enshrined as a key element in the political system’s legitimacy myth, to protect its self-interest. The self-interest lay, above anything else, in (1) the huge size of the armed forces to be mobilized in case of war, which guaranteed a very large number of senior officer billets, and (2) the professional and political conservatism of the officer corps. The military were well aware of the threat presented to their self-interest by clear and realistic thinking about nuclear war. The 1968 edition of Marshal Vassily Sokolovskii’s Military Strategy, after a discussion of how global thermonuclear war was deemed to be the most likely scenario faced by the Soviet armed forces, warned against any attempts to cut the mobilization system inherited from the Second World War.53 The postcommunist Russian military

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continued to cling to the mass mobilization system until the military reform announced in 2008. After decades of silence on the subject, recently a highranking Russian officer (the chief of training of the Russian armed forces, Gen. Vladimir Shamanov) finally acknowledged that maintaining a mass mobilization system is wasteful in view of the existence of large nuclear arsenals.54 The roles of the military and Communist Party in the failure to realistically assess the impact of nuclear weapons on military strategy are unclear: each side tends to blame the other. One the one hand, the military blames the Communist Party for following Stalin’s model of limiting military professionalism. According to a former General Staff officer, in the 1970s, when the General Staff experts developed models that demonstrated the enormous destructiveness of nuclear war in Europe, the Communist Party leaders rejected the reports and “instructed the General Staff to plan for war with tactical nuclear weapons even though the General Staff reached the judgment that those weapons had little military utility in combat operations.”55 On the other hand, the former Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko complained at a Politburo meeting in 1988 (by which time Mikhail Gorbachev had begun criticizing the military for its excessive buildup of nuclear weapons) that the Soviet “high command believed that we would win in a war. So they were building more and more nuclear weapons.”56 A final judgment on the role nuclear weapons played in Soviet military policy and culture can be pronounced only once the access is opened to the relevant Russian archives. The legacy of the greatest victory of Russian arms turned out to be enduring and, in the long term, counterproductive. The Second World War strengthened the already existing major characteristics of Russian military culture. The pursuit of imperial space and mass in manpower and armaments turned out to be expensive economically and politically, and contributed to the collapse of the state it was supposed to defend. While the Soviet military talked a lot about the revolutionary character of nuclear weapons, in reality they attempted to integrate these weapons into the framework of their traditional military culture. The reasons for this lie outside of the military culture itself. The character of civil-military relations in the Soviet Union was not conducive to civiliandriven change. The Soviet regime, like its tsarist predecessor, always depended on the military’s loyalty, a condition that discouraged “interference” by civilians into the military’s professional affairs. The emphasis on mass and space became entangled with the Soviet Union’s domination of its Eastern European empire and the interests of Soviet industrial managers, which created another impediment to change. The impact of nuclear weapons on the Soviet military’s posture and thinking was limited not only by the military’s reluctance to recognize that these new weapons made the cherished lessons of the Second World War largely irrelevant, but also by the regime’s resistance to recognizing the fact that twentieth-century physics had canceled out nineteenth-century utopia.

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Notess 1. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York, 1994), 274. 2. Lev Gudkov, “‘Pamyat’ o voine i massovaya identichnost rossiyan,” Neprikosnovennyy zapas, 2005, nos. 2–3, n. p., http://www.nz-online.ru/index.phtml?aid=30011370, accessed on 28 February 2008. 3. http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/ruwiki/451589, accessed on 18 April 2009; Georgiy Ramazashvili, “Yest’ takaya professiya—istoriyu zashchishchat’: TsAMO RF v preddverii 60-letiya Pobedy,” n. p., Neprikosnovenyy zapas, 2005, nos. 2–3, http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2005/2/ra19 .html, accessed on 18 April 2009. 4. “Mekhanizm rassekrechivaniya, slozhivshiysya v seredine 1990-kh godov, … dolzhen byt’ otmenen,” n. p., http://www.polit.ru/analytics/2008/06/03/memorial.html, accessed on 19 April 2009. 5. See, for instance, Mark Harrison, ed., Guns and Rubles: The Defense Industry in the Stalinist State (New Haven, 2008); Irina Bystrova, Sovetskiy voyenno-promyshlennyy kompleks: problemy stanovleniya i razvitiya (1930–1980ye gody) (Moscow, 2006); Nikolai Simonov, Voenno-promyshlennyy kompleks SSSR v 1920–1950ye gody (Moscow, 1996). 6. For instance, some interesting evidence based on archival documents can be found in the new biography of the Soviet navy commander-in-chief Admiral Sergei Gorshkov: M. S. Monakov, Glavkom (Moscow, 2008). 7. See, for instance, Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991 (Budapest, 2005); Vojtech Mastny, Sven G. Holtsmark, and Andreas Wenger, War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War (London, 2006). 8. An important exception are the published excerpts from the Politburo discussions during the Gorbachev era, Anatoliy Chernyaev et al., V Politburo TsK KPSS (Moscow, 2006); important documents on defense policies in the 1980s are found in the archive of Vitaliy Kataev, (the head of the Defense Industry department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev era) maintained at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. 9. See the observations by Mark Kramer in Mark Kramer, Bruce J. Allyn, James G. Blight, and David A. Welch, “Remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis: Should We Swallow Oral History?” International Security 15, no. 1 (summer, 1990): 212–16. 10. John G. Hines, Ellis M. Mishulovich, and John F. Shull, Soviet Intentions 1965–1985, vols. 1 and 2 (McLean, VA, 1995). 11. See, for instance, Yuri Mozzhorin, Tak eto bylo (Moscow, 2000); Oleg Grinevskiy, Perelom: Ot Brezhneva k Gorbachevu (Moscow, 2004); N. F. Chervov, Yadernyy krugovorot: chto bylo, chto budet (Moscow, 2004); Vitaliy Shlykov combines memoirs with analysis in his “Chto pogubilo Sovetskiy Soyuz? Genshtab i ekonomika,” Voyennyy vestnik, no. 9 (2002): 5–182; Vitaliy Shlykov, “Rokovye proschety sovetskoy i amerikanskoy razvedok—2,” Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’, no. 10 (1996): 57–65; Vitaliy Shlykov, “Rokovye proschety sovetskoy i amerikanskoy razvedok—3,” Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’, nos. 11–12 (1996): 95–101. 12. Alfred J. Rieber, “Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy,” in Hugh Ragsdale, ed., Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 1993), 315–59. 13. An outstanding discussion of these problems can be found in William C. Fuller, Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (New York, 1992), 328–445. 14. David E. Murphy, What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa (New Haven, 2005), 32–41. 15. Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 303, 304. 16. Ibid., 451. 17. G. F. Krivosheev, Rossiya i SSSR v voinakh XX veka. Poteri Vooruzhenikh Sil (Moscow, 2001), n. p., http://www.lib.ru/MEMUARY/1939-1945/KRIWOSHEEW/poteri.txt#w02.htm, accessed on 1 March 2008.

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18. Ibid. 19. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1991), 278–86, 309–13. 20. David M. Glantz and Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed (Lawrence, 1995), 68. 21. Ibid. 22. Krivosheev, n. p., Rossiya i SSSR v voinakh XX veka. 23. Ibid., n. p. 24. Ibid., n. p. 25. Lennart Samuelsen, Plans for Stalin’s War Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941 (Houndmills, 2000), 202. 26. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York, 1996), 331, 332. 27. Georgiy Zhukov, Vospominaniya i razmyshleniya, vol. 1 (Moscow, 2002), 255. 28. David M. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (Lawrence, 1998), 9. 29. Zhukov, Vospominaniya i razmyshleniya, 251, 259. 30. Ibid., 226. 31. In 1941, the shock of the surprise attack was such that initially the top echelons of the Soviet regime were on the verge of disintegration. For the evidence of the regime’s near collapse in the first days after the German attack, see R. A. Medvedev, “I. V. Stalin v pervyye dni Velikoy Otechestvennoy voiny,” Novaya i noveishaya istoriya, no. 2, (2002), n. p., http://vivovoco.rsl.ru/ VV/PAPERS/HISTORY/STAL_41.HTM, accessed on 12 January 2007. 32. David M. Glantz, The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union: A History (Abingdon, 2004), 205. 33. Vstupitelnoe slovo Nachal’nika Sluzhby kadrovoy i vospitatel’noy raboty Ministerstva oborony RF generala armii N. A. Pankova na zasedanii Press-kluba voyennykh obozrevateley rossiyskikh SMI pri upravlenii informatsii i obshchestvennnykh svyazei MO RF, 8 September 2005, n. p., http://www.mil .ru/info/1069/details/index.shtml?id=10557, accessed on 13 February 2008. 34. Aleksandr Golts, “Sekretnaya reforma,” Pro et Contra 14, no. 1 (January–February 2009): 64. 35. Problemy prognozirovaniya, no. 2 (1996): 140, cited inV. Shlykov, “Chto pogubilo Sovetskiy Soyuz?” 28, 29. 36. “Mobilizationnaya podgotovka i krizis rossiyskoy ekonomiki,” Voennyi vestnik (Moscow, Interregional Foundation for Information Technologies), no. 2 (June 1998): 10. 37. Shlykov, “Rokovyye proschyoty sovetskoy i amerikanskoy razvedok—2,” 57, 58. 38. Shlykov, “Rokovyye proschyoty sovetskoy i amerikanskoy razvedok—3,” 99. 39. Golts, “Sekretnaya reforma,” 63–65. 40. Alexei Arbatov and Vladimir Dvorkin, Beyond Nuclear Deterrence (Washington, D.C., 2006), 19. 41. Army Gen. S. P. Ivanov, Nachal’nyy period voyny (Moscow, 1974). 42. Mozzhorin, Tak eto bylo, 154. 43. Ibid., 171. 44. Ibid., 156. 45. Arbatov and Dvorkin, Beyond Nuclear Deterrence, 20. 46.Yuri Smirnov and Vladislav Zubok, “Nuclear Weapons after Stalin’s Death: Moscow Enters the H-Bomb Age,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 4 (fall 1994): 14, 15. 47. Arbatov and Dvorkin, Beyond Nuclear Deterrence, 20. 48. Ibid., 22. Silo-based ICBMs are more vulnerable than ballistic missiles launched from submarines (SLBMs). 49. Hines et al., Soviet Intentions, vol. 1, 44. The evidence regarding Soviet military views on use of nuclear weapons is somewhat contradictory: while the source cited in fn. 47 dates the shift toward deterrence at the early 1970s, the source in fn. 49 attributes this change only to “around” 1980. Without documentary evidence, we cannot resolve this disagreement. 50. Ibid., vol. 1, 43.

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51. Mastny and Byrne, A Cardboard Castle, 408–12, 415–17. 52. Ibid., 536. 53. Marshal V. D. Sokolovskii, ed., Voyennaya strategiya (Moscow, 1968), 271, 272. 54. Cited in Golts, “Sekretnaya reforma,” 67. 55. Hines et al., Soviet Intentions, vol. 1, 43. 56. Chernyaev, V Politbyuro TsK KPSS, 325.

[[[ CH AP T ER 16

1945–1955 The Age of Total War Pieter Lagrou

The Second World War is part of the modern wars of our era, which have become infinitely more cruel, through the massive scale of the destruction, but also by requiring inhuman efforts. Men are thus forced to execute merciless and unpleasant tasks. The Korean War we are witnessing today illustrates this abundantly. … The Hague Convention of 1907, outlining the rules of humanity in warfare, could not anticipate the development of modern war, notably the necessity to bomb cities and the emergence of partisan warfare, a war without rules which requires new methods of combat. … My clients are men who found themselves in a situation that was never foreseen and never witnessed before in other wars. … The limit of what constitutes a war crime is therefore military necessity. Soldiers, policemen, civil servants in time of war have to act according to military necessity. In the case of the interrogation of terrorism suspects, this limit is avowal. If reinforced methods are used to extract information from terrorist suspects which allows to prevent new acts of terror, and thereby, to save lives, they are a legitimate application of military necessity, in the framework of the Hague Convention which stipulates that the occupier is responsible for the maintenance of public order and the protection of the civilian population. A war crime occurs only when the beatings continue beyond the point of avowal, when they have lost all military necessity. My clients have acted as responsible professionals, in the clearly defined framework of the Verschärfte Vernehmung (intensified interrogation) and never committed gratuitous acts of cruelty.1

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HE PLEA OF DEFENSE attorney Hartmann, a member of the Hamburg Bar Association, delivered before the Military Appeals Court of Brussels in August 1950 during the trial of thirteen members of the Geheime Feldpolizei Unit 530, which was stationed in Brussels from May 1940 until August 1944, and more particularly of his client Walter Brodmeier, is strikingly contemporary. In a trial where more than 240 victims of torture made public depositions and where the identification of the suspects was beyond doubt, he adroitly diverts attention to the Allied policy of aerial bombing, to the Korean War that had just broken out to confront the West with a new communist

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threat, and to a generalized context of war on terror, which contemporary British, French, and Dutch experiences made all too familiar. The year 1945 marked the end of the Second World War in Europe, but by no means did it signal the end of the military involvement of Europeans in violent conflicts. The end of the war plunged Greece into a long and bloody civil war. In the Baltic region, anti-Soviet partisan activity continued until the early 1950s.2 In the Netherlands, France, and Britain, troops were not demobilized but sent straight from the European theater of war to the reconquest of colonial possessions. The two “police actions” of the Dutch in Indonesia in 1947 and 1948 involved over 100,000 Dutch soldiers each at a cost of 5,000 fatalities, almost twice the number of Dutch military casualties in Europe during the Second World War, and left 150,000 casualties on the Indonesian side. For France, 8 May 1945 was not only the end of the war in Europe, but also the start of the Setif insurrection in Algeria, which left 40,000 dead. The Malgache insurrection two years later left a comparable number of dead.3 In the main French theater of war in those years, Indochina, 60,000 French soldiers and almost half a million Vietnamese died between 1946 and 1954. As for Britain, in the same time span its troops were involved in counterinsurgency campaigns in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and South Yemen, while violence and mass death engulfed the crown colony India as soon as Britain had granted independence.4 The proximity of these conflicts with the nominal end of war in Europe created numerous continuities. Resistance fighters in France and the Netherlands who had volunteered to fight the German enemy ended up fighting dirty colonial wars, often in spite of their demobilization requests. In the Netherlands, compulsory military service recruits were sent to Indonesia from September 1946 onward, even though the constitutional amendment permitting this was voted in only one full year later. In both countries, former SS volunteers and collaboration convicts were granted reduced sentences if they enrolled in the expeditionary corps. In France, the Légion Étrangère recruited several tens of thousands of former Wehrmacht and SS veterans (out of a total of 500,000 légionnaires between 1830 and 1961, 210,000 were German nationals). Nor were the French the only active recruiting agents. The US administration was particularly keen to tap the expertise of German experts in partisan warfare, such as Reinhard Gehlen. Even for ordinary German POWs who did not volunteer to continue the war on different fronts, the war sometimes continued. The Evangelische Kirchengemeinde (The Evangelical Church Community) filed an official complaint with the International Committee of the Red Cross over the employment of German POWs in Albania for the clandestine loading of explosives and automatic rifles in coal ships sailing to Greece.5 The Partisanenkrieg was very much part of the present in postwar Europe, and terrorist attacks, such as the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem in June 1946, which killed

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almost one hundred, a third of them British nationals, made no less of an impression than the contemporary proceedings of the Nuremberg Trial. The great regularity of the bombing campaigns by Irgun and the Stern Group in Palestine and abroad in the years 1946–48, the spectacular assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, and more sporadic attacks in Saigon, Cairo, Thessalonica, and the western occupation zones of Germany form a crucial context for understanding the elaboration of military doctrines in the postwar years.6 As defense attorney Hartmann very well knew, it was in the shadow of these bombs, no less than those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that “postwar” military cultures and thinking about collective security took shape. It is the central contention of this essay that many of the sources previously used as various articulations of retrospective analysis, or even of the “work of memory,” such as war crime trials and debates on international law, were also very much prospective, crucially involved in outlining new military doctrines and methods of combat for the myriad lingering conflicts in which the main actors of these trials and debates were implicated. The US, Britain, France, and Belgium attributed exclusive judicial competence over war crime trials to military courts. Civilian judges thus always sided with active and reserve officers, for whom the issue of interpreting the rules of war was all but an academic or purely retrospective matter. A first example of this is the fierce debate over the revision of the Geneva Conventions. In 1947, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) proposed a set of amendments to modify existing conventions, including the Geneva Convention of 1929 on the protection of prisoners of war. The most contentious issue was the extension of the protection of the convention, defined in article 4, to “irregular forces” or those considered as such by the detaining power.7 Germany had initially refused to recognize De Gaulle’s Free French Forces captured in the desert as regular soldiers, considering them irregular combatants depending on a renegade military formation commanded by a deserter sentenced to death by the official French government. A similar issue emerged after September 1943 in Italy, when Germany refused to recognize Marshall Badoglio’s turncoat forces as regular troops. The ICRC had successfully interceded in these captives’ favor with the German authorities, but to prevent future conflicts over the interpretation, it proposed a reformulation of the first article of the Geneva Convention.8 Whereas the text of 1929 covered “all personnel belonging to the armed forces of the belligerent parties,” the new proposal read: “members of the armed forces, whichever government or authority they claim to belong to.” This of course was a very liberal definition that instantly raised objections, since it extended the protection to “des forces combattantes en bandes et en territoire occupé,” in other words, Partisanenkrieg. It was therefore suggested that this extension be restricted to “military formations obedient to an authority not recognized by the enemy, but allied

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to a regular belligerent nation”—in short, that it recognize auxiliary forces in a context of international conflict but not insurgents acting within the occupied territory. The proposals, discussed with national delegations in Geneva in 1947, were officially debated at the Stockholm Conference in 1948 and finally approved in Geneva in 1949. Of all the proposed modifications, the extension of the protection of the third Geneva Convention to insurgents proved the most contentious. From a legal point of view, conservative commentators observed that an elastic interpretation would undermine the cornerstone of the rules of war as set in the Hague Convention of 1907, namely the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. Not surprisingly, the British delegation took the fore in opposing a liberal definition that would bring full recognition for partisans through the back door of a convention on POWs. There were four general rules determining status as a regular combatant: having a responsible commander, carrying a distinctive sign, carrying arms openly, and respecting the rules of war. To this the British delegation wanted to add a whole set of new conditions, such as prior notification of the precise nature of the distinctive sign, a formal declaration of war, a guarantee of the effective control by the partisan headquarters over local units and of the efficiency of internal communications—conditions attributing almost unlimited margins of appreciation to the detaining power.9 In the final compromise, protection was extended to “[m]embers of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied,”10 provided they respect the aforesaid conditions of the Hague Convention. The debates in Stockholm and Geneva from 1947 to 1949 proved to be a fascinating mixture of backward- and forward-looking analysis. The initial ICRC proposal was most explicitly formulated as a redress of a historical tort done to De Gaulle’s Free French, but France did not unambiguously champion the legal protection of insurgents, and for good reason, given the involvement of its troops in military theaters all over the world. Nor was the fatherland of partisan warfare, the Soviet Union, much more proactive in this regard. The outcome, restricting legal protection to insurgent forces belonging to a party in an international conflict, was both perfectly adequate to the historical situation of Europe during the Second World War and perfectly inapplicable to the “internal police operations” of colonial warfare. Interestingly, Denmark—a country that certainly never excelled in partisan warfare during its gentle German occupation—proved to be the staunchest defender of the right to insurgency, arguing that since Nuremberg declared a war of aggression illegal, all forms of resistance against it were legitimate. Paragraph 6 of article 4 therefore both echoed revolutionary rhetoric legitimating la levée en masse, and reassured any colonial power of a world safely carved up into spheres of influence since

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1885 and again 1919, since it extended the protection of the convention to “[i]nhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.”11 Clearly, engagement in colonial conflicts set strict limits to any recourse to international law as a retrospective discourse on the unlawfulness of certain types of Nazi crimes. Even with this strong defense of legal conservatism, field manuals contemporary with the adoption of the new Geneva Conventions contained incitement to manifest violations of international law. The Manuel à l’usage des combattants d’Indochine published in 1949 by the État-Major du Corps Expéditionnaire, Forces Armées d’Étrême-Orient, for example, instructs officers to, “on little used trails, take indigenous people you encounter with you for a few hours and only liberate them when you think it is safe to do so,” and cautions elsewhere that “the peasant who salutes respectfully might have his gun hidden only a few feet away”—recommendations that might be interpreted as an incitement to hostage taking, or to a confusion of protected civilian population and combatants.12 The severe limitation of the legitimacy of insurgency and the confirmation of the legitimacy of retaliation to it are also shown convincingly in postwar trials. The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, convening from November 1945 through November 1946, corresponded to an ambitious project of legal innovation but very rapidly lost its impetus and even provoked some severe backlashes. Of the four central accusations in the Nuremberg trial— conspiracy, war of aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes—only the fourth category, corresponding to a classical definition of international law, was systematically taken up by the national military tribunals organized by the occupying forces in Germany and in the formerly occupied countries. The socalled American Nuremberg successor trials were highly controversial.13 George Kennan viewed them “with horror” and wrote that Nazi crimes on the eastern front were “consistent with the customs of warfare which have prevailed generally in Eastern Europe and Asia for centuries in the past, they are not the peculiar property of the Germans.”14 John Foster Dulles intervened personally to protect a whole series of indicted Wehrmacht and SS generals he had worked with in Italy,15 and Senator Joseph McCarthy turned against the Malmedy trial as a first move in his campaign against the cosmopolitan anti-fascist and procommunist forces who tried to instrumentalize American foreign policy for their own purposes, rather than help rehabilitate the German ally in the Cold War.16 Conservative judges, mostly retired Republican judges on state courts in the Midwest, regularly overruled their prosecutors’ offices, being more receptive to the arguments of defense attorneys and reaffirming the rights of a standing army faced with insurgency. Staunchly anti-communist and partly

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anti-Semitic, they adhered to the argument that terrorism had to be fought by all means as a form of legitimate defense of a regular army. Their analysis of contemporary events, whereby regular armies faced terrorists aided by the Soviet Union in Indonesia, Indochina, Malaysia, and particularly in Palestine, could only reinforce this interpretation. The “hostage case” against the German supreme command in the Balkans is the most extreme example, affirming in its sentence that although “[g]uerrillas may render great services to their country and, in the event of success, become heroes even, they still remain war criminals in the eyes of the enemy and may be treated as such.”17 The hostage case ruling notably delivered a new codification of the recourse to hostage shooting, introducing the principles of proportionality and collective responsibility of the civilian population among whom hostages are chosen, and of the presumed authors of the terrorist attack. The German command was thus condemned for the disproportion it had applied in the Balkans by shooting 200 civilians for a single military casualty, and for the arbitrary way in which hostages were chosen—but, very explicitly, not on the grounds that hostage shooting was illegal per se. There is no stronger statement of the illegitimacy of insurgency than to legitimate the shooting of innocent civilians as a method to combat it. American jurisprudence made the task of other military courts in less extreme contexts arduous. In the Fosse Ardeatine case, the prosecuting judge had to argue that disproportionality—358 Italians executed in retaliation for 35 German victims of a bomb attack—did apply, particularly because the many retaliation victims were high-ranking officers, whereas the German victims had been rank-and-file. The defense attorney for General Alexander von Falkenhausen, supreme commander of the German occupation forces in Belgium, even cited the 1948 ruling by the US military court to prove the exemplary moderation of his client, who had perfectly anticipated these rules in his policy of hostage shooting, sticking scrupulously to a 10:1 ratio. This brings us back to Attorney Hartmann and his clients of Geheime Feldpolizei Gruppe 530 in Brussels. The Belgian judicial authorities had adopted a decidedly prospective approach in their war crimes program.18 National frustration over the impunity of the perpetrators of the atrocities of August 1914 had been huge in the interwar years, and the insult of the Leipzig Trial, where German judges rejected the cases brought to it by the Belgian authorities, was not easily forgotten. Rather than expeditious sentences such as those meted out by French military courts or by the US court in Dachau, in judging an egregious crime committed in Malmédy on Belgian soil in January 1945, the Belgian judiciary formulated the ambition to create an unassailable jurisprudence answering to the highest standards of procedure, one the former German aggressor would be forced to accept as fully legitimate. The law organizing the trials was considered a legal masterpiece. Unlike the Nuremberg precedent,

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the Belgian law avoided any retroactive legislation: in order to be judged, a crime should qualify both as a common law crime under the Belgian penal code and as a manifest violation of the rules of war as codified in international law and conventions accepted by the German occupier. Unlike before French and Dutch courts, war crime suspects condemned by a Conseil de Guerre had a right to appeal to the Cour Militaire and even to the civilian Supreme Court (Cour de Cassation), which the vast majority of convicts effectively did. More exceptional still, all suspects had the right to be represented by a German defense lawyer, a generosity criticized as foolish by the US occupation authorities in Germany, in the wake of the Malmédy controversy, and consequently boycotted as far as exit permits for lawyers from the US occupation zone were concerned. The British authorities proved more cooperative, but it was above all the German authorities who proved cooperative beyond expectations. The ministry of justice of North Rhine Westphalia footed the bill for all Reichsdeutsche Kriegsverurteilte (citizens of the Reich sentenced for war crimes), and the Zentrale Rechtsschutzstelle (Central Office for Legal Protection) in Bonn provided German lawyers with centralized information on the most recent international jurisprudence. High-profile German lawyers and academics, internationally recognized experts in international law with considerable political and logistical backing from their own local authorities and the ICRC, found themselves thus in a position of superior access to information compared to Belgian prosecutors with limited means and experience. It was in this uneven contest that one of the most interesting battles on the redefinition of military doctrines was fought out in postwar Europe. Of the public depositions made by 240 torture victims, only 42 were considered by the court. Torture as such was not codified as a violation of international law. It was mentioned in the Geneva Convention of 1949, but the Belgian judiciary had disallowed retroactivity. Moreover, the sentences foreseen in the national penal code seemed utterly inappropriate in the case of the systematic torture by Gestapo agents, since the maximal tariff for “coups et blessures” (blows and injuries, articles 398–400 of the Penal Code)—three months to two years of prison—could only be doubled in the case of systematic repetition. Only where torture had caused death or permanent disability could the court require sentences that would at least be acceptable to the public. This judicial constraint led to a double selection. On the one hand, more than 200 Belgian torture victims were told that their testimony was irrelevant to the court since they had not suffered death or permanent disability. Given the respective roles of the Geheime Feldpolizei, a military police concerned with “military necessity,” and the SIPO-SD, the Nazi police force that targeted “enemies of the Reich,” these 200 torture victims were primarily martyrs of the patriotic resistance movement. On the other hand, eleven of the twenty-four members whose extradition Belgium had obtained after extensive diplomatic

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wrangling were sent back to Germany before the opening of the trial, since the investigating judge had failed to identify their personal responsibility for the death or permanent disability of “terrorism suspects” in their custody. Ironically, commanding officers were overrepresented among the released suspects, since they did not routinely take part in the physical abuse of suspects. At the trial, the thirteen others could thus invoke their obedience to the orders of superiors who, after several years in Belgian custody, had been sent home without facing judgment, without either exposing them to sanctions or risking contradiction. Obedience to superior order was not a valid argument in cases of “manifest violation of rules of war and humanity”—a case the suspects and their lawyers could contest by quoting the detailed rules and procedures for Verschärfte Vernehmung (intensified interrogation) valid in the German army. Belgian jurisprudence of the years 1948–52 is often cited in contemporary legal commentary as an important innovation, showing that it is possible to convict criminals in national courts on the basis of international conventions while applying the highest standards of procedure. But if these trials were supposed to look back on the war years, to deliver historical truth, and to satisfy the legitimate claims to justice by the victims, they can only be considered a failure. If they were supposed to look forward and to deliver new standards, new interdictions and thus contribute to the prevention of new crimes, as its main architects insistently claim, they can at best be considered a Pyrrhic victory. However, for activists of international law as a universalistic utopia living precisely in the 1940s and 1950s, showing that it was possible to condemn soldiers of a regular army for having tortured terrorism suspects was no mean achievement. As far as some of the most essential elements of military doctrines are concerned—counterinsurgency, war on terror, retaliation against civilian populations, use of torture—1945 is neither a watershed nor an aftermath of what came before. At most was there an impetus to change norms, originating almost exclusively from outside the military establishment—if an exception is made for the mostly civilian judges staffing military tribunals. The resistance to change was even stronger, and it is no exaggeration to say that on some of the core questions, military doctrines had been solidly reaffirmed by the time the Korean War broke out. Quite obviously, no single discussion of the history of the Second World War in the years 1945–60 can avoid the immediate implications for the present. The bitter historiographic battles on the history of British wartime strategy are a case in point. By creating the Special Operations Executive and pretending to “set Europe ablaze,” Winston Churchill not only parachuted weapons for Tito’s communist guerrillas, who would make Europe unsafe for democracy; he also, more fundamentally, legitimated the very strategies that dug the grave of the British Empire.19 In that regard, no one probably represents pre- and post-1945 continuities better than Carl Schmitt. His Theorie der Partisanen, published in 1963, is the

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condensation of a series of lectures he delivered as a guest professor in Franco’s Spain.20 For Schmitt, wars of extermination are what have characterized European modernity ever since the French Revolution legitimized the levee en masse and thereby removed the lid of what used to be the restrained exercise of interstate violence, effacing the distinction between soldiers and civilians and undermining the state’s monopoly on the exercise of violence. Perversely, this originally French transgression provoked Prussian authorities into a similar declaration when faced with Napoleonic conquest. The French Commune, the events of August 1914, and, ultimately, the Bolshevik Revolution, all followed on the same premises. The lawless and limitless “wars of extermination” waged by Soviet partisan bands two decades later forced the German army in response—and in response only—to draconian retaliation. The catastrophic wreckage heaped upon Europe by the evil spirit unleashed from Pandora’s box in the 1790s did not convince European commentators of the need to restore the prerogatives of the regular army and the state monopoly on violence. Quite the contrary, guerrilla war was legitimized, celebrated by the French and the British no less than by the Soviets, and passed unto the hands of insurgents in their colonies. The Partisanenkrieg threatened Western civilization, now that the Leninist revolutionary discourse had been taken up by an alliance of the colored people of the world against the Europeans and their descendants. Legal and polemicist arguments on “military necessity,” and on the limits and transgressions of regular armies facing insurgencies and terrorism in the 1940s and 1950s, are at the heart of the mental reconstruction of Western Europe. The image of an “honourable war” fought by Nazi Germany on the western front laid the foundations for postwar reconciliation and the integration of the Federal Republic into the European Community and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The “Western world” was ready to forget, if not to endorse, the savage war waged on the eastern front against communists and “Asian hordes.” By the same token, the Federal Republic abstained from criticism of the dirty wars fought by France, Britain, the Netherlands, and, somewhat later, the United States, against communist and non-European enemies. In the final analysis, their military doctrines in these different conflicts were not that far apart. It is no coincidence that the end of the Cold War has created room for critical retrospection, both for the Wehrmacht crimes in Germany and for torture in the Algerian War in France. However, 1989 was not the end of history. Attorney Hartmann’s plea sounds more familiar in 2010 than probably at any other time since 1945, which is an altogether different history of a different aftermath.

Notes 1. Auditorat Militaire, groupe GFP 530, farde XVI, partie III, plaidoirie de Hartmann en faveur de Brodmeier. The author thanks Nora Khayi for drawing his attention to this document at

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the research seminar conducted at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2004. Translation by Pieter Lagrou from French translation in the archives of the German original plea. 2. For a fascinating argument utilizing international law to prove the unabated legitimacy of the Lithuanian state (negating the “irregular” nature of the “regular” Lithuanian army, improperly called “partisans,” see Bernardas Gauilius, “Field Courts of the Lithuanian Guerilla Fighters (1944–1953): Just Deadly or Deadly Just?” International Seminar on Military Justice, Paris, 19–20 January 2007. 3. For the lower estimate cited here, see Jean Fremigacci, “1947 : l’insurrection à Madagascar,” Marianne, no. 401 (December 2004); for the higher estimate (more than 80,000), see Jacques Trochon, L’insurrection malgache de 1947 (Paris, 1974). 4. See, for instance, Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York, 2005). 5. CICR Archives, Geneva, C JC, Albania. 6. For a useful chronology, see http://www.mediasnews.com/chrono/chrono1945.php. 7. Rapport du Comité international de la Croix-Rouge sur son activité pendant la seconde guerre mondiale (1er septembre 1939 – 30 juin 1947) (XVII° conférence internationale de la Croix-Rouge, Stockholm, août 1948), vol. 1 (Geneva, 1948); Paul de la Pradelle, La conférence diplomatique et les Nouvelles Conventions de Genève du 12 Août 1949 (Paris, 1951); CICR, XVII° Conférence Internationale de la Croix-Rouge, Stockholm, août 1948 : Projets de Conventions revisées ou nouvelles protégeant les victimes de la guerre, no. 4, 2d. ed. (Geneva, 1948). See also: http://www.icrc.org/dih.nsf/, 1949 Convention. 8. See de la Pradelle, La conférence diplomatique, passim. 9. Ibid. 10. See http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/, 1949 Convention, art. 4, (2) 11. See http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/, 1949 Convention, art. 4, (6) 12. Document circulated by Alain Ruscio in the research seminar organized by Raphaelle Branche and Sylvie Thénault on “Répression, contrôle et encadrement dans le monde colonial au vingtième siècle,” Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, 4 June 2002. See also Alain Ruscio, La guerre française d’Indochine: 1945–1954 (Brussels, 1992); Alain Ruscio, La guerre «française» d’Indochine: (1945 – 1954): les sources de la connaissance bibliographie, filmographie, documents divers (Paris, 2002), and Michel Bodin, “L’adaptation des hommes en Indochine (1945–1954),” in Maurice Vaïsse, ed., L’armée française dans la guerre d’Indochine, 1946–1954 (Brussels, 2000), 111–31. 13. See Peter Maguire, Law and War: An American Story (New York, 2001). 14. Maguire, Law and War, 151–52. 15. See Kerstin Lingen, Kesselrings letzte Schlacht. Kriegsverbrecherprozesse, Vergangenheitspolitik und Wiederbewaffnung: der Fall Kesselring (Paderborn, 2004). 16. See James Weingartner, A Peculiar Crusade: Willis M. Everett and the Malmedy Massacre (New York, 2000). 17. Maguire, Law and War, 171. 18. Pieter Lagrou, “Eine Frage der moralischen Überlegenheit ? Die Ahndung deutscher Kriegsverbrechen in Belgien,” in Norbert Frei, ed., Transnationale Vergangenheitspolitik : Der Umgang mit deutschen Kriegsverbrechern in Europa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 2006), 326–50. 19. See, for example, Kenneth Macksey, The Partisans of Europe in the Second World War (New York, 1975). 20. Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen: Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (Berlin, 1963).

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Notes on Contributors

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Chair of the Department of Italian Studies and Professor of Italian Studies and History at New York University. She is the author of Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–45 (Berkeley, 2001, 2004) and the editor of Gli imperi: dall’antichità all’età contemporanea (Mulino, 2009) and Italian Colonialism (with Mia Fuller) (New York, 2005, 2008). She is currently writing a book entitled Fascism’s Empire Cinema: Histories and Journeys of Italian Conquest and Defeat, to be published by Indiana University Press. She has also completed research for Italian Prisoners of War and the Transition from Dictatorship, to be published by Princeton University Press. Paul Betts teaches German history at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. He is the author of The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Berkeley, 2004) and is co-editor (with Alon Confino and Dirk Schumann) of Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (Berghahn, 2008) as well as (with Katherine Pence) Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Michigan, 2008). He was joint editor of the journal German History (2004–2009), and his book Within Walls. Private Life in the German Democratic Republic will be published by Oxford University Press in Autumn 2010. Frank Biess is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, 2006) and has co-edited (together with Mark Roseman and Hanna Schissler) Conflict, Catastrophe, and Continuity: Essays in Modern German History (Berghahn, 2007). He is currently working on a history of fear and anxiety in postwar Germany. Heide Fehrenbach is Presidential Research Professor in the History Department at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of Cinema in Democratizing Germany (1995) and Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (2005), and coauthor, with Rita Chin, Geoff Eley, and

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Atina Grossmann, of After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (2009). Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is a professor of history at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in modern Russian/Soviet and European history as well as women’s studies. She is the author of two books: Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (Routledge, 2001) and The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–45: Myths, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge, 2006). She is currently working on a cultural history of international communism. Anna Krylova is Hunt Assistant Professor of Modern Russian History at Duke University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Russian gender and cultural history, World War II and mechanization of warfare, and issues of historical interpretation. She is the author of Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge, 2010) and has published articles in The Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Pieter Lagrou teaches contemporary history at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He published The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge University Press) in 2000 and is currently working on a project on postwar justice and on contemporary European history. Among his recent publications are “Europe in the World: Imperial Legacies,” in Mario Telo, ed., The European Union and Global Governance (Routledge, 2009), and “Between Europe and the Nation: The Inward Turn of Contemporary Historical Writing,” in Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (Berghahn Books, 2007). Katherine Lebow has taught at the College of Charleston and the University of Virginia, and is currently lecturer in European history at Newcastle University. She is completing the book Socialism in One City: Nowa Huta and the Transformation of Poland, 1949–2009. Robert G. Moeller teaches modern European history at the University of California, Irvine. He has written widely on the social, political, and cultural history of Germany in the twentieth century, and his books include War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001). He is faculty advisor of the UCI History Project, a teacher professional development initiative for middle and high school history teachers in Orange County, California.

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305

Samuel Moyn is Professor of History at Columbia University, where he has taught since 2001. He is the author of Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (2005), A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (2005), and many essays. Currently he is working on the history of human rights. Norman M. Naimark is Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Harvard, 1995) and Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe (Harvard, 2001), among other works. Klaus Naumann is a research affiliate of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. He is the author of several books on postwar German history, among them Einsatz ohne Ziel? Die Politikbedürftigkeit des Militärischen (Hamburg, 2008), Generale in der Demokratie: Generationsgeschichtliche Studien zur Bundeswehrelite (Hamburg, 2007), and Der Krieg als Text: Das Gedenkjahr 1995 im kulturellen Gedächtnis der Presse (Hamburg, 1998). He is also the editor of Nachkrieg in Deutschland (Hamburg 2001) and (with Hannes Heer) War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944 (New York and Oxford, 2000). Sonya Rose is Emeritus Professor of History, Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Her books include Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England and Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945. She is beginning work on a project tentatively titled “Who Are We Now?” concerning national identity in post–World War II Britain. Mikhail Tsypkin is an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His research interests include various aspects of Russian military policy, civil-military relations in Russia, and Russian intelligence. His articles on these subjects have appeared in International Affairs, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Orbis, and other publications, and he is the editor of Russia’s Security and the War on Terror (London, 2007). Dorothee Wierling is the deputy director of the Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg and teaches modern German history at the University of Hamburg. She has published in the field of women’s and social history as well as the history of East Germany. She is the author of Geboren im Jahr eins: Der

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Geburtsjahrgang 1949 in der DDR (Berlin, 2002). Her current research deals with the coffee trade in twentieth-century Hamburg. Denise J. Youngblood, Professor of History at the University of Vermont, has written extensively on the history of Russian and Soviet cinema, most recently Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005. Her latest project, co-authored with Tony Shaw, is Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (forthcoming, University Press of Kansas).

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Index

A Adamovich, Ales’, 68, 73, 76, 90, 135 Adenauer, Konrad, 261 Afghanistan, 136, 276 Africa, 8, 235, 239 After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (Jarausch), 197 Agamben, Giorgio, 58–61 Agranenko, Zakhar, 127 Akhmatova, Anna, 16 Albania, 14, 288 Albers, Hans, 142 Aleksievich, Svetlana, 73, 74, 75, 98, 99 Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, 70, 79–80n20 Algeria, 288, 295 Allied Military Tribunal, 184 Alov, Aleksander, 129, 130 Aly, Götz, 14 American Cool (Stearns), 31 Americanization, 1, 157 American Jewish Committee, 56 American Joint Distribution Committee, 185 Améry, Jean, 42 Anderson, Benedict, 189 Anderson, H. Foster, 220 And the Dawns Are Quiet Here (1973), 132–33 Anisimova, Nadezhda, 74 Ännchen von Tharau (1954), 145 Aralovets, Nina, 96 Arendt, Hannah, 38, 55–56, 59 The Art of Living: A Book of Good Manners for Everyone:The Knigge for the Twentieth Century (Ginök), 199 Der Arzt von Stalingrad (1957), 147–48 The Ascent (1976), 73, 134, 138n28 Asia, colonial conflicts in, 8 Association of Expellees (BdV), 25 At Dawn, It Is Quiet Here (Vasiliev), 89, 90 Attlee, Clement, 240

Auschwitz as concentration camp, 17, 23, 27, 39, 52, 55, 59 as extermination camp, 59, 184 survivors of, 53 Australia, 241 autobiographical texts, 106, 117n6 B Badoglio, Marshall, 289 Baida, Mariia, 93, 94, 98 Baklanov, Grigorii, 90 Báky, Josef von, 142 Balkans, 292 The Ballad of a Soldier (1959), 128, 129 Baltic States, 14, 16 Il Bandito (1946), 7, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162–69 Baring, Evelyn, 239 Barker, Ernest, 232, 233 Barnet, Boris, 126 Basov, Vladimir, 131 The Battle of Stalingrad (1949), 125 Baudissin, Graf, 257 Beevor, Antony, 21 Before the Fall (2004), 152 Behavior and Lifestyle in Educated Circles (Bodarius), 202 Behemoth (Neumann), 34 Belarus, 67, 73 Belzec, 52, 53 Benedek, Laslo, 147 Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron, 38 Berg, Nicolas, 35 Berggolts, Olga, 70, 71, 72, 78 Beria, Lavrenti Pavlovich, 22 Berliner Ballade (1948), 142–43 Berlin Wall, 107 Bermuda, 242

308 Bershanskaia, Evdokiia, 96 Bettelheim, Bruno, 51, 60 Beveridge, William, 234 Black, David, 162 black market, 143 Bloch, Ernst, 37 “Blockade Diary” (Ginzburg), 73 Blonski, Jan, 24 Bloxham, Donald, 53 Bodarius, Walter, 202 Bondarchuk, Sergei, 128, 133 Bondarev, Iurii, 90 Bondareva, Antonina, 99 Bonney, Thérèse, 176, 190 A Book of the Blockade (Adamovich and Granin, eds.), 73–74, 76, 80n41 Das Boot (1981), 152 Borchert, Wolfgang, 142 Borodziej, Wlodzimierz, 25 Bourke-White, Margaret, 52 Boyce, D. George, 237 Brahms, Helma Sanders, 152 Der Brand (Friedrich), 153 Brandt, Jürgen, 258 Brandt, Willy, 24 Brandys, Marian, 222 Brest, siege of, 127 Brezhnev, Leonid party-minded Soviet patriotism, 7, 70 political leadership of military, 278–79 war cult development of, 131, 132 Britain Beveridge Report, 234 black populations in, 235, 236, 237, 245n26, 245n35 British Nationality Act, 235 colonial conflicts, 238, 288 Festival of Britain, 238, 241 formation of welfare state, 232, 233, 234, 235 immigration policies, 235, 236, 243, 245n24, 247n97 imperial decline of, 8, 231, 233, 237, 238 London Blitz, 69, 232 migration of colonial populations to, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235 postwar myth of nation at war, 232, 237 Britain, Battle of, 232 British Commonwealth, 240, 241, 242 British Guiana, 237 Brockway, Fenner, 239 Brodmeier, Walter, 287

Index

Brooks, Jeffrey, 69, 79n16 Broszat, Martin, 14 Brubaker, Rogers, 189, 191 Die Brücke (1959), 150–51 Brunetta, Gian Piero, 161 Buchenwald, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 Bude, Heinz, 114 Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV), 25, 27 Burkhard, Isabella, 209 Burma, 237, 241 Bykov, Vasil, 90 bystanders, defining, 2 C Caccia tragica (1947), 161, 164 Calvino, Italo, 157 Campanini, Carlo, 163 camps. See concentration camps; extermination camps Canada, 235 Canaris (1954), 147 Canaris, Wilhelm, 147 Cannes Film Festival, 168 cannibalism, 76 capitalism, postwar perspectives, 3 Caribbean, 235 Carr, E. H., 217 Carruthers, Susan, 238 Celestial Sloth (1945), 124–25, 126 Cesarani, David, 237 Ceylon, 237, 241 Chaikina, Elizaveta, 93 The Character of England (Barker, ed.), 233 Chechneva, Marina, 97 Chechnya, 136 Chelmno, 52 Chiaureli, Mikhail, 125 children abuse of war orphans, 182–83, 194n28 Commission for War Foster Children, 179 inter-country adoption of, 190 Jewish hidden children, 8, 177, 178–83, 185–87, 193n24, 194n34, 194n38 Lebensborn (kidnapped and “germanized”), 176, 183–84 mixed-race and minority, 177, 187–89 Nazi selection for death, 175, 176, 178 of occupation forces, 7, 177, 187–89 refugee populations, 112–13, 145 renationalization and repatriation of, 177 war children generation, 6, 103, 109–14, 119n34

309

Index

war orphans, 4, 175–95 Chmielin;ski, Edmund, 223 Christian Democracy, 40 Chudakova, Valentina, 97 Chukhrai, Grigory, 128, 129, 130, 135 Churchill, Winston, 294 citizenship defining, 7 Polish reconstruction and, 215–30 Civilization (Mill), 210–11 Clausewitz, Carl von, 253 Clear Skies (1961), 129–30, 135 Cold War boundaries of, 141 defining enemies, 105 end of, 1, 43, 295 etiquette and manners during, 205, 211 ideological antagonisms, 1, 3 military leaderships and, 8 national mythical memories, 1 politics of integration during, 191 postwar definitions, 14 colonization, military practices and, 8 Come and See (1985), 67, 73, 135 Commission for the Extirpation of the Concentrationist Phenomenon, 56 Commission for War Foster Children, 179 Communism collapse of, 1 postwar perspectives, 3 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 105 concentration camps children in, 176 composition of, 105 concept of, 49–50 in film and cinema, 141–42, 153 history of, 51, 62n3 liberation of, 51–52, 62–63n7 purposes of, 51 survivors and witnesses of, 22, 52 as synecdoche, 6, 51, 54, 58–61 Conekin, Becky, 238 Conley, Tom, 161 Connolly, Cyril, 243 Consultative Committee of Party Secretaries of the Warsaw Pact, 282 The Cranes Are Flying (1957), 127, 128, 129 Crimean War, 272 criminal trials crimes against humanity, 53, 291 crimes against peace, 53, 291 war crimes, 53, 291 The Cuckoo (2002), 136

Cyprus, 237, 288 Cyrankiewicz, Józef, 225 Czechoslovakia, 14, 17, 276 D Dachau, 51, 53, 55, 292 Daily Mail, 239, 242 Daily Telegraph, 241 Danilevich, Andrian, 277, 281 Darfur, 61 The Days of Our Death (Rousset), 55 Deak, Istvan, 16 death camps, 39 decartelization, 39 decolonization colonial wars with, 8, 38 imperial decline and, 239–40, 242, 243, 247n92 neorealism and, 158 postwar trends of, 5 De Gaulle, Charles, 289, 290 Delage, Christian, 159 Deleuze, Gilles, 160 de Maiziére, Ulrich, 258, 259 denazification, 39, 104, 106, 200, 204 Deppe, Hans, 144 Derrida, Jacques, 58 De Santis, Giuseppe, 161, 163, 168 Destruction of the European Jews (Hilberg), 53 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 210 displaced persons (DPs), 4, 177 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 123 Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), 70 Don’t Be Scared of Good Manners (Kleinschmidt), 207 Downfall (2004), 152, 153 Dulles, John Foster, 291 E East Asia, postwar context of, 5 Eastern Europe continuities between wartime and postwar, 14–15 defining postwar in, 14 deportations from, 16, 19 forced migrations from, 141, 144, 145, 153 “Germanized children” of, 7 Roma populations, 175 Stalinist influences in, 216 East Germany (GDR) anti-fascist and self-improvement practices, 105

310 children of occupation forces, 187 dictatorship in, 14–15 education and schools, 107, 119n22 Hitler Youth as communist audience, 106 politics of memory, 102, 103 propaganda of, 107, 118n19 Red Army violence in, 105 social conduct and etiquette of, 7–8, 204–9 Soviet control of, 106, 204–5, 276 state-controlled film industry, DEFA, 140, 141 war children, generation of, 6, 103, 105–6, 112–14 Edele, Mark, 72 Edelman, Marek, 25 Egypt, 289 Eichmann, Adolf, 50 08/15 (1954–55), 147, 151 Elias, Norbert, 31, 197, 198, 210 Elizabeth II, 240, 241, 243 Elkins, Stanley, 57 emotionology, 34 emotions articulating, 36–37 cognitive components of, 32–33, 37–40 communal bonds with, 40–42 confinement/control of, 31–32 constructivist view of, 35 emotional refuge, 36 emotional regimes, 30, 34–37, 42 emotional suffering, 35, 36, 37 envy, 41, 42 fear, 5, 23, 30, 31, 32, 36–40, 43 hatred, 30, 32, 41, 42 history of, 30–33 hope, 5, 30, 33, 37–40, 43 norms, 31–32, 33, 43 political extremism and, 34–35 recasting in postwar societies, 33, 45n27 resentment, 5, 30, 32, 40–42, 43 emotives, 35 Empire Windrush, 235 Enzensberger, Hans-Magnus, 21 Erasmus, 199 Ermler, Fridrikh, 124 Ernst, Anna-Sabine, 207 Es geschah am 20. Juli (1955), 147 Estonia, 78 Ethiopia, 239 ethnic cleansing, 2, 26

Index

Ethnicity without Groups (Brubaker), 189 etiquette and social conduct gender roles and, 202, 207–8 publication of manuals, 197, 198–200 reinventing after wartime, 7–8, 196–214 social engineering and, 208 Europe continuities between wartime and postwar, 14–15 defining postwar in, 14 demographic impact of war, 16–17 European Community, 295 European Network of Memory and Solidarity, campaign of, 26 Europe’s Children, 1939 to 1943 (Bonney), 176 The Exploits of an Intelligence Officer (1947), 126, 127 exposure, 22, 23 extermination camps awareness and perceptions of, 39, 56–58 as commemorative paradigm, 6 concept of, 49–50 liberation of, 51–52, 62–63n7 non-Jewish deaths in, 59 paradigm of, 56–58 F Fadeev, Aleksander, 126 Falkenhausen, Alexander von, 292 The Fall of Berlin (1949), 125, 126, 132 The Fall of Berlin (Beevor), 21 family/families postgenocidal life in, 182–83 postwar reconstruction of, 177, 190 as social ideal, 177, 189–92 fascism aftermath of, 7 emotions and, 32, 34 postwar narratives of, 103 violence associated with, 2 Fassbinder, Rainer Maria, 152 Fassbinder, Werner, 140 The Fate of a Man (1959), 128 Faust (Goethe), 206 Fear (Gross), 15 Febvre, Lucien, 32, 40 Fehrenbach, Heide, 143 Fermaglich, Kirsten, 57 Ferro, Marc, 159 Figi, 241

311

Index

film and cinema about resistance, 162 censorship, 125 Cinema of Consensus, 152–53 Cold War, 125, 126 combat films, 146–49 as emotional refuge, 36 French New Wave, 128 German postwar films, 139–55 Germans as victims, 149–53 Heimatfilme, 141, 142–46 impact of television, 152 Italian neorealist films, 7, 128, 156–71 new German cinema, 140, 152 as privileged site of memory, 6–7 returnee films, 141, 142, 143 “rubble films,” 141–42, 143, 154n7 selective versions of war, 149–53 Soviet war films, 7, 123–38 Film rivista, 168 Finland, 123 First World War, 51, 123, 272, 273 “Flight, Forced Deportation, and Integration” exhibit, 26 “Flucht, Vertreibung, integration,” 26 forced labor camps, survivors of, 22 forced migrations, 2, 26, 141, 144, 145, 153, 241 Forest in Winter: Bells of Home (1956), 144–45 Fosse Ardeatine massacre, 292 Foucault, Michel, 58 France Algerian War, 295 colonial conflicts, 288 Free French forces, 289, 290 Légion Étrangère, 288 policy toward occupation children, 188, 195n49 resistance fighters in, 38, 288 wartime deportations, 52 France, Battle of, 176 Franco, Francisco, 295 Franco-German War, 254 Frank, Anne, 50 Frank, Hans, 22 Frauen von Heute, 207 French Commune, 295 Freud, Sigmund, 31 Friedan, Betty, 57 Friedrich, Jörg, 153 Friedrich, Klaus-Peter, 218 From Sunset to Dawn (Kravtsova), 97

Fulbrook, Mary, 14 Fuller, William, 277 Für Dich, 207 Furedi, Frank, 239 Furtseva, Yekaterina, 130 G Gandhi, Mahatma, 289 Gansel, Dennis, 152 Gantimurova, Albina, 74 Gati, Charles, 17 Gehlen, Reinhard, 288 gender roles in etiquette/social conduct, 202, 207–8 soldier identities in Red Army, 6 generation(s) as agenda of cultural politics, 111 born before, during First World War, 104 as children and adolescents during Nazi Germany, 104 defining, 103–4 of experience (Erlebnisgeneration), 102–3 experiencing war as children, 109–14, 119n34 familial conflicts, 107–8 first postwar generation (‘68ers), 103, 114 generation in the making (war children), 103, 109–14, 119n34 interpreting history through, 103–4 as narrative communities, 102–20 postwar generations of East and West, 107–8 Geneva Convention, 260, 289, 290, 291, 293 Georgia, 278 Gerasimov, Sergei, 126 German, Aleksei, 90 German Historical Institute, 27 Germany Berlin Wall, 20 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 105 etiquette and courtesy manuals, 197, 198–200 Grand Coalition, 26 military cultures of, 8, 251–68 National Socialist regime in, 7, 102 occupation zones of, 7, 187 persistence of postwar in, 13–21, 26–27 reunification of, 14, 114

312 Soviet rape of women in, 19–21 SPD Green coalition, 26 as wartime victims, 19, 39, 106, 110, 114, 119n32, 153 See also East Germany (GDR); Nazi Germany; West Germany Gherman, Aleksei, 131, 134, 138n26 Gibbs, Philip, 243 Ginök, W. Von, 199 Ginzburg, Lidiia, 69, 72, 73 Gnarovskaia, Valeria, 83–87, 93, 98 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 200, 206 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 57–58 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 17, 23 Gorbachev, Mikhail perestroika, 136, 277 recognizing nuclear reality, 282, 283 Granin, Daniil, 73, 76 Great Patriotic War, 67–82, 123, 136n2, 269–86 The Great Turning Point (1945), 124 Grechko, Andrei, 280 Greece, 288, 289 Greenfield, Liah, 41 Grignaffini, Giovanna, 162 Grizodubova, Valentina, 96 Gromyko, Andrei, 283 Gross, Jan, 15, 24, 39, 186, 216, 219 Grossmann, Atina, 38 guerilla warfare, 67–68, 294, 295 Guigueno, Vincent, 159 Guten Tag, Her von Knigge! Ein heiteres Lesebuch für alle Jahrgänge über alles, was ‘anständig’ist (Schweickert and Hold), 199, 204, 205 Gutes Benehmen von A bis Z (Smolka), 204, 205, 206 H Habermas, Jürgen, 211 The Hague Convention, 287, 290 Hansen, Randall, 236 A Hard Little Nut (1967), 131 Harnack, Falk, 150 Harsch, Donna, 207 Hartmann, defense attorney, 287, 292 The Heath is Green (1951), 144 Hedwig, Saint, 145 Heidegger, Martin, 38, 47n64 Heinemann, Gustav, 257 Henke, Klaus-Dietmar, 14 Hennessy, Peter, 231, 232 Herbert, Alan, 242

Index

heroic narratives, 7 Hilberg, Raul, 53 Hilgendorff, G. von, 202 Hillgruber, Andreas, 57 Hirschbiegel, Oliver, 152 historiography of Britain, 231 postwar emotions in, 31, 44n5 of Third Reich, 197 usable pasts, 1 wartime childhood narratives in, 109 Hitler, Adolf annihilation policies of, 8, 22, 217, 251, 252, 264 assassination attempts on, 147 assimilation of occupied territories, 3 following of, 153 Jewish extermination policies of, 18 Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen), 57 Hobsbawm, Eric, 3 Hold, Bert, 199, 204, 205, 206 Hollywood, 168 Holocaust acknowledgment of, 49 emotional investment and, 32 histories and memories of, 1–2, 5–6, 42, 50 national mythical memories and, 1–2, 9n5 perpetrators and collaborators, 2, 24 survivors, 2, 22, 52, 53 Horkheimer, Max, 255 Horthy, Miklós, 17 Hosking, Geoffrey, 72 hostage case ruling, 292 How to Get Along with Others (Knigge), 199 Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (1959), 147, 148 Hungary, 17, 276 Hutsls, 17 I The Immortal Garrison (1956), 127 India, 235, 237, 240, 241, 288 “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” (Bettelheim), 51 Indochina, 288, 292 Indonesia, 292 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 288, 289, 290, 293 International Military Tribunal, 183, 291 International Relief Organization (IRO), 183, 193n9

313

Index

internment, 2 Ireland, 241 Irgendwo in Berlin (1946), 142 Isaeva, Vera, 71 Ismay, Lord, 255 Israel German ambivalence toward, 19 postwar Jewish emigrants to, 185, 194n37 trials of Nazi criminals, 50 Italy armistice with Allies, 158, 163 break with Fascist past, 157 civil war in, 14 dictatorship of, 2, 7, 156–57, 191 neorealist films of, 7, 156–71 protracted wartime violence in, 156, 163 resistance movements in, 38 turncoat forces, 289 veterans of, 162–69 Ivan Nikulin, Russian Sailor (1944), 124 Ivanov, Aleksander, 127 Ivan’s Childhood (1962), 128, 129, 137n13 Izvestiia, 92, 94 J Jamaica, 235, 242 Jameson, Frederic, 158 Janowitz, Morris, 257 Japan, 289 Jarausch, Konrad, 197, 210 Jarry, Alfred, 54 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 282 Jewish populations assimilation of, 53 child deaths under Nazi rule, 175, 177, 178, 192n7 displaced persons (DPs), 4, 17, 52, 177 emigration to Israel, 185 hidden children of, 8, 177, 178–83, 185–87, 193n24, 194n34, 194n38 Jedwabne massacre, 15 Kielce pogrom, 15 national mythical memories and, 1–2, 9n5 Nazi destruction of, 49–50 postwar baby boom, 38, 178 wartime acquisition of property and assets, 15 Les Jours de notre mort (Rousset), 55

Judt, Tony, 1, 13, 18, 49 Jugert, Rudolf, 143 Junger Mann von heute (Smolka), 207 Junge Welt, 207 K Kaczynski, Jaroslaw, 26 Kaczynski, Lech, 26, 27 Kadochnikov, Pavel, 127 Kalatozov, Mikhail, 127 Kaliningrad region, Sovietization of, 16 Kashubians, 17 Käutner, Helmut, 147 Kennan, George, 291 Kennedy, Dane, 239 Kenney, Padraic, 224 Kenya, 237, 238–39, 288 Khrushchev, Nikita lifting ban on war stories, 76–77 ouster of, 128, 131 party-minded Soviet patriotism, 70 reality of nuclear war, 281 relationship with military, 278, 279 Secret Speech of, 124, 128, 131 on Stalin’s military tactics, 75 Kikuyu, 238–39 Kinder, Mütter und ein General (1955), 147 Kirmes (1960), 151 Kirst, Hans Hellmut, 147 Kleinschmidt, Karl, 207 Klimov, Elem, 67, 135 Kluge, Alexander, 140, 152 Knigge, Adolph Freiherr von, 199, 200, 210 Kobzdej, Aleksander, 220 Kogon, Eugen, 54 Komsomolskaia pravda, 92, 93, 95, 96 Korean War, 287, 294 Kosmodemianskaia, Zoia, 74, 86, 87–89, 91, 93, 94, 98, 100n6 Kovshova, Nataliia, 93, 94, 95–96, 98 Kozlov, Denis, 73 Krasnaia zvezda, 92, 94 Kravtsova, Nataliia, 97 Krestianka, 85 Krylov, Nikolai, 280 Krzeminski, Adam, 25 Kuby, Erich, 148, 149 Kundera, Milan, 69, 73, 79n13 Kushner, Tony, 236–37 Kuzmin, M., 85 Kymlicka, Will, 234

314 L labor camps, 39 Lagrou, Pieter, 52, 157 Lahola, Leopold, 148 Lamprecht, Gerhard, 142 Lattuada, Alberto, 7, 158, 162, 167, 168, 169 Latvia, 16, 78 Lausanne Treaty, 17 Leakey, Louis, 239 Lebedev, Nikolai, 136 Lebensborn (kidnapped and “germanized”) children, 176, 183–84 Lebenskunst: Ein Buch vom guten Benehmen für Jedermann: Der Knigge des 20. Jahrhunderts (Ginök), 199 Leigh, Ione, 239 Leipzig Trial, 292 Lemkos, 17 Lenin, Vladimir, 271 Leningrad, siege of counternarratives of, 69–70, 79n16 heroic defense of, 75–76 individual memories, 6 narratives of, 6, 69 oral histories of, 73 poetry and literature on, 16 survivors of, 69, 70–71 Lethen, Helmuth, 31 Leuwerik, Ruth, 148 Levchenko, Irina, 97 Levi, Primo, 50, 59 L’Ezrat ha-Yeled (To the Aid of the Child), 181 Liberation (1970–72), 132, 133 Lidov, Petr, 88 Liebe 47 (1949), 142, 143, 144 Liebeneiner, Wolfgang, 142, 144, 148 literature of destruction, 50 Lithuania, 17, 78, 296n2 Litviak, Liliia, 96 Litvinova, Larisa, 97 The Living and the Dead (1963–64), 129, 130–31 Louis XIV, 210 Loza, Dmitrii, 77 Lübbe, Hermann, 150 Lyttleton, Oliver, 239 M Machaty, Gustav, 145 Magnani, Anna, 163

Index

Majdanek, 52 Malaya, 237, 288 Malaysia, 292 Malenkov, Georgiy, 281 Malgache insurrection, 288 Malia, Martin, 269 Malinovskii, General, 83 Malmédy massacre, 291, 292, 293 Mannheim, Karl, 103–4, 111, 117n7 Manstein, Erich von, 259, 263 Manuel à l’usage des combattants d’Indochine (État-Major due Corps Expéditionnaire, Forces Armées d’ Étrême-Orient), 291 Márai, Sándor, 215, 216 Maresiev, Aleksei, 126 Markham, Violet, 243 Markova, Galina, 98 Marseille, Hans Joachim, 147 Marshall, T. H., 234 mass death, 5, 26, 27 Matusevich-Zaiats, Maria, 74 May, Paul, 147 Mazurians, 17 McCarthy, Joseph, 291 McClintock, Anne, 240 McKibbin, Ross, 233 “The Meaning of the Coronation” (Shils and Young), 240 Meckel, Markus, 25 Meditsinkaia gazeta, 85 Medvedeva, Zoia, 97 Meissner, Hans-Otto, 209 memory cinema as privileged site of, 6–7 collective, 6 communicative, 103, 116n2 cultural, 103, 116n2 as cultural history, 6 defining, 103 emotions and, 37–40 generational narratives, 102–20 history of, 6 individual, 6 national mythical, 1 private, 5, 6, 103 public, 5, 6, 103 Mergel, Thomas, 34 Merkel, Angela, 26 Merkel, Ina, 207 Merloo, A. M., 38 Merridale, Catherine, 68, 79n6 Michnik, Adam, 25

315

Index

migration emotions and, 39 forced, 141, 144, 145, 153, 241 postwar settlement and, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235 Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw, 23 Military Appeals Court of Brussels, 287 military culture annihilation practices of, 251, 252, 253–55 art and practice of war, 252 attitudes to Soviet military professionalism, 270, 273, 275, 278, 283 Bundesweher and military reform, 255–60, 264–65, 266n7 as citizen in uniform, 251, 261, 262 codes of conduct, 259, 267n27 conflicting role models, 258–60 defining victory and defeat, 8 discipline and prevention of war, 257 in films and cinema, 146–49, 148 flexible response strategy, 258 German military extremism, 252–55 imperial space as Soviet defensive barrier, 270, 271, 272, 273, 276, 283 leadership and operative legacy, 262–64 nuclear age reality and, 257, 259, 260–61, 265, 270, 275, 279, 283 political and strategic terms, 261–62 in postwar etiquette and social conduct, 203 Russian style of warfare, 272 of Soviet Union, 269–86 trauma learning, 254, 263, 266n9, 268n45 Wehrmacht traditions, 253, 256, 258, 260, 264 Military Strategy (Sokolovskii), 282 Mill, John Stuart, 210, 211 Miłosz, Czesław, 215, 216, 217, 218 Der Moderne Knigge (Weissenfeld), 203–4 Moldova, 16 Moltke, Helmuth von, 259 Morante, Elsa, 156 Morawski, Jerzy, 222 Die Mörder sind uns (1944–45), 141–42, 151 Morgan, Kenneth, 238 Morgenthau Plan, 39 Morrison, Herbert, 238 Moscow, Battle of, 88 Mother-Motherland (Isaeva), 71

Mrozæek, Sławomir, 223 Murrow, Edward R., 52 Muselmann (Muslim figure), 59, 60 Mussolini, Benito, 14 My Name Is Ivan (1962), 128 N Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen (1959), 147 Naimark, Norman, 139 NaPolA (2004), 152 Napoleon, 77, 295 National Socialism emotional basis of, 34 mass support of, 106, 150 public and private memories of, 139 war crimes of, 42, 105 Naumov, Vladimir, 129, 130 Nazi Germany Aktion Reinhard operation, 52 Allied aerial bombing of, 2, 19, 153, 287 annihilation policies of, 8, 22, 217, 251, 252, 253 continuities between wartime and postwar, 15 Einsatzgruppen (order police), 58 Geheime Feldpolizei Unit, 287, 292, 293 Gestapo, 293 Hitler Youth, 106, 110 Holocaust perpetrators, 2 Luftwaffe, 147 occupied territories of, 2 Operation Tannenberg, 22 prosecution of perpetrators, 2 public and private memories of, 49, 106, 107 racist and eugenic policies of, 7, 18–19, 175, 178, 184 SIPO-SD, Nazi police, 293 SS, 31, 131 veterans of, 146 war crimes by, 2, 58, 64n38 Nazi-Soviet Pact, 16, 75, 272 Nazzari, Amadeo, 163 Neighbors (Gross), 15 Nennstiel, W. A., 202, 203 neorealism attention to language, 161 decolonization and, 158 eclecticism of, 160 moral nature of, 159, 170n16 as transitional aesthetic, 160

316 Netherlands colonial conflicts, 288 dirty wars by, 295 hidden Jewish children, 178–82, 193n24 postwar disposition of hidden children, 178–82, 194n27 resistance fighters, 288 Network of Memory and Solidarity, 27 Neuengamme, 55 Neumann, Franz, 34 Never Again (Hennessy), 232 Nevskii, Aleksandr, 77 The New Elizabethans (Gibbs), 243 New Zealand, 241 Nicolson, Harold, 198 Night (Wiesel), 50 Nikiforova, Ekaterina, 98 NKVD. See Soviet Union, People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs Nolte, Ernst, 57 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 255, 259, 260, 261, 262, 276, 295 nuclear weapons German military reforms and, 259, 261, 267n37 modern warfare with, 257, 279 as political weapons, 263 Soviet military culture and, 8, 270, 281–82, 285n49, 289 as Western alliance defense strategy, 252 Nuremberg trials as civilizing influence, 197–98 Nazi Concentration Camps film, 53 postwar emotions, 42 profiling criminal behavior, 53, 183, 289, 290, 291 Nussbaum, Martha, 32 O Okudzhava, Bulat, 90 On Civility in Children (Erasmus), 199 Onilova, Nina, 93, 96 Operation Vistula, 17 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 38, 55, 56 The Other Kingdom (Rousset), 54 Ozerov, Yury, 132 P Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 147 Pakistan, 237, 241

Index

Palestine British mandate of, 237 Irgun and Stern Group in, 289 King David Hotel bombing, 288–89 terrorism in, 292 war orphan disposition to, 181, 182 Papenek, Ernst, 181, 182 Partisanenkrieg, 288, 289, 295 Partisan Review, 55 “Pass Me A Brick” (Kobzdej), 220 Pasternak, Boris, 70 Paul, Gerhard, 151 Paul, Kathleen, 235 Pavlichenko, Liudmila, 93 peace as invoking threat of war, 107 as motif in Soviet war films, 126, 137n11 Peace to Him Who Enters (1961), 129, 130 perestroika, 7 perpetrators, defining, 2 Pershing II/cruise missiles, 263 Petersen, Wolfgang, 152 Peterson, Roger, 42 Petliuk, Ekaterina, 96 Petrov, Vladimir, 125 Petrova, Antonina, 93 Picture Post, 236 Pittsburgh Courier, 188 Podzhidaev, Colonel, 83, 85 Poland anti-Semitism in, 23, 24, 39, 186 building socialism in, 219–25 citizenship and reconstruction, 8, 215–30 concentration and extermination camps in, 51, 52, 53 hidden Jewish children in, 185–87, 194n34, 194n38 Home Army (Armija Krajowa), 23, 25 Jedwabne massacre in, 24 Jewish populations in, 15, 17, 22 Katyn Forest massacre, 22, 75 Kielce program in, 186 Krakow, 220 Lenin Shipyards, 221 Lenin Steelworks, 221, 224 loss of prewar population, 22–23 nationalist policies of, 17 Nazi invasion of, 21–22 Nowa Huta showcase city, 8, 217, 220–25, 229n37

317

Index

persistence of postwar in, 5, 13–18, 21–27 Polish National Democratic Party, 15 repatriation of citizens, 184, 185 Six-Year Plan, 220, 221 Solidarity movement in, 24, 221, 222, 227 Soviet control of, 15, 23, 226, 229–30n54 szlachta versus lud (gentry versus commoners), 217–18, 224, 226, 228n9 Union of Polish Youth (ZMP), 222, 223 urban-rural dichotomy, 218 victims and/or collaborators, 23–26, 39 Warsaw, 25, 50, 219, 220 wartime losses and destruction, 218, 219–20, 228n16 Western territories, 223, 229n37 Polevoi, Boris, 126 Polivanova, Mariia, 93, 94 Pomeranians, 144 Ponomarenko, Panteleimon, 72 “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” (Blonski), 24 postwar as analytical concept, 3 cross-national comparisons, 4 decolonization and, 5 defining, 2–3, 13, 18 emotional aftermath, 30–48, 104 multiple experiences and histories, 4 national histories, 4 postfascist changes associated with, 191 post-postwar, 26–27 temporal definitions, 5 transnational histories of, 4 Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (Judt), 1, 18, 49 Pravda, 74, 88, 92 Preussiche Treuhand, 27 prisoners of war (POWs) abandonment of, 72 in films, 145, 147, 148, 152, 164 Germans as, 19, 20, 36, 142, 288 in Gulag, 22, 136 Italians as, 156 Polish as, 22 protection of, 288, 289 Soviets as, 128 Proper Behavior At Work and in Private: A Useful Guide for Young People (Nennstiel), 201, 202

psychiatry, 3 psychohistory, 34 Putin, Vladimir, 78, 136, 270, 277 Pyriev, Ivan, 124 Q The Quagmire (1977), 135 A Queen is Crowned (1953), 241 R Radebold, Hartmut, 109 Radvanyi, Géza von, 147 Rakobolskaia, Irina, 98 rape, 19–21 Raskova, Marina, 96 Rasputin, Valentin, 90 Reckwitz, Andreas, 31 reconstruction of European societies, 3 of families, 177, 190 of postwar Poland, 8, 215–30 sanitizing wartime memories, 3 Red Army destruction by, 219, 228n21 female soldiers in, 6 Reddy, William, 35 refugee populations, 112–13, 145 relativization, 25, 27, 108 Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben), 58 Rentschler, Eric, 152 Rex, Zvi, 19 Riabinkin, Iura, 74 Rieber, Alfred, 271 Rogozhkin, Aleksander, 136 Roma città aperta (1945), 168 The Romance of Empire (Gibbs), 243 Romania, 13, 17 Romanov, A. V., 73 Rose, Sonya O., 38 Rose Bernd (1957), 151 Rosen für den Staatsanwalt (1959), 151 Rosenstone, Robert, 159 Rosenwein, Barbara, 31, 40 Rossellini, Roberto, 163, 168, 169 Rostotsky, Stanislav, 132 Röttiger, Hans, 265 Rousset, David, 54–56, 57, 58, 59 Russia Bolshevik Revolution, 295 civil war in, 123 Winter War with Finland, 123 Russian Federation, 276, 283

318 Russian Germans, 114 Russo-German War, 123 Russo-Japanese war, 273 S Sachsenhausen, 55 St. Petersburg, 75–76 Salisbury, Lord, 234, 241, 242 Sanders, Helka, 20 Savchenko, Igor, 124, 125 Scheler, Max, 41 Schelsky, Helmut, 106 Schieder, Theodore, 20 Schiller, Friedrich, 200 Schleif, Wolfgang, 145 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 198 Schlieffen, Alfred von, 259, 261, 263 Schmitt, Carl, 294–95 Schneider, Peter, 43 Schroeder, Gerhard, 25 Schumpeter, Joseph, 215, 227n1 Schwarz, Bill, 236 Schweickert, W. K., 199, 204, 205, 206 Second World War defining, 123, 136n2 demographic impact of, 16 Eastern Front, 4 emotional aftermath of, 5, 30–48, 104 end of, 288 forced migrations, 2, 26, 141, 144, 145, 153, 241 liberation and defeat modalities, 3–4 mass starvation, 2 national mythical memories, 1 as part of modern wars, 287 reconstruction following, 3 social transformations during, 3 veterans of, 4, 36, 42, 68, 72, 77, 83–101, 127, 146 war crimes trials, 8 See also Great Patriotic War Seeckt, Hans von, 259 Serdyukov, Anatoliy, 270, 278 Setif insurrection, 288 Shamanov, Vladimir, 283 Shepitko, Larisa, 73, 90, 134 Shield and Sword (1967–68), 131 Shils, Edward, 240, 241, 243 Silesians, 17, 144, 145, 151 Simonov, Konstantin, 130 Sinfield, Alan, 233

Index

Six o’Clock in the Evening after the War (1944), 124, 125, 126 ’68ers challenging postwar histories, 108, 114, 118n26 emotional expression of, 43 Smena, 85 Smith, Malcolm, 69 Smolka, Karl, 204, 205, 206, 207 Sobchak, Anatolii, 76, 77 Sobibor, 52, 53 social conduct and etiquette, reinventing after wartime, 7–8, 196–214 “Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe” (Gross), 216 Società, 156 Söhne ohne Väter (Schulz, Radebold, and Reulecke), 109 Sokolovskii, Vassily, 282 Soldier (1957), 127 Solovei, N., 98 Sons without Fathers (Schulz, Radebold, and Reulecke), 109 South Yemen, 288 Sovietization, 1, 157 Soviet Union Afghanistan invasion by, 123, 136, 276 Brezhnev period of, 7, 131, 137n19 Chechnya war, 136 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, 282 children of occupation forces, 187 collapse of, 16, 20 counternarratives of, 69–70, 76, 79n16, 86 defining postwar in, 13 dissolution of, 75, 136 Eastern Europe occupation by, 14 Eastern front and, 4 economic backwardness and military, 272 famines, 124 female soldiers in Red Army, 6 Five Year Plan, 127 glasnost era, 75, 135 Great October Revolution myth of, 15 Great Patriotic War, 67–82, 123, 269–86 gulag archipelago, 58, 76 heroic narratives, 7 historic erasure practices, 83–87, 98

Index

invasion of Poland, 13, 17, 123 legitimizing myths of, 69 military culture and legacy of Second World War, 8, 269–86 Moscow Aviation University, 93 Nazi-Soviet Pact, 16, 75, 272 nuclear weapons strategies, 8, 275, 279–83 occupation zone in Germany, 106 Partisan Movement, 72 People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), 22, 25, 68, 131, 136 perestroika, 7 Piskarevskoe Memorial Cemetery in, 70–71 politicized war myths of, 6, 8, 68, 79n5 postwar I, 1945–57, 5, 124–27 postwar II, 1957–67, 127–31 postwar III, 1967–86, 15, 131–35 purges in, 124 Red Army of, 20, 21 repatriation of citizens, 184 Soviet-era evidence access, 270, 284n6, 284n8 Stalinism period, 7 the “thaw” era, 7, 127–31 “the war” mindset, 269 veterans of, 68, 72, 77, 83–101, 127 war crimes, 58, 64n28 war cult of, 131, 137n19 war films of, 7, 123–38 Warsaw Pact, 270 women combatants of, 74–75, 83–101 Young Communist League, 74, 89, 93 Zhdanovshchina filmmakers, 125 Zoia cult narrative, 70, 86, 87–89, 91, 93, 94, 98, 100n6 See also Leningrad, siege of Spain, 295 Spanish Civil War, 51, 176 Der Spiegel, 26 Spielberg, Steven, 152 Spires, Michael, 188 Der SS-Staat (Kogon), 54 St. Petersburg, 77 Stalin, Joseph cinematic glorification of, 125 creating wartime myth, 15, 68, 69, 70, 73 death of, 23, 70, 125, 127, 221, 279 industrialization process of, 272

319 legitimizing regime of, 269 limiting military professionalism, 275, 278, 279, 283, 285n31 prisoner of war policies, 22 productivist rhetoric of, 224, 226, 229–30n54 purges by, 15, 124, 275, 278 Stalingrad (1993), 152 Stalingrad, Battle of, 133, 147 The Star (2002), 136 starvation, 2, 71, 72 Staudte, Wolfgang, 141, 151 Stearns, Peter, 31, 34 Steinbach, Erika, 25, 26 Steiner, Jean-François, 57 Stemmle, Robert, 142 Stern von Afrika (1956), 147 Stites, Richard, 132 Stockholm Conference, 290 Stolper, Aleksander, 126, 129, 130–31 La storia (Morante), 156 The Story of a Real Man (1948), 126–27 Suchkind 312 (1955), 145 Suez Canal, 231, 243 Sułkowski, Leopold, 224 Sunday Express, 241 Sunday Graphic’s Royal Tour Picture Album, 242 Survival of Auschwitz (Levi), 50 Sycheva, Tamara, 97 T Taiga (1958), 148 Tanner, Jakob, 32, 35 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 128 terrorism, 287, 288, 292, 295 Des Teufels General (1955), 147 Der Teufel spielte Balalaika (1961), 148, 149 Theorie der Partisanen (Schmitt), 294–95 The Theory and Practice of Hell (Kogon), 54 They Fought for the Motherland (1975), 133 The Third Blow (1948), 125 Timoshenko, Semyon, 124 Tito, Marshal, 14, 294 Togliatti, Palmiro, 157 Tomasik, Wojciech, 221 Torriglia, Anna Maria, 157 torture, 88, 89, 293, 294, 295 Touraine, Alain, 222 Tragic Hunt (1947), 161 Traverso, Enzo, 32 Treaty of Conventional Forces, 277 Treblinka, 52, 53, 60

320 Treblinka:The Revolt of an Extermination Camp (Steiner), 57 Treichel, Hans-Ulrich, 21 The Trial on the Road (1971), 134 Tumarkin, Nina, 72, 80n28 U “Über das Problem der Generationen” (Mannheim), 103 Über den Umgang mit Menschen (Knigge), 199 Ubu the King (Jarry), 54 Udet, Ernst, 146 Uganda, 242 Ukraine, 17 Ukrainian Insurgency Army (UPA), 16 Ulbricht, Walter, 204, 208 Umniagina, Tamara, 74 Und über uns der Himmel (1946), 142 unemployment, 23 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 183, 184, 187, 193n9 United Nations (UN) Charter and Basic Law, 201 child relief programs, 177, 193n9 United States dirty wars by, 295 Guantanamo Bay, 61 missile defense system of, 276 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 188, 189 9/11 attacks on, 58, 62 policy toward occupation children, 188, 189 L’univers concentrationnaire (Rousset), 54, 55 Unruhige Nacht (1958), 150, 151 Der Untergang (2004), 152 Uspenskaia, E., 98 Ustinov, Dmitrii, 271 V van der Molen, Gesina, 180 Vasiliev, Boris, 89–91 Veil, Simone, 52 Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming the past), 49, 140 Der Verlorene (Treichel), 21 Vertreibung approaches to, 26 autobiographical materials, 20 exhibits of, 26, 27

Index

veterans emotional refuge for, 36 German, 42 psychological conditions of, 36 See also specific country victims, defining, 2 Vietnam, 288, 289 Villa, Federica, 165, 166 Vilsmaier, Josef, 152 violence active and passive, 2, 5 collective experiences, 2 emotions and, 32 fascist-induced, 2 German wartime legacies of, 5 individual experiences, 2 Polish wartime legacies of, 5 postwar traces of, 3, 114 wartime, 2 Volkswagen Deutsche, 18 Von Stalingrad zur Währungsreform (Broszat, Henke, and Woller, Eds.), 14 Vulfovich, Teodor, 131 W Waldwinter: Glocken der Heimat (1956), 144–45 war children generation, 6, 103, 109–14, 119n34 war crimes, 287 war orphans, 4 defining, 177 as film motif, 129, 137n14 mixed-race and minority, 7, 177, 187–89 Warsaw Pact, 270, 276, 282 War’s Unwomanly Face (Aleksievich), 73, 74, 98 We Are Building Socialism, 222 Weber, Max, 31 Webster, Wendy, 238 Wehler, Hans Ulrich, 35 Wehrmacht annihilation practices of, 219, 228n21, 253, 264 military traditions of, 256 postwar exhibits of, 115 war crimes of, 8 Weidenmann, Alfred, 147 Weight, Richard, 232, 238 Weiss, Christina, 26 Weissenfeld, Curt von, 203–4

321

Index

Welzer, Harald, 103, 110, 153 We Refugee Children (Höntsch), 112 Western Belorussia, 16, 23 Western Ukraine, 16, 23 West Germany children of occupation forces, 187 cinema and postwar films, 7, 139–55 economic advances in, 107 generations as narrative communities, 6, 102–20 historiography of Holocaust, 35 Law for the Equalization of Burdens, 104 military reforms of, 251–68 politics of memory, 102, 103 prosecution of Nazi perpetrators, 2 ’68ers challenge postwar histories, 108, 114, 118n26 skeptical generation of, 106 social conduct and etiquette, 7–8, 200–204 transition of active-duty soldiers, 106 war children generation of, 103, 104–12 West Indies, 235, 236 “When Will the Real Day Come?” (Dobroliubov), 123 Which People’s War? (Rose), 231 White, Walter, 188 Wickendon, James, 234 Wicki, Bernhard, 150–51 Wiesel, Elie, 50

Wieviorka, Annette, 52, 54 Williams, Raymond, 231 Wir Flüchtlingskinder (Höntsch), 112 Wisbar, Frank, 147, 149 Wolf, Diane L., 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184 Wolff, Hans, 144 Woller, Hans, 14 A Woman in Berlin (Enzensberger), 21 Woodward, E. L., 232 A World Apart (Rousset), 54 Wortmann, Sönke, 152 “Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Negro?”, 236 Wprost, 25 Das Wunder von Bern (2003), 152 Y Yeltsin, Boris, 75, 76 Young, Michael, 240, 241 Younger Man of Today (Smolka), 207 The Young Guard (1948), 126, 127 Youth Aliyah, 185 Yugoslavia, 14, 17 Z Zahra, Tara, 177, 181 Zavattini, Cesare, 160 Zemskaia, Liubov, 96 Zhdanov, Andrei, 16, 125 Zhukov, Georgiy, 274, 278 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 16