Microhistories of Memory: Remediating the Holocaust by Bullets in Postwar West Germany 9781805391807

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Microhistories of Memory

Worlds of Memory Editors: Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia Aline Sierp, Maastricht University Jenny Wüstenberg, Nottingham Trent University Published in collaboration with the Memory Studies Association  This book series publishes innovative and rigorous scholarship in the interdisciplinary and global field of memory studies. Memory studies includes all inquiries into the ways we – both individually and collectively – are shaped by the past. How do we represent the past to ourselves and to others? How do those representations shape our actions and understandings, whether explicitly or unconsciously? The ‘memory’ we study encompasses the near-infinitude of practices and processes humans use to engage with the past, the incredible variety of representations they produce, and the range of individuals and institutions involved in doing so. Guided by the mandate of the Memory Studies Association to provide a forum for conversations among subfields, regions, and research traditions, Worlds of Memory focuses on cutting-edge research that pushes the boundaries of the field and can provide insights for memory scholars outside of a particular specialization. In the process, it seeks to make memory studies more accessible, diverse, and open to novel approaches. Recent volumes: Volume 13 Microhistories of Memory: Remediating the Holocaust by Bullets in Postwar West Germany Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska Volume 12 De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places Edited by Sarah Gensburger and Jenny Wüstenberg Volume 11 Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory and Jews, Poles, and Communists in Twenty-First Century Poland Kate Korycki Volume 10 The Right to Memory: History, Media, Law, and Ethics Edited by Noam Tirosh and Anna Reading Volume 9 Towards a Collaborative Memory: German Memory Work in a Transnational Context Sara Jones

Volume 8 Carnivalizing Reconciliation: Contemporary Australian and Canadian Literature and Film beyond the Victim Paradigm Hanna Teichler Volume 7 Nordic War Stories: World War II as History, Fiction, Media, and Memory Edited by Marianne Stecher Volume 6 The Struggle for the Past: How We Construct Social Memories Elizabeth Jelin Volume 5 The Mobility of Memory: Migrations and Diasporas across European Borders Edited by Luisa Passerini, Milica Trakilović and Gabriele Proglio Volume 4 Agency in Transnational Memory Politics Edited by Jenny Wüstenberg and Aline Sierp

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/ worl​ds-of-memory

Microhistories of Memory Remediating the Holocaust by Bullets in Postwar West Germany

Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska Translated by Alexander Simmeth

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2024 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com English-language edition © Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska 2024 German-language edition © Walter de Gruyter GmbH 2022 Originally published in Germany as Mikrogeschichten der Erinnerungskultur: “Am grünen Strand der Spree” und die Remedialisierung des Holocaust by bullets 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 Names: Saryusz-Wolska, Magdalena, author. | Simmeth, Alexander, 1973– translator. Title: Microhistories of memory : remediating the Holocaust by bullets in postwar West Germany /   Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska ; translated by Alexander Simmeth. Other titles: Mikrogeschichten der Erinnerungskultur. English Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2024. | Series: Worlds of memory; volume 13 |   Includes bibliographical references, filmography, and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023021760 (print) | LCCN 2023021761 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805391791   (hardback) | ISBN 9781805391807 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Scholz, Hans, 1911-1998. Am grünen Strand der Spree. | Scholz, Hans,   1911–1998--Adaptations. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in mass media. |   Massacres in mass media. | Collective memory in mass media. Classification: LCC PT2638.O7245 A69373 2024 (print) | LCC PT2638.O7245 (ebook) |   DDC 833/.914--dc23/eng/20230725 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021760 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021761 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-179-1 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-398-6 epub ISBN 978-1-80539-180-7 web pdf

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805391791

For Maria and Helena You are both great!

Contents

List of Illustrationsviii Acknowledgmentsxi List of Abbreviationsxiv Prologue. Orsha 1941xv Introduction. Why Three Stories on Through the Night?1 Chapter 1. First Story: Actors and Institutions 24 Chapter 2. Second Story: Authenticity and Affects 75 Chapter 3. Third Story: Media and Technologies 143 Conclusion. Dead Ends in Memory Culture 188 References and Sources211 Filmography239 Index241

Illustrations

0.1. Destruction of Orsha, view of the riverbank, probably 1941. © Anonymous, n.d. Source: private collection. xvi 0.2. Destruction of Orsha, view from the railroad track, 1941. © Anonymous, n.d. Source: private collection. xvi 0.3. Destruction of Orsha. Only chimneys left after the wooden houses had burned down, 1941. © Anonymous, n.d. Source: private collection. xvii 0.4. The Jewish cemetery in Orsha, 2020. © Andrei Liankevich, 2020.xviii 0.5. Hand-drawn plan of the Orsha ghetto by Paul Eick, Minsk Trial, 9 January 1946. © FSB Archives, Moscow. xix 0.6. House in Engels Street on the former site of the Orsha ghetto, 2020. © Andrei Liankevich, 2020. xx 0.7. Memorial for the victims of Orsha, 2020. © Andrei Liankevich, 2020. xxx 1.1. Soldiers in front of the wardroom in Orsha, probably 1941. © Anonymous, n.d. Source: private collection. 28 1.2. The wardroom in Orsha, probably 1941. The decoration on the wall in the background may have been painted by Hans Scholz. © Anonymous, n.d. Source: private collection. 29 1.3. Work on the radio adaptation for SWF public radio, 1956. Actors in the frame story (from left to right): Wolfgang Hofman, Hans Scholz, Else Hackenberg, Heinz Klingenberg, Ludwig Cremer. © SWR/Hans Westphal, 1956. Source: SWR Historical Archives Baden-Baden (SWR Historisches Archiv Baden-Baden).56 2.1. View from the railroad embankment onto the area of the mass execution, 2020. Behind the trees, the terrain descends into the Orschitza valley. © Andrei Liankevich, 2020. 80 2.2. Recording for the first part of the radio play Through the Night at SWF public radio in Baden-Baden, 1956. From left

Illustrations ix

2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 2.6. 2.7. 2.8. 2.9. 2.10. 2.11. 2.12. 3.1.

3.2. 3.3. 3.4.

3.5.

to right: Else Hackenberg (secretary), director Gert Westphal (Dr. Brabender), and author and actor Hans Scholz (Schott). © SWR/Hans Westphal, 1956. Source: SWR Historical Archives Baden-Baden (SWR Historisches Archiv Baden-Baden).113 Wilms’ view through the camera while taking a picture of his comrade Hans Hapke. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter). 118 The Jewish boy in Góra Kalwaria. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter). 120 Wilms hides on the way to the firing squad. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).122 Ruins in Orsha. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter). 123 Children playing war. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter). 124 The arrival of the transport. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter). 125 Piles of victims’ shoes. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter). 126 The psychopathic SS man in command of the mass execution. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter). 128 Armbands of the Latvian executioners. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter). 129 Jürgen Wilms at the pit. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter). 130 Pages from the initial manuscript of Through the Night, with handwritten markings by Hans Scholz, 1954. © Robert Hans Scholz, n.d. Source: Hans Scholz Archive, Archives of the Academy of Arts. 155 Hans Scholz at the typewriter, 1956. Taken for the purpose of the Fontane Prize award ceremony. © Fritz Eschen, 1956. Source: SLUB Dresden/Deutsche Fotothek. 156 Scan from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 June 1956, p. 2. 161 Script of the first episode of Through the Night; additions to the footage of the SS man at the execution site, 1959. © Fritz Umgelter Archiv, Archives of the Academy of Arts Berlin.164 Coverage of SWF public radio in 1956. SWF 1956/57, Report (Geschäftsbericht), p. 56. © SWF, 1956/57. 167

x • Illustrations

3.6. Record containing the Jockey Bounce. Photo by the author. 169 3.7. Ad of the Leica II camera, 1932. © Landesmuseum für Technik und Arbeit in Mannheim. Source: Europeana.com.172 3.8. Scan from Tagesspiegel, 29 May 1960, p. 5. 173

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments are a memory medium. They are about remembering the many people behind any academic work. In May 2014, I heard about Through the Night—then in the German wording Am grünen Strand der Spree—for the first time. Wolfgang Mühl-Benninghaus from the Humboldt University in Berlin mentioned the television miniseries during his lecture on West German media history. His claim that Through the Night had already addressed the Holocaust in 1960 was at odds with my knowledge about coming to terms with the Nazi past in Germany; it prompted me to look into the matter. In 2015, I started working at the German Historical Institute Warsaw (GHI) with a project on the reception of historical films. The analysis of Through the Night was to be included as one of three case studies. Over time I found more and more sources, and decided to give up the other case studies. Fortunately, I could easily implement my plans and follow the sources as they arose—I am very grateful to the director of the GHI, Miloš Řezník, for his trust and flexibility. During a research stay at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam (CCH) in 2018, I collected most of the archival material. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship at the Johannes Gutenberg University (JGU) in Mainz in 2019/20 enabled me to analyze the sources and write large parts of the initial manuscript. In the background of many historiographical works, there are archive staff members who support the research process. Helga Neumann from the Archives of the Academy of Arts in Berlin opened up the newly received estate of Hans Scholz. Cara Grube from the archives of the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house showed their documentation to me. Jana Behrendt from the Historical Archives SWR Baden-Baden provided me with the radio play and related material in an uncomplicated manner. The cooperation with Petra Wittig-Nöthen from the Historical Archives WDR was equally efficient. The reconstruction of the ‘liquidation’ of the ghetto in Orsha would not have been possible without the commitment of the archivists at the Ludwigsburg branch of the German Federal Archives and the Munich State

xii • Acknowledgments

Archives. The staff of the Federal Archives in Berlin and Freiburg, the Berlin State Archives, the German Literature Archives in Marbach, the German Diary Archives in Emmendingen, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the FSB Archives in Moscow, and the Yahad-in Unum organization all provided me with access to additional sources. I received further support from numerous librarians at the State Library in Berlin, the university libraries in Mainz and Lodz, as well as the libraries of the GHI, CCH, Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Deutsche Kinemathek, and Topography of Terror in Berlin. To finish my research, I had planned a trip to Orsha, but this could not take place due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the tense political situation in Belarus; however, the Belarusian photographer Andrei Liankevich explored the place for me with his eyes and camera. During my work on first the German and then the English version of this book, I also received great support from my colleagues. Sabine Stach encouraged me to tell the story of Through the Night three times from three different perspectives; Katrin Stoll explained the specifics of the Holocaust by bullets to me; Felix Ackermann provided his expertise on Belarusian history; Andrea Huterer translated the Russian sources into German; Artur Koczara helped me edit the illustrations; Tomasz Załuski and Karol Jóźwiak found time for exchanges about the material basis of memory culture; and Roma Sendyka and the staff of the Research Center for Memory Cultures in Cracow presented new research perspectives on the Holocaust to me. At the CCH, I was able to discuss my project with Frank Bösch, Christoph Classen, Hanno Hochmuth, Achim Saupe, Annette Vowinckel, and Irmgard Zündorf, among others. My time there coincided with the stay of Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, who at the time was researching the media representations of Latvians’ participation in the Holocaust. This connection helped me to fill an important gap in my project. Although not at the CCH, but still in Potsdam, Helmut Peitsch gave me important information on the cultural and literary life of the 1950s. During my fellowship at the JGU in Mainz, I received generous support from Gabriele Schabacher and Alexandra Schneider. The discussions in their seminars opened up new dimensions of media theory for me. From Mainz, Astrid Erll’s Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform was just ‘around the corner.’ There I was able to discuss the concept of ‘subcutaneous memory.’ In the meantime, I presented the project at numerous conferences, workshops, and seminars. Their participants, some of whom are still anonymous to me, inspired me with comments and questions. Special thanks go to the reviewers of the German edition, Judith Keilbach and Wulf Kansteiner, for their careful reading and important impulses. In 2022, the German monograph Mirogeschichten der Erinnerungskultur. “Am grünen Strand der Spree” und die Remedialisierung des Holocaust by bullets finally appeared. Having received positive feedback from my first readers,

Acknowledgments xiii

I took the opportunity to publish the book in English also. I am indebted to Alexander Simmeth, who translated it from German. Jeffrey K. Olick, Aline Sierp, and Jenny Wüstenberg have my gratitude for accepting the book for inclusion in their “Worlds of Memory” series at Berghahn Books, where Amanda Horn was responsible for the smooth and pleasant editorial process. My husband and daughters accompanied me through research and writing with a great deal of patience. They traveled with me in the footsteps of Through the Night, and tolerated the moves and the changes of schools associated with the long periods of research abroad. Although already tired of my fascination with Through the Night, they welcomed the idea of the translation, which again entailed my absence. Dear Emil, dear Maria, and dear Helena, I am extremely grateful for your support and participation in this project. It would not have been possible without the three of you. Warsaw, January 2023

Abbreviations

ARD Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland = Working Group of Public Service Broadcasters in the Federal Republic of Germany CDU Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands = Christian Democratic Union of Germany DFF Deutscher Fernsehfunk = German Television Broadcasting DNVP Deutschnationale Volkspartei = German National People’s Party EK Einsatzkommando FDP Freie Demokratische Partei = Free Democratic Party HR Hessischer Rundfunk = Hesse Broadcasting NDR Norddeutscher Rundfunk = Northern German Broadcasting NWDR Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk = Northwest German Broadcasting NWRV Nord- und Westdeutscher Rundfunkverband = Northern and West German Broadcasting Network RIAS Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor = Broadcasting in the American Sector NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = National Socialist German Workers’ Party SD Sicherheitsdienst SFB Sender Freies Berlin = Radio Free Berlin SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands = Social Democratic Party of Germany SWF Südwestfunk = Southwest Radio SWR Südwestrundfunk = Southwest Broadcasting WDF Westdeutsches Fernsehen = West German Television WDR Westdeutscher Rundfunk = West German Broadcasting ZDF Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen = Second German Television

Prologue

Prologue

Orsha 1941 The Wehrmacht units of the 18. Panzerdivision (18th Tank Division) reached the Belarussian city of Orsha on 16 July 1941 (Vinnitsa 2011, 300), less than a month after the start of ‘Operation Barbarossa’ and the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Within a few days Orsha was largely destroyed (figures 0.1–0.3). The main targets were a bridge over the Dnieper River and a large train depot at the railway junction where the lines from Minsk to Smolensk and from Vitebsk to Mogilev meet, both part of the strategically important railroad connections between Berlin and Moscow, and between Leningrad and Odessa, respectively. Parallel to the railroad lines ran two important trunk roads, also crossing in Orsha. Before World War II, Orsha had about thirty-seven thousand inhabitants, almost eight thousand of them Jews (Vinnitsa 2011, 698; Smilovickij 2000, 191). The Jewish population had especially increased during the 1920s and 1930s, mainly as a result of the industrial development of the city and hence its overall growth. With the exception of a few farmers, doctors, and teachers, the majority of the Jewish population worked in skilled trades. Up to the mid-1930s, the Jewish children attended two Jewish schools, which were shut down in the course of Soviet measures against religion (Spector and Wigoder 2001, 944). The start of the ‘Operation Barbarossa’ made numerous Jewish inhabitants flee eastwards into the Soviet Union (Felgina 2003; Irum 2000). On only the first day of the occupation of the city, the Germans killed Chain-Jankel’ Ronkin by hanging—he was the first Jewish victim in Orsha (Vinnitsa 2011, 300), but in the following three years, several thousand Jews were murdered. Only a few of them are listed in the Yad Vashem Central Database by name (Yad Vashem n.d. b); most victims are unknown, as is the exact number of Jewish survivors. The Russian historian Gennady Vinnitsa accounted for only sixteen survivors, and they had either joined partisans or had been rescued by their neighbors (Vinnitsa 2011, 304). Two Orsha residents were later awarded the title of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad Vashem. Some Jewish refugees returned to Orsha after the war, at least partly reviving Jewish culture in the city (Figure 0.4).

xvi • Prologue

Figure 0.1.  Destruction of Orsha, view of the riverbank, probably 1941. © Anonymous, n.d. Source: private collection. Every effort has been made to identify the original photographers as well as the individuals on the photographs but they are not traceable.

Figure 0.2.  Destruction of Orsha, view from the railroad track, 1941. © Anonymous, n.d. Source: private collection. Every effort has been made to identify the original photographers as well as the individuals on the photographs but they are not traceable.

Prologue xvii

Figure 0.3.  Destruction of Orsha. Only chimneys left after the wooden houses had burned down, 1941. © Anonymous, n.d. Source: private collection. Every effort has been made to identify the original photographers as well as the individuals on the photographs but they are not traceable.

Immediately after the Germans had occupied the city, they installed two large camps for captured Soviet POWs, the so-called Durchgangslager 203 (Transit Camp 203) and Hauptlager 353 (Main Camp 353) (Kohl 1995, 149–50).1 Two other POW camps were built in the immediate vicinity of Orsha. Until 1943, the city remained an important base for the Heeresgruppe Mitte (Army Group Center) under the command of the 286. Sicherheitsdivision (286th Security Division) (Romanovsky 2009, 1711)—a unit regularly involved in mass executions of Soviet Jews (Beorn 2014, 64–91; Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1996, 122). From September 1941 to 1943, Einsatzgruppe 8 had a subcommand stationed in Orsha consisting of roughly twenty members of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) and the 3. Polizei Reservebatallion (3rd Reserve Police Battalion) (Landgericht München 1977, 677; Wehmeier 1962, Interrogation, 464). The city was also part of the operational area of Sonderkommando 7b (Special Task Force 7b) for some time (Kohl 1995, 268–69).2 The establishment of a Judenrat (Jewish Council) was among the first measures taken by the German occupation forces. An accountant named Každan was appointed as its chairman (Vinnitsa 2011, 301). The Germans also introduced a curfew, demanding that Jews leave the streets earlier than all other inhabitants, as well as an extremely restrictive food distribution system.

xviii • Prologue

Figure 0.4.  The Jewish cemetery in Orsha, 2020. © Andrei Liankevich, 2020.

According to a later testimony of the administrative employee A. Skakun, a Russian working for the German administration, “food was only distributed to Jewish residents if there was any left over after the Russian residents had bought it” (Černoglazova 1997, 172; Rozenberg 2012, 48).3 Another eyewitness from a neighboring village reported that Jews had to pay the Germans for food and survival; as soon as they ran out of assets, they were executed (Yahad-In Unum 2011, Interview, 00:26). At the end of August and the beginning of September 1941, the Germans expelled the Jewish residents of Orsha from their homes and forced them into a ghetto (Vinnitsa 2011, 301; Koch 1995, 268). The ghetto was located on Engels Street in the northeastern part of the city (Vinnitsa 2011, 304). Some contemporary witnesses reported a second ghetto (Spector and Wigoder 2001, 944), which, if true, could explain existing discrepancies between the number of Orsha Jews before the occupation and the estimated number of eventual Jewish victims. However, so far the reports have not been confirmed through archival documents or field research. Even the exact location of the supposed second ghetto remains unknown (Vinnitsa 2011, 304).4 The topography of the ghetto on Engels Street, however, is well known. From the east it bordered the Orschitza River, while a barbed wire fenced it off from the west (Figure 0.5). The map that the deputy commander of the city, Hauptmann (Captain) Paul Eick, drew after the end of the war

Prologue xix

Figure 0.5.  Hand-drawn plan of the Orsha ghetto by Paul Eick, Minsk Trial, 9 January 1946. © FSB Archives, Moscow.

depicts thirty-nine buildings including residential houses, barns, and stables (Romanovsky 2009, 1710). Other sources mention only twenty to twenty-five structures, probably referring to isolated farms with several buildings (Černoglazova 1997, 171; Smilovickij 2000, 190). Between August and November 1941, two to three thousand Jews crowded into this very small area of approximately 0.25 square kilometers (Vinnitsa 2011, 303–4; Rozenberg 2012, 50; Ioffe and Knatko 2002, 241).5 Therefore, depending on the c­ alculation, between 50 and 150 people had to share one of the ­buildings—most of them small, wooden, one-story buildings (Figure 0.6). Many Jews died from cold and hunger every day (Arad 2009, 187); each individual received a daily ration of ten to fifteen grams of flour and only a small portion of potatoes, often even less (Černoglazova 1997, 171). As mentioned above, the Jews additionally had to hand over money, jewelry, and valuables to the local commander of the occupation forces (Černoglazova 1997, 172; Rozenberg 2012, 47; Smilovickij 2000, 190). In August 1941, even before the subcommand in Orsha had been established, the first mass executions took place. A unit of Einsatzgruppe B, transferred from Smolensk, murdered fourty-three Jews for their alleged participation in “sabotage and communist agitation” (Vinnitsa 2011, 301; Klein 1997, 159; Romanovsky 2009, 1712). In September, more mass executions followed (Romanovsky 2009, 1711; Landgericht München 1977, 669). Like in most early cases in the occupied Soviet Union, the Germans executed Jews under the pretext of ‘fighting partisans’ (Baumeister 1962, Interrogation, 984; Reuss 2017, 40–41; Beorn 2014, 81). Roughly 200 to 800 Jews were killed in October (Curilla 2006, 440–41); these executions reportedly took place in a hollow near the riverbanks of the Dnieper and along Sovietskaya Street (Vinnitsa 2011, 302). On 19 November 1941, Eick and the chief of the local Sicherheitsdienst inspected the ghetto, and the following day they ordered members of several German military units to seal it off (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1996, 122; Rozenberg 2012, 50). On 26 and 27

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Figure 0.6.  House in Engels Street on the former site of the Orsha ghetto, 2020. © Andrei Liankevich, 2020.

November, the ghetto was finally ‘liquidated’, the Nazi jargon for the mass murder of all surviving inhabitants. Some historians have mentioned the early mass executions in Orsha, mainly because they were a subject of the Munich trials against the leadership of Einsatzkommando 8. However, research on the final ‘liquidation’ of the ghetto has been patchy. A possible reason is the sources: the Ereignismeldungen UdSSR (Operational Situation Reports USSR) lack any information on the ‘liquidation,’ and the interrogation protocols from the Munich trials merely contain isolated references. It was only after Hans Graalfs, a member of Einsatzkommando 8, had been sentenced to three years in jail for accessory to murder at the Kiel Regional Court in April 1964 (Landgericht Kiel 1978) that a certain Willy Kirst, who had served on the Eastern Front in Kesselwagenkolonne 706 (Tank Car Platoon 706), contacted the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg.6 Kirst detailed the mass executions of the Jews from the ghetto in November 1941, but as the verdict had already been passed, the investigators did not pursue the matter any further. The massacre remained unpunished. As the ‘liquidation’ of the Orsha ghetto is hardly mentioned in the sources, the Yad Vashem Online Guide of Murder Sites of Jews in the Former USSR (Yad Vashem n.d. a) only provides information about the crime scene

Prologue xxi

without mentioning a date or even an estimated number of victims. More information can be found on the website about European memorials maintained by the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Foundation,7 but it exclusively follows Gennady Vinnitsa’s findings. Only the first so-called Wehrmachtausstellung (Wehrmacht Exhibition) in 1995 gives more detail (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1996, 122–23),8 such as Paul Eick’s testimony in the Minsk Trial in 1946. It suggests that he ordered an Obersturmführer (a Nazi paramilitary rank) named Reschke to ‘liquidate’ the ghetto (Zeidler 2005). Although Reschke was indeed the commander of the subcommand in Orsha, Hauptsturmführer Hans Hermann Koch claimed during the very same trial to have been in charge of the ‘liquidation’ himself (Koch 1995, 268–69). This discrepancy is relevant because Reschke’s subcommand was under the command of Einsatzkommando 8, while Koch commanded Sonderkommando 7b. Although the credibility of the defendants’ testimonies in the Minsk Trial has been questioned (Zeidler 2005), the fact that at least parts of both units were stationed in Orsha makes it entirely possible that they cooperated. Sources on the Orsha massacre are few, scattered, and sometimes contradictory. As in numerous other accounts on the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union, documents related to the Soviet and West German criminal investigations and court proceedings against the perpetrators provide the bulk of the information. In 1946, at the end of the Minsk Trial, both Eick and Koch were sentenced to death; and in the early 1960s, the Munich and Kiel state courts in West Germany handed down verdicts of accessory to murder against the leadership of Einsatzkommando 8. Four of the defendants received sentences of up to nine years in prison. Today, however, disagreement has grown on how to deal with court-related sources. Christopher Browning claims, for instance, that perpetrator testimony can be helpful for certain research foci and under certain conditions (Browning 2003, 10–12). Jan Tomasz Gross, in turn, is much more skeptical of perpetrator testimony: in his paradigmatic study on the mass murder of the Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne, he argues that the greatest weight should be attributed to the voices of the victims (Gross 2002, 92–93). This is perfectly reasonable in the well-documented case of Jedwabne, but less so in the occupied Soviet Union, as only very few Holocaust survivors could give testimony. And there are no sources that describe the Orsha massacre from a Jewish perspective. Thus, testimonies of ‘bystanders’—leaving aside the problems of Raul Hilberg’s category—can be particularly helpful. A considerable part of research on the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union is based on such testimonies. The example of witness Willi Kirst shows, however, that many representatives of the German forces on duty also considered them-

xxii • Prologue

selves witnesses: “The SS member complained that members of our unit observed the mass executions” (Kirst 1965, Letter, 2225). The phenomenon of observing the mass executions raises questions about whose perspective should be given more weight when reconstructing the history of the Holocaust,9 especially when using files from criminal investigations. To what extent should we believe testimonies of individuals who sought to avoid prosecution? Well aware that the perpetrators usually tried to justify their behavior, I confront their statements with other available sources—as far as it is possible. My description of the Orsha massacre is based on the chronological sequence of the execution—from sealing off the ghetto to the disposal of the dead bodies. It is one of thousands of similar terrible massacres of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union (Pohl 2015, 37); however, in German memory culture it is overshadowed by other aspects of the Holocaust. While the mass murders in death camps, concentration camps and several large ghettos have been researched in detail and are core aspects of cultural memory, any details about the mass executions in Eastern Europe are largely unknown. In this context, I follow the approach of ‘making visible’ the crimes as called for by Katrin Stoll and Alexandra Klei, who demand the identification of the German perpetrators and their local helpers, and scrutiny of the “material condition” (Klei and Stoll 2019, 13) of the respective crime scenes, as well as the handling of the victims’ belongings and the methods employed to cover up and destroy evidence. Despite this broad approach and consulting numerous sources, a reconstruction of the historical events in Orsha remains limited in scope. Ultimately, I offer another narrative about the massacre— one that is based on statements of contemporary witnesses, observers, and perpetrators, and which therefore inevitably remains incomplete. The Central Database of Yad Vashem provides information about some individuals murdered in Orsha in 1941. In most cases, whether they died in the ghetto or during the mass executions can no longer be clarified. Among the identified victims are entire families, such as three generations of the Aramovs and the Gershons; the database lists factory workers, train drivers and railroad workers, accountants, farmers, teachers, tailors, shoemakers, salesmen, an actress, a publisher, a nurse, a midwife, a doctor, and many others. In addition, it records a considerable number of children who were supposed to be the future of the Orsha Jews—instead they were murdered, often in front of their parents. The ‘liquidation’ of the ghetto was ordered by Paul Eick, who called in the Sicherheitsdienst (Rozenberg 2012, 51; Černoglazova 1997, 171–72; Hamburger Institut für Sozialgeschichte 1996, 122). It was obviously not the first time the Wehrmacht had participated in a mass execution of Jews: in early November 1941, for instance, Einsatzkommando 8 had carried out a

Prologue xxiii

similar ‘operation’ in Gomel, about 250 km south of Orsha (Curilla 2006, 442). The statement of the subcommand leader reads as follows: “I carried out the operation in the Gomel area . . . at the request or demand of the Wehrmacht units stationed there. In each case, I was asked by the commanding officers of these units to come with my command, since everything was prepared” (Schulz 1959, Interrogation, 1393). In Orsha, the Wehrmacht not only participated by assisting to provide a task force, but also by sealing off and surveilling the ghetto; Eick assigned the gendarmerie of the local command as well as auxiliary guards (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1996, 122). According to his own testimony, he ordered additional troops after the start of the execution in order to control and supervise the execution site (Černoglazova 1997, 170; Arad 2009, 187). German police also claimed that in Orsha the Jews “were taken to the execution site by the Wehrmacht” (Schulz 1964, Interrogation, 1914). Early morning on 26 November 1941, the Jews were taken out of the ghetto (Vinnitsa 2011, 303). The Sicherheitsdienst ordered the Jewish Council to inform the residents of the ghetto about an imminent resettlement (Prusin 2003, 14; Smilovickij 2000, 190). The Germans temporarily exempted about thirty families of craftsmen from the execution, only to force them into labor and execute them later (Prusin 2003, 14; Bröde 1962, Interrogation, 888). The non-Jewish residents of Orsha who later testified at the Minsk Trial reported that a small commando of fifteen men led by Eick carried out the evacuation of the ghetto (Černoglazova 1997, 171). The members of this commando as well as Eick himself claimed almost unanimously, however, that they received assistance from the local Ordnungsdienst (Wachtendonk 1958, Interrogation, 295; Wiechert, Interrogation, 1962, 451; Baumeister, Interrogation, 1962, 983; Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1996, 122). While these statements were most likely a rhetorical attempt to deflect blame, other witnesses also mentioned the involvement of non-Jewish residents of Orsha during the evacuation of the ghetto (Rozenberg 2012, 53; Prusin 2003, 14)—this is no surprise, as local helpers often guarded the victims and execution sites in Eastern Europe (Rein 2011, 254–306; Dean 2000, 161–67; Beorn 2014, 100). On the day of the execution, the pits had already been dug (Černoglazova 1997, 170). The report of the Soviet commission that investigated the execution site in September 1944 records two pits, each 23 m long, 6 m wide, and 3 m deep (Oršanskoja Gorodskaja Komisija 1944, Report, 4)—about half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Compared with photos of other execution sites in Eastern Europe, which are available in Yad Vashem and elsewhere, these pits seem to be among the largest of their kind (Yad Vashem n.d. c). Late in November 1941, the ground in Orsha was already frozen, which is why it had been necessary to dig the pits in advance (Kirst 1965,

xxiv • Prologue

Letter, 2223; Yahad-In Unum, Interview, 2011). The sources do not reveal who performed the excavation; the Belarusian historian Leonid Smilovickij claims that Soviet POWs dug the pits a few days earlier (Smilovickij 2000, 190), but the use of explosives also seems possible—and the two methods are not mutually exclusive. The mass execution took place behind the Jewish cemetery, which was and still is located on a small hill between the former ghetto and a railroad embankment. The site was in plain sight from afar, so no attempt was made to hide the crime. Unlike many other execution sites of the Holocaust, which were hidden in forest areas (Kwiet 2019), the ‘liquidation’ of the Orsha ghetto was generally observable. The Jews were taken to the cemetery in small lines (Prusin 2003, 14; Vinnitsa 2011, 303). According to Smilovickij, some of them were taken to the train depot, forced into freight cars, and then killed elsewhere (Smilovickij 2000, 190). His account is based on notes of Orsha resident A.F. Kasperskij, but these have been disputed (Vinnitsa 2011, 303). Although no other source confirms Kasperskij’s claims, they cannot be entirely rejected, especially as the infrastructure of mass executions in the wider Orsha area had already been fully established. Indeed, Einsatzkommando 8 used a gas truck to kill the Jews in the town of Mogilev, about 75 km away and on the same railroad line as Orsha (Reuss 2017, 45–46; Beorn 2014, 99; Beer 1987).10 It is possible that the Germans actually took a group of Jews from Orsha to that gas truck by train. Apart from that possibility, the Jews shot in Orsha in late November 1941 reached the nearby execution site by walking, as it was only a few meters behind the ghetto fence. Several witnesses claimed that the Jews went to their deaths calmly. One SS man testified after the war: “I admired the death-defying attitude of the Jews. Most of the time they went to the pit very calmly” (Stein 1962, Interrogation, 861). Of course, this statement was probably a justification strategy, as testimonies from other execution sites prove that victims cried, screamed, and attempted to escape (Desbois 2008, passim). The composure of the victims in Orsha, however, was similarly reported by local witnesses as well, but they generally observed the executions from a greater distance and so may simply not have heard the voices. A man from the region interviewed by the Yahad-In Unum organization (Yahad-In Unum 2011, Interview, 00:46), for example, recalls Jews walking silently in the snow toward Orsha, guarded by local police officers. Extensively documented evidence for the mass executions of East European Jews generally indicated a complete disrobement of the victims before the killings. However, the sources on the early massacres in the occupied Soviet Union provide a more differentiated picture. Witnesses stated that the victims were forced to remove shoes and outer clothing only (Beorn 2014, 76; Walke 2018, 186).11 Some members of Einsatzkommando 8 even claimed

Prologue xxv

that this measure was not introduced until the summer of 1942 (Baumeister 1962, 982). However, based on the consistent testimony of local witnesses as well as photographic evidence from other sites, there is no doubt that the women, men, and children killed in Orsha in the severe frost of November 1941 were forced to undress, at least down to their underwear. After the killings, the “belongings and clothing of the victims were taken to the camp shed of the district administration” and counted there, as administrative employee A. Skakun remembered (Černoglazova 1997, 172).12 The presumed silence ended after the first shot, as some SS men later recalled: “Of course, women and children screamed and cried, especially when their relatives were separated from them and taken to the pit. Also, while the victims were still together as a family, they prayed” (Stein 1962, Interrogation, 861). Yet, the details about the procedure of the mass executions are described in only a few sources. During interrogations after the war, most members of the Einsatzkommandos claimed that they had not seen the killings but merely heard them. The local population gave similar accounts, maybe because most of the execution sites were sealed off by armed forces. All the more significant is the testimony of Willi Kirst about the Orsha massacre: I have . . . found an entry in my . . . pocket diary from 26 November 1941, in shorthand. It reads: “Jews of the ghetto will be shot today. Men, women, and children, 2,000. Lord spare us, innocent of these things, from your ­vengeance” . . . On the morning of 26 November, we heard machine-gun shots continuously. My location was the teachers’ college in Orsha, where our unit was housed. It was about 200 meters from the small river Oiсha [Orschitza], on the western bank. The Orsha ghetto was located on the eastern bank of this small river, beyond our accommodation and about 200 to 300 m away from us. I heard from our Kradmelder13 . . . that Jews from the ghetto were being shot there. . . . I walked somewhat toward the execution site in order to get an idea of what was happening. I then saw with my own eyes, from a distance of about 100 meters, a line of approximately 600 people. There were men, women, and children. Young people as well as old people among them. They had to support each other; it was a procession of real misery. The people were half starved. They seemed to drag themselves along with their last strength. I could not see the whole line of people, only its front. At the front, individual groups of about 10 people were separated by SS men. These groups were taken away, apparently for execution; but I could only deduce that from the gunshots and the screams I heard. I could not see the actual executions from my position. However, at noon I heard from other unit members that they had also witnessed the executions . . . Our accountant . . . described in detail, for example, how an old couple were shot as they walked arm in arm to the mass shooting site. (Kirst 1965, Letter, 2224–25)

xxvi • Prologue

At the Minsk Trial, A. Skakun provided further detail: The ghetto bordered the Jewish cemetery, which was located on a hill. There they had taken the group, about 150 to 200 people, accompanied by a ­reinforced convoy . . . the people, adults as well as children, were ordered by the Germans to undress themselves, throw their clothes and other belongings on piles and jump into the pit. Then, just there, in the pits, muffled machinegun salvos could be heard. (Černoglazova 1997, 171)

Unlike most non-Jewish inhabitants of Orsha Skakun, an employee of the German administration was in the immediate vicinity during the events, hence his testimony is one of the most comprehensive descriptions of the massacre. Not only does he confirm the assumption that the victims had to undress—although it cannot be concluded to what extent—but he also describes the events during the execution. While Skakun reports machine gun salvos, other witnesses mention individual shots. In the court opinion after the trial against the leadership of Einsatzkommando 8, we read: The mass executions [carried out by the] members of EK 8 [Einsatzkommando 8] and the assigned police platoons [took place] in such a way that specially assigned SS leaders or police members within the pit killed the people lying on the ground in front of them, or on top of those already shot, through machine gun shots in the neck. (Landgericht München 1977, 670)

Some of the perpetrators justified this practice as ‘mercy shots’ and claimed during the trial: “I have considered it my self-evident duty to somehow spare a victim suffering or torture, if they were not fatally shot” (Ditner 1959, Interrogation, 801). Both Kirst and Skakun stood at some distance from the execution site. In order to get a more accurate picture of the actual shooting, statements about other executions carried out by the same Einsatzkommando during the same period and in the same region deserve a closer look. In fact, the perpetrators often made general statements without specifying places or times. A policeman of Einsatzkommando 8 reported about the “big execution of the Jews” in 1941 or early 1942: The infants and children were mostly put into the pit for us and then shot. We were all astonished . . . how calmly these people usually went to their death. Of course, we had terrible scenes at the execution site as well. It was also the case that those who were shot later were able to see the execution of those who had gone before. First, the victims had to remain about twenty to thirty meters from the execution pit. Then they were taken to the execution pit one by one and shot. On the short way to the shooting pit there were some guards.

Prologue xxvii

Regularly, the victims were brought to the pit by two men. (Bauer 1962, Interrogation, 989–90)

Particularly striking is the description of the murder of infants and children. During the first mass executions between August and early October 1941, it was mainly men who were murdered under the pretext of fighting the partisans; these statements, however, reveal the genocidal dimension of the ‘operations.’ A member of the 3. Polizei Reservebatallion reported about an unspecified mass shooting near Mogilev: For this purpose [the shot in the neck] they had saved a woman with an infant and some men, who had to climb into the pit. The woman had to lay her small child on the mound of corpses, which was then shot by an SD [Sicherheitsdienst] man from the edge of the pit. Afterwards the woman and the men, who were also already standing in the pit, were finished off by a shot in the neck. (Walkhoff 1962, Interrogation, 1176)

Cruel measures against children are also described by A.F. Kaspersky: “Children were buried alive or bent over the knee and had their spine broken with one blow” (quoted in Vinnitsa 2011, 303). At about this time, the Germans applied and perfected the so-called ‘­sardine packing.’ On 30 November and 8 December 1941, two of the largest mass executions in Eastern Europe happened in the Latvian forest of Rumbula. The corpses were stacked: before they were shot, the Jews had to lie down on top of the dead bodies of those murdered before in order to take up as little space as possible (Ezergailis 1996, 239–70). In Orsha, adults were also forced to climb into the pit before being killed. It is unclear if they were forced to lie down like the children. In a statement about a massacre in the same region, a member of Einsatzkommando 8 claimed that, in the execution pit, he saw “several layers of corpses lying on top of each other, of both sexes, and also children’s corpses” (Walkhoff 1962, Interrogation, 1176). Other SS men reported that Obersturmführer Hans Graalfs had kicked the corpses and “neatly” packed them to the desired position (Lewy 2017, 103). In the sources about the Orsha massacre, one distinctive characteristic stands out: repeated reports about pickle vats filled with corpses. The Soviet commission that investigated the site in 1944 recorded twenty-four vats (Oršanskoja Gorodskaja Komisija 1944, Report, 4; Rozenberg 2012, 51). One of the police officers involved mentioned corpses in “sauerkraut barrels” (Schulz 1964, Interogation, 1915). We can only speculate about the reasons; possibly the pits turned out to be too small and the frozen ground rendered a spontaneous digging of new pits impossible. A meat combine and a kolkhoz (Soviet farm) in the immediate vicinity of the execution site might have

xxviii • Prologue

­ rovided the perpetrators with silos or vats. In any case, in the following days p the corpses were burned. Skakun recalled: Within five days, the corpses of those buried here as well as corpses brought from other mass execution sites were burned. People living near the cemetery almost suffocated from the smoke and the stench of corpses. (Černoglazova 1997, 171)

Hans Herrmann Koch of Sonderkommando 7b claimed that, after the mass executions of all Jews, his unit burned down the ghetto: “We did that in every place. In Slonim, in Baranowici, and in Orsha” (Koch 1995, 268). However, this contradicts other statements that the deserted ghetto remained intact after its ‘liquidation’: “Windows and doors of the houses were open, clothes and other objects lay scattered on the streets of the ghetto” (Kirst 1965, Letter, 2225). Considerations about the disposal of the corpses and the size of the pits lead to the fundamental question of how many people were murdered in Orsha on 26 and 27 November 1941. Willi Kirst recorded 2,000 victims, Eick testified 1,750 Jews in the Minsk Trial, and Skakun spoke of 1,873 victims in the same trial (Černoglazova 1997, 170). When asked by the prosecutor about the surprisingly precise figure, Skakun replied: “You see, I didn’t have to exactly count them [the corpses], but according to the information received in connection with the receipt of ration cards, it was 1,873.” The prosecutor inquired: “So you took this figure of 1,873 people from the lists compiled for food distribution?” Skakun confirmed: “Yes, these lists were brought forward two days after the execution” (Černoglazova 1997, 172). While Eick, as the deputy local commander and the officer in charge of the ghetto, should have known the number of its inhabitants immediately before the ‘liquidation,’ and Skakun based his statement on the exact number of leftover ration cards, Kirst’s estimate, by contrast, is striking. After all, we are talking about a very large number of people who were shot in multiple groups over two days; it was never feasible to count them altogether in one place. Kirst stated: “The figure of 2,000 victims in my pocketbook must be based on estimates or rumors. At any rate, this figure was discussed in our unit at the time” (Kirst 1965, Letter, 2224). Similar to numerous other statements in the files of the Munich and Kiel investigations, Kirst’s assertion proves that German soldiers in the occupied Soviet Union generally talked about the mass executions: not only the policemen, Sicherheitsdienst and SS units directly involved, but also ‘ordinary’ Wehrmacht personnel. During the investigations, defendants referred to these conversations as another defense strategy, claiming to have known about the mass executions only ‘from hearsay’ (Stoll 2012, 218).

Prologue xxix

The 1944 commission gave different figures, which is why Vinnitsa writes of a “confusion regarding the number of perished Orsha Jews” (Vinnitsa 2011, 303). As the Germans burned hundreds of thousands of corpses and covered up evidence as part of the so-called Aktion 1005 campaign, such confusions occur comparatively often when investigating execution sites in the former Soviet Union. Cover-up measures were also taken in Orsha, which makes the reconstruction of the events considerably more difficult (Angrick 2018, 536–38). Nonetheless, the different numbers of victims can at least be partially explained. The report of the 1944 commission first mentions 2,900, later even 6,000 corpses (Oršanskoja Gorodskaja Komisija 1944, Report; Arad 2009, 187). The first figure, referring to the corpses found at the Jewish cemetery, probably counts all ghetto residents murdered in Orsha— including those who starved to death or were killed in earlier executions. The second figure refers to all corpses found in no less than 120 mass graves in and around Orsha—including non-Jewish residents and probably perished Soviet POWs as well. Taking everything into account, it is most likely that between 1,750 and 2,000 Jews were murdered during the massacre on 26 and 27 November 1941. Another 14,000 corpses, presumably former Soviet POWs, were discovered in 1969 during the construction of a linen combine in another part of the city (Kohl 1995, 150). Since 1968, a memorial has honored the victims of the Orsha massacre. It reads: “Here rest Soviet citizens killed by German-fascist aggressors on 26 November 1941” (Jurianov 2010). In the Soviet Union, all victims of the ‘Great Patriotic War’—up to today the Russian expression for World War II—were honored as ‘Soviet citizens,’ regardless of their ethnicity. A simple, handmade concrete slab, later installed to the back of the pedestal, had the inscription: “Eternal, holy rest to those innocently murdered by our enemies. We will never forget you. To my family. From the son of dear mother, dear brother, dear sisters, and other relatives” (Jurianov 2010). After a restoration of the memorial, however, the slab disappeared. Next to the cemetery was a second, temporary memorial. In July 2014, it was replaced by a larger obelisk surrounded by old trees, commemorating in Belarusian, English, and Hebrew the “victims of Nazism [and the] brutally murdered children from the Orsha ghetto”. The Belarusian Jewish Committee, the Simon Mark Lazarus Foundation, which works for the remembrance of the Belarusian Holocaust victims (Belarus Holocaust Memorial Project n.d.), as well as two family foundations from the United States initiated the plan. In 2020, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the ‘great victory’ of the Red Army, the memorial was expanded, the old trees cut down, and the lawn paved (Figure 0.7). This time, the Communist Party of Belarus and the Association of Veterans of the Afghan War participated in the reconstruction, in addition to local Jewish organizations (Lebedeva 2020).

xxx • Prologue

Figure 0.7.  Memorial for the victims of Orsha, 2020. © Andrei Liankevich, 2020.

Not only Willi Kirst witnessed the ‘liquidation’ of the Orsha ghetto, but also the painter, musician, and writer Hans Scholz. In November 1941, Scholz served in the Kraftwagen-Transport-Regiment 605 (Motor Transport Unit 605). Did Kirst and Scholz even stand next to each other at the foot of the hill when the execution took place? Perhaps even with members of other units? In any case, both men wrote down and spoke freely about their observations after the war. Kirst contacted the Central Office in Ludwigsburg after he had read about the trial of Hans Graalfs in the newspaper; and Scholz included a description of the mass executions on eleven pages of his first book Through the Night (orig. 1955). Although he probably created the most detailed account of a mass execution in West German literature, he was never even invited for an interrogation by any West German authority. In 1956, he received the Fontane Prize for his novel, and the national daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung printed it in a series of seventy-one consecutive episodes. The same year, the SWF public radio broadcast a five-part radio play based on the novel—the detailed description of the execution in Orsha extended over eleven minutes. Finally, in the spring of 1960, the Deutsches Fernsehen—then the only nationwide public television network in West Germany—broadcast a television adaptation of the novel as a five-part miniseries. It again included an extended sequence of the Orsha massacre, this time twenty-two minutes long, which triggered an enormous media response. As quickly as all four variations of Scholz’s liter-

Prologue xxxi

ary report found their way into the memory culture of West Germany, however, they soon disappeared again. Only a few years later, almost no traces of Through the Night could be found in the West German media.

Notes   1. For the POW camps near Orsha, see the files in the German Federal Archives Ludwigsburg B162/21208.   2. The stationing of both commandos in Orsha is confirmed by Ereignismeldungen UdSSR (Operational Situation Reports USSR), considered an important source for research on the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union (Mallmann et al. 2011, 902–3).   3. The protocols of the Minsk trial are based on the collection Tragedija evreev Belorussii v gody nemeckoj okkupacii, 1941–1944 gg (Černoglazova 1997), the publications of Aleksandr Rozenberg (2012), Gennadij Vinnitsa (2011), and Peter Kohl (1995), and the catalog of the exhibition Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 1996), as cited.  4. The installation of two ghettos would have been nothing unusual. Writing about Grodno, for example—a town on the Memel River, today in Belarus on the border with Poland—Felix Ackermann mentions two ghettos. The Jews crammed together in the first one “practiced a profession or were otherwise considered useful” and had to perform forced labor; in the second one were those “who did not constitute a valuable labor force” (Ackermann 2010, 161).   5. The calculation of the area’s size has been made by the author.   6. The Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (hereafter ‘Central Office’) was established in 1958 to persecute crimes committed outside Germany during World War II, such as mass executions in the occupied territories. In the mid-1960s, the mission was extended to crimes committed within Germany. The idea behind establishing a central office (and not relying on the traditional system of district prosecutors) was to make the investigations independent from the particular crime scenes or the defendants’ places of residence.  7. https://www.memorialmuseums.org.   8. The first Wehrmacht Exhibition, dealing with the Wehrmacht’s crimes druing World War II, toured various German and Austrian cities between 1995 and 1999. The exhibition contradicted the previously held public opinion, according to which only SS units committed and facilitated mass executions, while ‘ordinary’ Wehrmacht soldiers had nothing to do with the crimes. After an enormous backlash from visitors and some historians (the latter accusing the exhibitors of incorrect usage of the sources), the exhibition was closed, only to be reopened as a second Wehrmacht Exhibition touring between 2001 and 2004. The revised exhibition did not change its core narrative of the Wehrmacht’s co-­responsibility and involvement.   9. In some cases, observers took photos of the events; a large portion of the photos shown in the Wehrmacht exhibitions came from private sources, as did the exhibition FotoFeldpost. Geknipste Kriegserlebnisse 1939–1945 (Jahn and Schmiegelt 2000). Photos were repeatedly used as evidence in the investigations against the leadership of Einsatzgruppe 8, but the files at the Central Office, which refer to Orsha, only contain lists of these photographs and their captions.

xxxii • Prologue 10. The use of a gas truck in Mogilev was mentioned multiple times during the investigations against Otto Bradfisch, the commander of Einsatzkommando 8. The files are located in the Federal Archives Ludwigsburg (Sign. B162/3275–3284). 11. See photos from the project ‘The Untold Stories’, published by Yad Vashem (n.d.c.). 12. There are isolated reports of looting after the executions (Walke 2018, 186). 13. Kradmelder (abbreviation for Kraftradmelder) were messengers on motor bikes moving around the battlefields.

Introduction

Why Three Stories on Through the Night?

8

On 5 September 1955, Hoffmann und Campe publishing house first published Hans Scholz’s novel Am grünen Strand der Spree (On the green banks of the Spree) which was later translated into English as Through the Night. Only one year after its initial release, Through the Night appeared both as a feature novel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper and as a five-part radio play directed by Gert Westphal on SWF public radio. In 1960, NWRV public television produced a television miniseries, again in five parts, directed by Fritz Umgelter. The book, and the radio and television adaptations all contain a detailed account of the Orsha massacre; the production and the reception of each version mirror the processes of negotiating the ‘sayable’ concerning German war crimes at each specific point in West German postwar history. In order to understand those processes, my focus shifts on the depiction of the Nazi crimes in Through the Night—or, more precisely, on eleven pages of the book, three episodes of the feature novel, eleven minutes of the radio play, and twenty-two minutes of the television miniseries. Although the individual episodes of each media production also have their individual titles, for reasons of readability I will stick with the common English translation of the main title Through the Night. In Scholz’s novel, the fictional character of infantryman Jürgen Wilms hears from his comrades about the planned execution. He applies for a twohour leave, and—like the writer himself had done fourteen years earlier— walks up to the railroad embankment facing the Jewish cemetery where he witnesses the mass execution right before his eyes. Infantryman Wilms writes

2  •  Microhistories of Memory

down his detailed impressions in a diary—in part, they coincide with the historical facts. In Wilms’s notes, the massacre happens on a cold autumn day at the Jewish cemetery in Orsha, the victims are 1,800 Jewish men, women, and children, and once the corpses no longer fit into the prepared execution pits, the perpetrators dispose of them in “concrete conduit pipes” (Through the Night [TN] 59). In one decisive point, however, Wilms’s account in the book decisively deviates from the historical facts at Orsha: the executioners Wilms observes are not members of the German Einsatzkommando, but Latvian soldiers. This fictional account by Wilms, subsequently adapted for radio and television, is at the core of my interest. Technically speaking, I focus on one short passage of a much broader opus. However, the fictional diary also bears characteristics of a stand-alone narrative in itself, which is ultimately supported by the fact that Scholz originally framed it that way. SWF public radio broadcast this passage both as the first episode of the series and as a separate radio feature, and NWRV even planned to adapt the respective episode for a feature film. In addition to Wilms’s account, the novel contains six more episodes, of which all but one are set between 1934 and 1954. The episodes are linked by a frame narrative: in April 1954, four friends meet in West Berlin’s famous Jockey Bar to celebrate the release of one of them from a POW camp. The evening passes with telling stories and anecdotes—hence the English title Through the Night—while the strict division between the frame story and the stories within the story dissolves several times, creating a dense “Geschichtengewebe (story web)” (Heck and Lang 2018, 241).1 The overarching theme emerges as “human behavior in war and postwar times” (Heck 2020, 228). In the first story, the recent Heimkehrer (returning POW) Joachim Lepsius reads from the Wilms diary, which he received from Wilms himself; the two soldiers had met shortly before Lepsius’s release from the POW camp. The other episodes deal with the acquaintance between a German soldier and a Russian partisan, a German wardroom in Norway, a family saga dating back to the eighteenth century, an actor who fled from the former eastern territories of Germany and now resides southeast of Berlin, a US-American POW camp, and finally a fictional love story in Italy.2 From today’s perspective, the description of the massacre in the first story is one of the novel’s stylistic highlights—Scholz’s contemporaries, in turn, praised it for its accurate rendering of the jargon at the time. Similarly, the first episodes of the radio and television adaptations (set in the occupied Soviet Union) still appear convincing today, while the remainders of both are firmly anchored in contemporary discourses and so are more difficult to understand. Recently, academic interest in Through the Night has increased noticeably. In their anthology, Heck, Lang, and Scherer (2020) discuss a broad spectrum of topics from all episodes. Because of the different media productions,

Introduction 3

all created in a relatively short period, the authors call Through the Night a ‘media complex,’ a productive term that is used here as well. In contrast to Heck, Lang, and Scherer, however, it is not my concern to bring the entire media complex back to memory; illustrated by the example, I am rather interested in the sociosystemic structures concerning the presence (or absence) of the Holocaust in West Germany’s memory culture of the 1950s and 1960s. I aim to complement the numerous publications on the early attempts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming the past),3 employing an in-depth focus on the micro dimension of the media’s handling of the difficult past. What I wish to achieve is a precise understanding of the media representation of the executions in Orsha—no more, but also no less.

The Exceptionality of the Execution Scene In the context of the general silence about the Holocaust in West German culture in the 1950s, the detailed and ‘plurimedial’ (Erll and Wodianka 2008, 2) description of the mass execution of the Orsha Jews is, without a doubt, a significant exception. However, that is also true for German memory culture today: in comparison to the atrocities in the concentration and extermination camps, the mass executions of approximately 1.5 million4 East European Jews are still considerably less present. The no doubt extensive historiographical research on this so-called ‘Holocaust by bullets’ resulted in only very few novels, films, or television productions that could have contributed to cultural memory (Vice 2019). It is now thirty years ago that Omer Bartov pointed out that historical knowledge about German war crimes in Central and Eastern Europe had only had a minor impact on the German perception of World War II (Bartov 1991, 182–83); and despite numerous publications, exhibitions, and documentaries produced since then, Bartov’s claim remains valid. German memory of the Eastern Front is still dominated by heroic Wehrmacht soldiers and honorable war victims; in this narrative, the German mass executions, which account for approximately 25 percent of all Jewish victims of the Holocaust, continue to have little space. From the German perspective, the execution sites are still just “somewhere in the east” (Klei and Stoll 2019, 10). While in almost every German city, memorials or plaques commemorate deported Jews, East European Jews murdered on the spot close to their homes are largely absent from German memory. This ‘dual forgetting’ discussed in this study—that is, the lack of debate around German war crimes in Eastern Europe on the one hand, and the significant absence of Through the Night in German media history on the other—vividly illustrates the dynamics of German memory culture.

4  •  Microhistories of Memory

Notably, the first story of Through the Night focuses on the memory of German war crimes, even if the fictional and plurimedial diary of Jürgen Wilms is far from today’s conventions concerning Holocaust remembrance. From this perspective, all media productions—the novel, the radio play, and the television miniseries—can be considered as being far ahead of their times; the depiction of Nazi crimes in Through the Night was “probably even unique” (Scherer 2020, 111). Indeed, narratives that specifically addressed German perpetration did not gain popularity until the twenty-first century (McGlothlin 2016b, 34). By contrast, Scholz was already able to claim more than sixty years ago that he deliberately emphasized the issue (Scholz 1969). As much as Scholz may have tried to make his readership aware of the ‘German guilt,’ however, his strategy to adapt the execution passage to contemporary expectations is obvious. For example, protagonist Jürgen Wilms does not participate in the execution, but is only a witness. Similar adaptation strategies are used in the radio and television versions of Through the Night. In contrast to the book, producer Gert Westphal slightly shortened the description of the massacre for the radio adaptation; and director Fritz Umgelter, in turn, considerably expanded the scene on television by showing an arrival of Jews by train, adding scenes of Wilms trying to save a Jewish girl, and even introducing an apparently psychopathic SS officer in charge of the execution. In the companion published for the revised Wehrmacht Exhibition in the early 2000s, the authors addressed the Wehrmacht’s involvement in the Holocaust, as shown in Through the Night: “An SS officer exercises command, while members of the Feldgendarmerie [military police] cordon off the execution site, and Latvian collaborators carry out the mass execution. A Wehrmacht soldier watches the killings helplessly” (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 2002, 675). According to the authors, the film scene emphasizes the soldier’s consternation, portraying him as another victim rather than as a downright perpetrator and/or collaborator. Despite the morally dubious attitude of the fictional character Wilms, the authors of the Wehrmacht Exhibition described the television adaptation of Through the Night as a “provocation” (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 2002, 675). Literature scholar Norman Ächtler calls the passage of the massacre in the book a “risk” (Ächtler 2014, 79); media historian Knut Hickethier, in turn, speaks of a “caesura” (Hickethier 2000, 94), and historian Peter Seibert of a “rupture in the collective silence” (Seibert 2001, 74). However, these interpretations of Through the Night were ascribed subsequently. After all, ‘ruptures’ and ‘caesuras’ rarely occur in the history of memory, especially as changes usually occur gradually and as a result of highly complex processes. Accordingly, not every new motif that appears in memory culture for the first time is necessarily a ‘rupture.’ Eventually, Through the Night, includ-

Introduction 5

ing the execution scene, disappeared from the public sphere just as quickly as it had entered it. Today, the media complex of Through the Night is only, if at all, known to specialists. Furthermore, the editors of the above-mentioned anthology devoted to Through the Night claim that even the few existing references are directly related to the depictions of the massacre (Heck, Lang, and Scherer 2020). According to Christoph Hißnauer, however, this does not do justice to the media complex, “even though it [the depiction of the massacre] is certainly one of its greatest achievements” (Hißnauer 2020, 216). For my approach, the plurimedial depiction of the massacre is of fundamental relevance, including the history of its creation and impact. My experience with Through the Night also shows that the execution scene is hardly known. Over the last couple of years, I have repeatedly presented Through the Night to professional audiences in Germany and abroad; in almost all instances, it caused great astonishment, especially the fact that those depictions were possible in the 1950s and early 1960s. Ernestine Schlant’s monograph on the Holocaust in West German literature is probably the most prominent example of the novel’s absence in academic research—although the execution scene undoubtedly contributed to her argument (Schlant 1999). Other accounts on the (West) German history of literature also entirely ignore Through the Night, or only mention it in passing. The first study on the radio play did not appear until 2020. There are, however, some isolated publications concerning the Orsha massacre in the television miniseries.5 Antiquarian editions of the book are still easily available, the feature novel of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung can be read in any major library in Germany, and the radio play and television miniseries are accessible on the Internet. The execution scene is thus within everyone’s immediate reach—and yet hardly present. This apparent paradox is an opportunity to reflect on the complex mechanisms of memory culture in more detail. A foreseeable objection to my method is its grounding in fragments taken out of context. That is, however, a widespread cultural technique. Scene excerpts and longer quotations are regularly used in teaching; a quick glance at textbooks, for instance, reveals only excerpts of literary texts. At least in German schools, students are rarely required to read a work in its entirety, and interpretations are usually based on short passages. Until the early 2000s, even students of film knew the classics of movie history mainly from descriptions and short sequences shown during lectures; the departments usually had a limited number of VHS or (later) DVD copies, which were difficult to distribute among dozens of students. While it is now easier to make copies, the influence of online platforms such as YouTube, providing only short clips due to copyrights, has spread the practice of watching isolated scenes. In this

6  •  Microhistories of Memory

context, microhistory and microsociology are especially suitable for the analysis of fragmented reception practices.

History of Memory as Microhistory As the present study is based on a single scene, it requires a corresponding methodological approach. My focus on the ‘plurimedial’ depiction of the Orsha massacre aims at an extreme ‘magnification’ of the research object: like under a historical microscope (Medick 1994, 44; Schlumbohm 1998, 22; Levi 2012, 95), I look at those extremely brief moments in West German media history. Consequently, I propose a detailed analysis within the framework of micro- if not nanohistory that “is based on real historical events and requires genuine archival research, yet it leads us not to microhistory but to histories that rely on patterns, trends and regularities” (de Vries 2019, 34). The microhistorical approach allows me to identify memory culture as being ‘made’ at the micro level—a fact that has received little attention. Memory is produced, received, and processed by individual actors under certain sociocultural conditions. Therefore, the mechanisms of these complex processes are now at the center of my study, using the example of the execution scene in Through the Night. Microhistorians often refer to Clifford Geertz’s famous claim that ethnologists do not research about villages, but in villages (Medick 1994, 44; Hiebl and Langthaler 2012, 11; Levi 2012, 93). By analogy, microhistory is an approach to study not small events, but in small events. To take up this metaphor, my thick description of the history of Through the Night provides insight about the micro mechanisms and structures of West German memory culture. “At the center of microhistory are . . . not isolated individuals, but social relations,” writes Jürgen Schlumbohm (1998, 22). In this sense, my book is less about individual authors, producers, editors, or recipients, but about the entire network of people, institutions, technologies, and aesthetics of memory culture. This method is not new to academic disciplines contributing to memory studies: in historiography, microhistorical approaches have been well established, much like microsociological studies in sociology; in ethnology, thick description is one of the basic methods, and literary scholars often apply close reading. Even in art, film, and music studies, detail-focused research is not considered new. In memory studies, however, these methodological approaches have hardly been applied to date. In the following chapters, I therefore present three case studies, which I regard as a kind of microhistorical and interdisciplinary thought experiment. The challenges of microhistory are threefold. The first two difficulties have been elaborated by the cofounder of microhistory, Giovanni Levi

Introduction 7

(2012, 95 and 109). According to Levi, microhistory consists, first, of thick descriptions of source-saturated research objects, and second of sociostructural interpretations of case studies. In other words, we must stay close to the sources but also draw conclusions beyond the microlevel. The focus on actions of individual actors also allows scholarly narratives with identifiable protagonists and clear conflicts. This way, potentially readable yet scientifically precise stories emerge, such as Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistorical classic and bestseller The Cheese and the Worms (Ginzburg 1980). German historian Hans Medick (1994, 12) formulates the third challenge by pointing at the diversity of perspectives: practicing microhistory “means engaging in complexity, not trusting simple and generalizing explanations, but elaborating social and cultural practice from the source material” (Lanziger 2012, 49). Following those calls, I propose not one but three microhistories of the execution scene in Through the Night, all resting on a broad base of sources, all identifying structural patterns of West German memory culture, and all told from different perspectives. Writing a history of memory from a microhistorical perspective means looking ‘behind the scenes’ of memory culture in order to identify the mechanisms of its production and use. In the case of Through the Night, questions concern negotiations between authors, publishers, and broadcasters, their respective interests and decision-making processes, and the reactions of readers, listeners, and viewers. These are long-term processes, hardly visible from afar, and (for the most part) happening beyond the public sphere. Even if a historical event has eventually reached the status of a piece of art, often after lengthy negotiations, it still says nothing about its relevance in terms of memory culture. Only on the basis of other authors’ references and the artifact’s presence in public debates can it be considered relevant for the mnemonic field. In other words: the decisive factor is the impact it has on the public, as Christoph Cornelißen emphasizes in his definition of memory culture. It implies all “modes of representation of history . . . as far as they leave traces in the public sphere” (Cornelißen 2012). According to Cornelißen, memory culture is, above all, about the use of history; in this context, the Holocaust reserves a particular place in German memory culture. The broad range of Cornelißen’s approach is its greatest weakness and, at the same time, its greatest strength; ‘memory culture’ becomes an umbrella term referring to diverse manifestations of public interaction with the past. In my opinion, however, this productive term still requires a structured reflection on its social and media dimensions. Memory culture does not emerge out of nowhere. It is shaped by social actors such as authors, editors, and directors, who act in certain social, political, economic, and cultural environments. Under equally complex circumstances, narratives of memory culture are (or are not) read, heard, seen,

8  •  Microhistories of Memory

commented on, kept silent, praised, or despised. This process, however, cannot be understood based on the cultural texts and images themselves. Its reconstruction first requires painstaking (archival) research, and a degree of luck, to find the proper sources. When I first worked through the estate of director Fritz Umgelter in the Archives of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, I realized the potential of a historiographical study on Through the Night. However, the estate of Hans Scholz was missing, without which the project would have been unfeasible. That changed when the Academy of Arts made the Scholz collection accessible in 2018. In general, and beyond this particular case, however, the postwar cultural history of West Germany is fertile ground for source-based research. Since 1945, no archives in Western Europe have been destroyed by a war; in the 1950s, writing letters was still a widespread practice, as the telephone was not available in every household, and its cost was high. At the same time, the use of typewriters was common, even in private correspondence. As deciphering manuscripts is time-consuming, the use of the typewriter not only increased the efficiency of the scribes and readers of the time, but also of today’s researchers. The materiality of the typescripts, including deletions, corrections, and marginal notes, provide additional clues. Using carbon paper for copies used to be common practice as well, meaning that if today a letter is not included in the addressee’s estate, it is very likely that it can be found in the sender’s. The exchange of opinions about books and films, crucial in the context of this study, usually happened by mail; while today we write and read comments and opinions on the Internet, readers and viewers of the 1950s picked up a pen or pulled out the typewriter. The overall number of letters, notes, and drafts was certainly much smaller than the vast amounts of emails and messages of today; more effort was required then, and the cost of paper and postage as well as the distances to and from the post office and mailboxes simply made such communications less commonplace. Last but not least, analog media was easily manageable, and many people had a greater urge to archive. Public figures commissioned press services to regularly collect and send newspaper clippings with reports about themselves and their work; Hans Scholz had the habit of adding his own handwritten comments. Future historians can only dream of such a substantial and at the same time manageable number of sources when studying the correspondence of the digital age. The incredible wealth of personal sources neatly stored in German archives makes it remarkable that the history of West German Vergangenheitsbewältigung is dominated by research on political institutions, public figures, and widely published cultural texts. Research on Nazi trials, on personal and institutional continuities from Nazi- to West Germany, and on public debates and representations of violence is increasingly hard to grasp. However, research on the construction of memory ‘from below’

Introduction 9

is available, albeit less common: for example, by Lutz Niethammer (1999), who analyzed Vergangenheitsbewältigung based on oral history. Other accounts include Konrad Jarausch’s Broken Lives (2018) and Hanne Leßau’s Entnazifizierungsgeschichten (Stories of denazification, 2020): while Jarausch reconstructs various perspectives on twentieth-century German history based on private diaries, Leßau examines individual interpretations of denazification based on questionnaires and private correspondence. Overall, these rare analyses of collective memory at a microlevel usually make use of biographical methods. My approach, in turn, is to tell the microhistory of memory based on a single representation of history; in this sense, I write the biography of a cultural text. The social and media practices accompanying the production and reception of collective memory are largely invisible to the public. For example, the majority of the investigations against Nazi perpetrators happened behind closed doors and went largely unnoticed. Whether and how employees of the public prosecutor’s offices, police departments, and courts spoke about the mass murder of Jews and other groups can hardly be reconstructed. Looking at the internal communication of publishers and broadcasters, the situation is similar. Although we can easily refer to published books and screened films about the Holocaust, it is much harder to reconstruct the processes and discussions on manuscripts and film proposals which in the end were not produced. Consequently, many sources on Through the Night provide a unique insight into the otherwise mostly hidden world of negotiations ‘behind the scenes’ of memory culture. Although the fictional diary of Jürgen Wilms does not seem to refute the theory of silencing Nazi crimes in postwar West Germany—an ‘uninvolved’ German soldier, expressing his dismay, observes a massacre perpetrated mainly by non-Germans—the story of Through the Night reveals numerous cracks in this picture. In this sense, the discussions in the publishing house and in the broadcasting stations, as well as the very diverse reactions of readers, listeners, and viewers, are probably the most telling material. They provide insight into those areas of memory culture that I call ‘subcutaneous memory’—they hardly appear on the surface of the public sphere. In his seminal study on collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs states that memory emerges in ‘social frameworks’ (1992, orig. 1925). In which ‘framework’ did the authors of Through the Night create the account of a cruel mass murder committed by individuals of their own society? In which ‘framework’ was the representation perceived? While for Halbwachs it was mainly class, religion, and family that contributed to the ‘framing’ of memory, today the term needs some amendment. Certainly, the family or social background still plays a significant role in the perception of the past—both on an individual and a collective level. However, ‘discursive frameworks’ are also relevant for

10  •  Microhistories of Memory

dealing with the depictions of the Orsha massacre: what topics were discussed in public at the time? How were the German war crimes in Eastern Europe talked about? How did the discourse on the Nazi past change between manuscript submission and television premiere? We should further consider the ‘media frameworks’ (Erll 2011a, 128): what status did individual publishers have on the book market? What kind of mnemonic function was attributed to the older medium of radio or the younger medium of television? In addition to capturing those social, discursive, and media frameworks concerning the depiction of the Orsha massacre, I am also interested in their historical contextualization. As early as the 1970s, literary scholar Hans Robert Jauss (1982) suggested that the respective perspective of individual readers should also be taken into account, and this claim has lost none of its topicality. I conceptualize the microhistory of memory culture as a response to four desiderata in memory studies. First, scholars in the field are often concerned with hermeneutic analyses of cultural representations of history, following the account of Aleida Assmann (2006, 54), among others, according to which cultural memory is mediated by symbols and signs. This approach has been implemented in countless analyses of literature, film, art, museums, and rituals. Despite numerous voices criticizing the notion of representation when researching the Holocaust (Friedländer 1992; Ehrenreich and Spargo 2010), especially in relation to traumatic memories (Golańska 2017), it is likely to dominate memory studies for a long time to come. Even if we wanted to move away from ‘representational’ thinking, it is still the starting point of criticism. “But rather than leading us to some authentic origin or giving us access to the real,” Andreas Huyssen states, “memory . . . is itself based on representation” (Huyssen 1995, 2–3). The present study deviates slightly from this paradigm; it is conceptualized as an intervention in order to expand the prevailing hermeneutic approach by aspects of the production and reception of ‘representation’ relevant to memory culture. Second, global and transcultural aspects entered memory studies in the twenty-first century (e.g., Assmann and Conrad 2010; Inglis 2016; Young, N. 2019). Memory scholars follow the discussion about the globalization of Holocaust memory, first initiated by Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2005), and later continued by Michael Rothberg (2009). I do not want to contradict those accounts; however, the more we are concerned with global aspects of memory cultures the less we focus on their practices and historical dimensions at the local and individual level. In this context, global- and microhistory are not necessarily to be understood as opposites (Epple 2012; de Vries 2019). What both approaches have in common is their challenge of national narratives: while global history seeks transcultural patterns of explanation, microhistory focuses on individual and local processes that cut across national categories.

Introduction 11

Third, I would like to address a desideratum frequently mentioned in memory studies. With the microhistorical examination of Through the Night, I intend—following Wulf Kansteiner—to “illuminate the sociological basis of historical representation” (Kansteiner 2002, 180). Many scholars call for a stronger consideration of reception, as “no mediation of memory can have an impact on memory culture if it is not ‘received’” (Törnquist-Plewa, Andersen, and Erll 2017, 3). The claim does not necessarily refer to the direct ‘impact’ of cultural texts on collective memory. This one-sided relationship has recently been called into doubt because recipients also project their ideas onto cultural artifacts (Moller 2018; Rauch 2018; Garncarz 2021). Fourth, Through the Night is not a sophisticated work, but rather a piece of popular culture aimed at a mass audience. This is significant insofar as cultural memory studies often deal with ambitious art. In contrast, this case study is about an example of ‘popular memory.’ According to Alison Landsberg, it is precisely those images of the past that allow their viewer to “suture himself or herself into a large history. . . to take on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live” (Landsberg 2004, 2). Without contradicting this approach, however, I want to focus on the opposite relationship: in early West Germany, almost all adult citizens had individual memories of World War II; millions of former soldiers knew very well what had happened in the occupied territories. Thus, the function of war literature or films was to provide narratives offering meaningful interpretations of uncomfortable memories.6 This study is difficult to fit into a specific academic field. According to Christina von Hodenberg, media history is equally part of historiography and media studies, both often misinterpreting each other due to different research questions, approaches, and methods (Hodenberg 2012, 26–27). Following von Hodenberg, I consider discussions about academic classifications rather unhelpful. I start with my object of research, which is the description of the Orsha massacre in the different versions of Through the Night, and examine it with all methods and techniques available to memory studies. After all, it is a premise of microhistory to combine historical and social science methods.

Movements in Memory Culture As Ann Rigney points out, memory studies have currently experienced a shift from ‘product’ to ‘process’ (Rigney 2015, 68). Cultural memory does not exist, but happens—it occurs and passes. Memory ‘travels’ and ‘moves.’ More than twenty years ago, Annette Kuhn (2000) expressed this idea in relation to cultural memory, but only in the wake of intensifying migration patterns did it gain greater significance. The idea fits into the successful notions of

12  •  Microhistories of Memory

t­ raveling concepts by Mieke Bal, traveling theory by Edward Said, and traveling cultures by James Clifford (Neumann and Nünning 2012). In the context of the latter concept, Astrid Erll emphasizes that “all cultural memory must ‘travel,’ be kept in motion in order to ‘stay alive,’ to have impact on individual minds and social formations” (Erll 2011b, 12), and Rigney adds that only those memories that “travel across media and are appropriated by different actors” (Rigney 2012, 51–53) can be productive for cultural memory. Both scholars take a very thorough and ‘high resolution’ look at their research subjects, albeit through a wide-angle lens: Rigney explores the long afterlife of Walter Scott’s literature, and Erll examines the ‘traveling memory’ of the Odyssey in its global scope. By contrast, I capture the changing popularity of Through the Night’s account of the Orsha massacre in a detailed close-up. Compared to the ‘travels’ of memory that are the focus of transcultural memory studies, this project deals with almost molecular oscillations that are tangible at the lowest level of memory culture. Small movements of memory are already visible at the individual level: Hans Scholz presented his biography during a number of ceremonies; for example, when he received the Heinrich Stahl Prize of the Jewish Community, and when he was admitted to the Academy for Language and Poetry. However, each time he presented it differently. He adapted his ­narrative to his audience—in discourse analysis we speak of ‘framing,’ which corresponds to Halbwachs’s concept of ‘frameworks of memory.’ Scholz repeatedly emphasized certain episodes from his biography, such as his refusal to join the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), while others, including his voluntary enlistment in the Wehrmacht, were mentioned only on certain occasions, and commented on in different ways. Depending on who formed his audience, he sometimes presented himself as a painter, sometimes as a writer, sometimes as an intellectual, and sometimes as a barfly. We can value such strategies in different moral ways, but the fact that people— Scholz is certainly not the only one—communicate divergent elements of their past testifies to the flexibility of individual memory, which adapts to collective expectations. Scholz incorporated his experiences into the manuscript of the novel. The editors at the publishing house forced him to make some changes, and further revisions followed during work on the radio and the television adaptations. What viewers finally got to see on television was only partly based on what Scholz had seen in Orsha. And yet, after the broadcast, he sounded as if it was a film based on his recollections (Scholz 1960c). The depiction of the Orsha massacre moved—or rather, was moved—between texts and images, and then returned. Of course, we do not know exactly what Scholz thought while watching it on television, or whether he actually equated the scene or its fragments with his memories. But social psychologists have long demon-

Introduction 13

strated that media images of history can indeed shape individual memories (Welzer 2017, 185–207). Looking at Through the Night from a broader perspective, it quickly becomes clear that it is an ‘exceptionally normal case’ (Hiebl and Langthaler 2012, 12). The media complex represents the overwhelming part of ­cultural production, which did not provoke political debates, impacted few—if any—subsequent authors, and was rarely studied. In this sense, it is a fairly average artifact of West German cultural history. Furthermore, Scholz was by no means the first to address German war crimes; other authors also highlighted the murders of East European Jews. One of them was Heinrich Böll in The Train was On Time (orig. 1949), describing Galician towns as “smelling of pogroms” (Böll 1994, 18). On the way east, his protagonist Andreas thinks several times “of Cernauti, and he said a special prayer for the Jews of Cernauti and for the Jews of Lvov, and no doubt there were Jews in Stanislav too, and in Kolomyya” (ibid., 28). He says nothing more, but these thoughts emerge in context with his reflections on death. He therefore expresses what, strictly speaking, he does not: that the Jews from Galicia are now dead. Another example is Paul Verhoven’s barely known film Ich weiß wofür ich lebe (1955) about a woman raising two Jewish children from Eastern Europe. In ‘unpopular flashbacks,’ as it was called at the time, the viewer learns that the children’s parents had been killed, but in the end “once again everything is wrapped in cotton wool, repressed, and . . . found in a friendly ending” (“Neu in Deutschland” 1955; “Probleme verspielt” 1955). In contrast to such subliminal or subcutaneous, as I call it, fragments of the cultural memory of the Holocaust, which had only somewhat seeped into public awareness, Through the Night contained by far the most detailed description, up to that time, of the massacres during World War II. To this day, hardly any comparable passages can be found in German literature; in world literature, Jonathan Littel filled this ‘gap’ with his monumental novel The Kindly Ones (2009, orig. 2006). The ambivalent character of Through the Night does not seem unusual for the West German approach to the (then) recent past. Research on Vergangenheitsbewältigung in West Germany proves that a homogenic memory culture has never existed. Many political and social processes ran in parallel, and the decisive turns probably occurred somewhere in the interstices. Konrad Adenauer’s conservative government programmatically blocked any attempt of Vergangenheitsbewältigung;7 it was not without reason that Theodor W. Adorno, in his famous lecture The Meaning of Working through the Past, spoke of “forgetting” and of “repression of what is known or halfknown” (Adorno 2005, 90–91). The theory of ‘repression’ was pushed even further by Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich in their psychoanalytically

14  •  Microhistories of Memory

underpinned essay Inability to Mourn (1975, orig. 1967). Later, Hermann Lübbe coined the term kommunikatives Beschweigen (communicative silence) for the West German postwar society’s silent yet constructive approach to war crimes (Lübbe 1983). However, ‘repression’ and ‘silence’ do not illustrate the whole picture of West Germany’s handling of its Nazi history; numerous criminal prosecutions should be mentioned as well. Between 1950 and 1960, West German prosecutors initiated more than seven thousand investigations against Nazi perpetrators (Eichmüller 2008, 626). In 1958, probably the most famous of the court trials from this period—against the Einsatzkommando Tilsit who had murdered Lithuanian Jews—took place at the Ulm Regional Court (Fröhlich 2011). Partly in response to this trial, the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes was subsequently founded in Ludwigsburg (Krösche 2008). The downside of these efforts, however, was the fact that the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators were never investigated, and only a fraction of the investigations ended in convictions (Fulbrook 2018, 355). Moreover, most of those convicted could hope for early discharges from prison (Eichmüller 2008). In any case, a conclusive judgment about the handling of war crimes in the West German postwar period is hardly possible. Repression of the past and attempts of Vergangeneitsbewältigung existed simultaneously, always depending on what we take into consideration (Berghoff 1998, 97).8 The extensive research on postwar West Germany and its dealings with the Nazi past makes clear that the legal, political, media, and even family ways of coping with the past were highly diverse: examining individual areas leads to varying judgments, case by case. This notwithstanding, major changes did not occur until the 1960s. The “centerpiece of Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (Reichel 2010, 10) were the major Nazi trials, above all the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials which started in 1963. They quickly triggered artistic reactions, as evidenced by Peter Weiss’s drama The Investigation (orig. 1965), among others. In contrast to other media events related to Vergangenheitsbewältigung—such as the television broadcast of the Eichmann trial (1961), and the broadcast of the US television miniseries Holocaust (1978/79)—only very few scholars recognize Through the Night as relevant. How could a representation of German war crimes, disseminated through mass media, not have any long-term consequences on memory culture? The memory of the murder of Soviet Jews conveyed by the novel, the radio play, and the television miniseries quickly ceased to ‘travel’ or even to ‘oscillate;’ it seems as if the depiction of the Orsha massacre, as well as the entire media complex Through the Night, reached a mnemonic cul-de-sac. Instead of moving forward on the path of memory culture, it suddenly stopped. Why? And could Through the Night possibly be

Introduction 15

moving out of the cul-de-sac again in the future, pushed by further transformations of memory and media cultures?

The Remediation of Memory Culture The presence of the past in the present requires a mediation of history, as collective memory is depending on media and is inconceivable without them. Halbwachs already argued that memory only emerges in the act of communication; the relationship between media and collective memory has since been elaborated multiple times, often with reference to Benedict Anderson, who famously pointed at the connection between collectively shared images of history and the development of mass media. Following Richard Grusin (2004), Astrid Erll sees history not only remediated, but also premediated (Erll 2011a, 139). Certain motifs are often remediated precisely because they have already been premediated. It resembles a circular or spiral movement in which images and concepts are shaped and subsequently reactivated by pre-existing ‘pre-images’ and ‘pre-concepts.’ This model allows us to consider the media complex Through the Night as a process of pre- and re-mediation. By contrast, the concept of adaptation—even in its processual view (Hutcheon 2013)—assumes a generally linear process in which a work emerges in response to a previous one. Cultural memory, however, is not linear; it is entangled, branched, and it circulates. The idea of a genuine connection between media and cultural memory is at the core of Aleida and Jan Assmann’s theory (Assmann 2004). Inspired by technological determinism, they propose a model of the history of memory that is based on innovations in media technology, such as writing, printing, and photography. With the rise of television, Through the Night came out in a crucial epoch, even though the ‘media revolution’ at the end of the 1950s was less obvious than it appears in hindsight. While the arrival of television in West Germany primarily impacted movie theaters, its initial effect on book and newspaper sales, as well as on radio use, was insignificant (Meyen 2001, 79–82). The decisive question therefore is how contemporary technological changes also affected memory culture. According to Andrew Hoskins, every new medium influences existing modes of memory (Hoskins 2001). As an example, Hoskins mentions the transition from electronic to digital media, from television to the Internet. While in the electronic phase a few large media institutions controlled the mass audience, in the digital phase the control is distributed among multiple competing institutions and globally dispersed users. Explaining the difference, Hoskins uses the example of wars and media. In the electronic phase, questions about making war visible and communicating it to the public were

16  •  Microhistories of Memory

central; in the digital phase, the war is shaped for the media and the media for the war. In this process, users form “affective networks” instead of mass audiences (Hoskins 2014, 669). Most of today’s media studies focus on the technological developments in the media during recent years and decades. Early television, however, when the mediated image of history became an everyday experience in Western societies, is less often taken into account. Stewart Anderson and Wulf Kansteiner even claim that, until 1967, West German television “never visualized the ‘war crimes’ nor, for that matter, the criminals themselves” (Anderson and Kansteiner 2014, 446). That is not true, as the miniseries Through the Night proves. As early as at the turn of the 1960s, West German television was slowly developing into a medium of social debate, and it contributed to the establishment of new discourses on history (Classen 1999; Keilbach 2003; Bösch 2006). Thanks to serial formats, it was possible to draw the attention of the audience over several days and weeks: the broadcast of Through the Night in the spring of 1960, for instance, was followed by the documentary Das Dritte Reich (1960/61) and the coverage of the Eichmann trial in 1961 (Bösch 1999; Keilbach 2019). From this perspective, Through the Night reflects not only the rapid rise of television but also of popular literature in the postwar period, as well as the slow demise of the feature novel and the radio play. The transformation of West German memory culture coincided with these developments. Following Science and Technology Studies, it is also worth considering to what extent media technologies determine memory culture. This means that we should pay more attention to the technological aspects of the media of memory: if the circulation is too small, the reception too poor, or the image too blurred, the mediated images of history will hardly impact memory cultures, regardless of their content. Concerning the discussion about remediation as the basis of memory culture, ‘plurimediality’ should be emphasized. Through the Night has great potential for a historical investigation of the same content ‘traveling’ between different media. Heck, Lang, and Scherer emphasize the uniqueness of the media complex, which in their view can only be compared to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and its contemporary radio and film adaptations. However, repeated adaptations of the same literary material for radio and cinema were common in the early postwar period. Gerhard Hauptmann’s The Rats (1911) gained significant popularity after the end of World War II, with three radio and four film adaptations, including two in the United States (Schauding 1992). Another example is Theodor Plievier’s bestseller Stalingrad, published as a book immediately after the war (1945) and adapted three times for radio (twice in 1948, and in 1953) and later for television (1963). According to Heck, Lang, and Scherer, the uniqueness of

Introduction 17

Through the Night is primarily the relatively short time between the novel’s publication and the adaptations, but even that was nothing too unusual at the time. Wolfgang Borchert’s drama The Man Outside was adapted as a radio production (1947), shortly after as a theater play (1947), and two years later as a movie called Love ’47. The novel So weit die Füße tragen (As far as my feet will carry me) by Joseph Martin Bauer, published in 1955 (like Through the Night), was first used as a script for a radio play of the same title (1956), and later for a television miniseries (1959). Both novels competed for the Fontane Prize, which Scholz eventually won; and both film adaptations were shot by Fritz Umgelter. In addition to the novels and their adaptations, the audience also received reviews, program booklets, posters, and the like. ‘Plurimediality’ therefore was—and remains—an essential component of reception. For Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake (2009), research should always consider several types of media simultaneously, not only one. For historian Axel Schildt, the ­twentieth century was the age of “mass media ensembles” (Schildt 2001, 188); Andreas Fickers added that media history cannot be understood as a linear process, and that the appearance of ‘new’ media, especially television, always retroactively influences already existing media techniques (Fickers 2012, 51). In addition, mediated artifacts have a long ‘afterlife,’ often overlooked in common narratives about media history. Accordingly, basic research on the history of literature, film, or theater usually follows a certain chronological pattern: first the idea, then the product, then the reception immediately after premiere. This type of narrative, however, does not correspond with the views of the producers or the audiences. Books appear in several editions—first hardcover, then as paperbacks, then as audio books or as e-books. Movies run for months, until they are released on DVD, broadcast on television, or offered through streaming services. Theater plays are usually performed over and over again, works of art repeatedly exhibited, or even digitized. According to Ann Rigney, this ‘afterlife’ of cultural artifacts is characteristic of cultural memory, with the disappearance in turn being the absence of rewriting, ­reissues, or restaging (Rigney 2012, 51). Through the Night illustrates all those phenomena on a microlevel. As people almost always use several types of media simultaneously, the fact that reception studies usually focus on only one medium (Moller 2018; Rauch 2018; Biltereys and Meers 2018) has more to do with the structure of academia. Put simply, literary scholars are primarily interested in readers, and film scholars in viewers; however, as Christina von Hodenberg puts it, it should be about “explaining the impact of different media on each other and, in their interplay, on the society” (Hodenberg 2012, 36). For example, radio listeners commenting on the radio version of Through the Night used to compare it to the book; television critics, on the other hand, did so less

18  •  Microhistories of Memory

frequently. It is highly probable, however, that they were familiar with the Ulm trials only a year earlier; a few weeks before the screening of the first episode of the television miniseries, they might have heard Adorno’s lecture on Vergangenheitsbewältigung on public radio. As difficult as it may seem to trace these connections in detail, they might have shaped or altered the reception of the execution scene in all versions of Through the Night.

About This Book: Telling the Same Story, Three Times The idea for this book first appeared in 2014. After seeing the Orsha massacre in the television version of Through the Night, then hearing the radio adaptation, and finally reading the book, I wanted to learn more. However, literature on Through the Night turned out to be very sparse and additional archival research essential, but even the available sources did not look promising at first. With the acquisition of the Scholz estate by the Academy of Arts in Berlin, the tide turned; I was then able to consult the archives of the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house in Hamburg as well as the archives of the public broadcasters SWR and WDR, which hold material on the radio and television productions. I also found supplementary material in the State Archives of Berlin, the Military Archives of the Federal Archives in Freiburg, and the German Literature Archives in Marbach. Finally, thanks to the help of the staff at the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes and the Bavarian State Archives in Munich, I succeeded in locating files on the Orsha massacre. At the same time, I read Sylvie Lindeperg’s book Night and Fog: A Film in History (2014), a forceful and captivating example of a source-saturated analysis of a seemingly straightforward event in media history. Lindeperg impressed me with her precise approach and the numerous cross-sections through the history of Alain Resnais’s famous Auschwitz film. Taking a microhistorical approach, Lindeperg perceives the individual performances and versions as distinct layers, carefully uncovering them one by one. She calls her approach “a micro-history in movement” (Lindeperg 2014, XXIV) and a “palimpsest of perspectives” (ibid., XXV). She unfolds the individual narratives of each layer in full detail and complexity, so that in the end a multidimensional narrative of Night and Fog emerges. I recognized in Lindeperg’s method as a possible way to approach the media complex Through the Night; however, the abundance of sources clouded attempts to discern a clear narrative. I tried to formulate different (partly even opposing) questions instead of one central research question. On the one hand, the account of the Orsha massacre might have created a mnemonic ‘rupture’; at a time when the massacres of the Jews were rarely (or even hardly) discussed, the respective sequence in the

Introduction 19

book as well as in the radio and television adaptations confronted millions of recipients with fictional images of the murder of East European Jews. On the other hand, the way it was portrayed contained numerous motifs to justify the act, such as Scholz’s Latvian gunmen and Umgelter’s psychopathic SS officer. In multiple conversations with colleagues, I considered what the individual versions of Through the Night, as well as the sources concerning its production and reception, could ‘tell.’ Depending on the particular perspective from which I read, heard, or saw the material, it always resulted in a different narrative: about negotiating the rules of ‘sayability’ concerning the Holocaust at the time, about the development of the West German media landscape in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and finally about the voids in the memory of the Holocaust. I discussed Through the Night at numerous talks and conferences, until, one day, a commentator requested: ‘Make a point.’ I replied, ‘There is no one point,’ to which she replied: ‘Well, then this is your point.’ This brief exchange later reminded me of Thomas Bauer’s essay Die Vereindeutigung der Welt (The univocalization of the world, 2018), in which he criticizes modern cultures for their preferences for unambiguous narratives. Similar processes can be observed in academia, particularly how the Anglo-American writing culture demands clearly formulated theories and plausible arguments. It was no coincidence that the conference language was English. I do not want to completely oppose that notion of unambiguity, but I also do not want to fall into total ambiguity. Through the Night certainly does not evoke a highly relevant research question that urgently needs to be answered. There are good reasons why scholars have preferred other books, radio plays, and television productions so far. The need of ‘stuffing research gaps’—to use an ironic remark by Annette Vowinckel (2013)—does not necessarily lead to good results. My aim is rather to ‘understand’ the account of the Orsha massacre in all its historical, social, and cultural aspects. I could perhaps be accused of splitting hairs here, but how often do we have the opportunity to scrutinize a book passage or a film sequence so closely? As this book is not intended to be an academic qualification of any sort, I decided to take the risk. The eventual decision to tell the same story three times from three different perspectives goes back to two conversations: one with my colleague Sabine Stach, who—seeing my dilemma with Through the Night—was reminded of Tom Tykwer’s film Run Lola Run (1998) and its leitmotif that one and the same story can always have different outcomes. The second conversation I had was with some of my students at the University of Lodz. It started with them questioning why they had to learn so many different cultural theories; for the next session, I then developed an exercise in which we interpreted two artifacts—first a photograph and then a short film—using different ­theories. As a result, we discovered that the use of different theories led to different

20  •  Microhistories of Memory

meanings. I achieved my didactic goal with this exercise, but I also ran into trouble when trying to answer the students’ next question: why do most scholars use only one theoretical approach, or at most two? I had no convincing answer, other than that the unwritten rules of academic convention demand it. The following chapters, however, contain three stories of Through the Night; more precisely, they contain three stories of the fictional diary of Jürgen Wilms, written from three perspectives. To give a preview: the result turned out to be less surprising than I had hoped. Instead of illuminating contrasts, the chapters ended up complementing each other. The first perspective focuses on the actors involved in the circulation of the media complex. Although I stick to the rather old-fashioned terms of ‘production’ and ‘reception,’ I refer to multiple actions related to the ‘use’ of the novel, radio play, and television miniseries, centered around the strategies of adapting the execution scene to the contemporary norms of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The analytical description is based on Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration; Giddens opposes a strict separation between micro- and macrosociological approaches, and with them the understanding of society either as a result of individual interactions or fixed structures. Giddens wants to combine both ideas: every interaction contributes to the emergence of social structures, which in turn shape individual interactions. Negotiations about the rules of ‘sayability’ follow a similar pattern: while the account of the Orsha massacre undoubtedly pushed the boundaries of what ‘could’ be said, it also had to be defined by those very boundaries. All actors involved negotiated those rules. I examine this process from the first version of the novel manuscript, all the way to the rerun of the television miniseries. The second story is dedicated to the text of the novel, the sound of the radio play, and the images of the miniseries. Considering research on ‘authenticity’ and the ‘affective turn,’ I examine the strategies of ‘authenticity’ characteristic of the execution scene: what kinds of war images were considered ‘genuine’ and ‘authentic’ at the time? Another focus of my investigation is the affective impact of the massacre’s depiction: what did the scene ‘do’ to its producers and its recipients? These considerations are seen through a close reading of the corresponding passages in the book, as well as the scenes in the radio and television adaptations. In contrast to the hermeneutic approach of classical reception aesthetics (Jauss 1982), I not only reflect on how contemporary recipients could have perceived the texts and images, but I confront the account with the actual reactions. Hundreds of reviews, letters, and surveys provide insight into the emotional makeup of West Germans toward Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The third story is about media from two different perspectives. It first deals with the mediality of Through the Night; taking this perspective, I fol-

Introduction 21

low Bruno Latour’s account, centering around the connections between human and non-human actors, particularly technology: according to Latour, humans and technology mutually interact (Latour 2006, 17); whereby it is less a matter of how they act, but rather what circumstances make them act how they do (ibid., 18). Inspired by Latour, I ask how the material properties of the media influenced the mediation of the execution scene: what did the media ‘demand’ from the material? Furthermore, media also took an important role concerning the intradiegetic level of Through the Night: the male characters in the frame story earn their money in the cinema industry, the diary is the medium of memory par excellence, and Jürgen Wilms also records his impressions with a camera; the protagonists thus reflect on the contemporary changes of media usage. My three stories are connected by the main focus of my study, namely the first episode of Through the Night. The above-mentioned research questions, the methods of analysis, and the theoretical approaches distinguish each of the three stories, however. The first story emphasizes media as institutions, including publishers or broadcasters; in the second story, media are mediators of past images; and in the third they are technical apparatuses affecting the construction of cultural memory. In fact, the first and third stories are closely intertwined, as they deal with the social and technological conditions of the circulation of Through the Night. I want to present them separately, however, especially as the chapters on actors and institutions have a sociological focus, whereas the chapter on media and technologies derives from media and cultural studies. Both frame the second story—not to be placed last, as it specifically addresses the ‘plurimedial’ representation of a previously unrepresentable event. Finally, I discuss why Through the Night has remained outside the (West) German cultural memory. After a brief and intense popularity, the public’s interest declined just as rapidly as it had started, and the media complex entered a mnemonic cul-de-sac. Admittedly, this metaphor harbors numerous pitfalls, as it transcends the sheer microhistorical perspective. However, I take the lack of interest in Through the Night as an opportunity to reflect on the mechanisms of staying outside of memory culture. A significant majority of the literary, radio, and television history is not part of the academic canon and has never crossed the threshold of ‘functional memory,’ a notion by Aleida Assmann (2011) referring to memories that are not only ‘stored’ in culture, but also ‘used.’ The fact that the canon is an exception rather than the rule “is part of the normality in literary history, too,” Assmann writes. “Only few ultimately make it into the pantheon of great artists whose works are sainted and given the cachet of enduring durability” (Assmann 2016, 40). While we focus on few exceptional works that ‘traveled’ toward the present memory culture without much resistance, numerous other texts fall by the

22  •  Microhistories of Memory

wayside or drift into cul-de-sacs; in any case, they remain ‘outside’ of cultural memory, and must be, if necessary, ‘recalled’ with considerable effort. The multiperspective narration at the execution scene in Through the Night forces the readers of this book to compromise, however. Redundancies are particularly difficult or even impossible to avoid. Whoever intends to read the book from beginning to end, I have to ask for some understanding about the repeated encounter of factual statements. Yet, academic books are rarely read from the first to the last page; hardly anyone can afford to purchase all relevant titles. German university libraries, for instance, increasingly rely on collections that can be used only on the spot, with the result that books are leafed through, scanned in fragments, but hardly ever read in their entirety. This trend has progressed to the point where thousands of e-books can only be downloaded in parts, as libraries buy licenses by the chapter. The policy of large publishing houses and the pressure to increase efficiency shapes the reading behavior of academics, who—at least in Europe—already practice fragmentary reading during their college years, mostly selecting only excerpts relevant for the assignment or study at hand. In order to address the requirements of fragmented reading in this book, the most important background information is given in all three chapters—albeit in a different perspective and corresponding to the respective thematic focus. As can be gathered from this Introduction, I would like to write from a first-person perspective, as long as the remarks are not of a general nature. The reason is my academic socialization: the academic form of Polish—my native language, in which I formulate most of my thoughts—barely tolerates passive voice, and knows no indefinite pronouns. I also avoid aesthetic judgments; several times, after lectures and talks on Through the Night, people asked me: ‘Are the book, radio, and the television adaptations actually good?’ In my opinion, aesthetic judgments should be left to literary, radio, and television critics, especially as current expectations often differ substantially from judgments made at the time the respective works first appeared. While I consumed Through the Night with some difficulty, readers and viewers in the 1950s and 1960s mostly expressed enthusiasm. In the end, to conclude with Hans Robert Jauss, aesthetic judgment depends on the horizon of expectations of the respective present (Jauss 1982).

Notes 1. Stephanie Heck and Simon Lang present a more detailed analysis of the structure of the novel, and also consider the anecdotes from the frame story; they identify eight stories within the story and six metadiegetic narratives (Heck and Lang 2018, 239–40).

Introduction 23 2. Complete summaries of the book and the film is provided by Hans Schmid (2011) in his witty DVD review; he addresses numerous aspects of the contemporary context, and explains the meaning of individual symbols and figures (retrieved 13 January 2023 from https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Scheener-Herr-aus-Daitschland-3390037.html). 3. See Brochhagen (1994); Frei (2002); Herf (1997); Kittel (1993); Moeller (2001); Niven (2006); Reichel (2010). 4. Estimates on the number of victims of the Holocaust by bullets differ. Mary Fulbrook, for example, suggests 1.8 million (Fulbrook 2018, 105); I follow the data provided by Paul A. Shapiro (2008). 5. Detailed references to current research on Through the Night can be found throughout the book. 6. See Norman Ächtler (2013) or Christoph Classen (1999). 7. A notorious example in the Adenauer government is Hans Globke, then head of the Federal Chancellery, who was accused of complicity in the Holocaust due to his role as a ministerial councilor in Nazi Germany (Bästlein 2018). 8. In addition to FN 5, the books by Niethammer (1999), Reifenberger (2019), or Rürup (2019) should be mentioned here.

Chapter 1

First Story Social Actors and Institutions

8 Thanks to extensive research on West Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung, much is known about coming to terms with Nazism and war crimes. Elaborate and in-depth studies illuminate the field from a large variety of angles (e.g., Kittel 1993; Herf 1997; Berghoff 1998; Frei 2002; Olick 2005; Reichel 2010). The majority of these accounts introduce a broad spectrum of political or cultural topics from a long-term perspective. By contrast, we know much less about individual processes at the microlevel. Because microhistories need protagonists, we need actor-centered approaches—or, as media historian Christina von Hodenberg put it, “a return of the human factor” (Hodenberg 2012, 28). Only combining the two concepts by embedding individuals and their actions in a sociopolitical environment provides us with a more holistic picture. The British sociologist Anthony Giddens suggested the interaction of macro- and microlevels. His concept of the “duality of structure” describes how social actions follow existing structures while constructing them at the same time (Giddens 1984, 5–34, 297–304). Regarding Through the Night and the focus in this chapter, the social actions at play relate to production and reception practices. The media complex emerged within the structural context of West Germany during the early postwar era, in which certain norms of Vergangenheitsbewältigung were already in place. However, to speak with Giddens, the norms were rather “tacit” and “informal” (ibid., 22). For a successful participation in West German media public discourses at the time, those norms had to be respected, though not to be followed blindly. Indeed,

First Story: Actors and Institutions  25

as Giddens points out, norms and rules are negotiable. They do not exist outside but within social reality; they are produced, reproduced, and changed by acting individuals. Books, feature novels, radio plays, and television films are created, produced, and marketed by social actors. Subsequently, one or more individuals make decisions about possible new editions or additional screenings. It is writers, editors, directors, and audiences that determine a work’s functionality within memory culture; organizations such as publishers and broadcasters also participate in this process. Giddens would speak of social actors within an institutional framework to which he attributes standardizing power. However, he employs a very broad institutional concept that implies all forms of regulating action (Giddens 1989, 18–21), and in which economic and legal regulations as well as symbolic and discursive orders play a prominent role (Giddens 1979, 107). Modes of memory and the norms of Vergangenheitsbewältigung are certainly among them; like all institutions, they are neither entirely imposed ‘from above’ nor entirely constructed ‘from below,’ but instead are subject to permanent negotiations. A mutual reaction of appropriation and challenge forge their rules. The relationship between the media complex, its actors, and the contemporary discourse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung1 could also be explained with Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory: Thus the real hierarchy of explanatory factors requires a reversal of the approach ordinarily adopted by analysts. On no account do we ask how such and such a writer came to be what he was—at the risk of falling into the retrospective illusion of a reconstructed coherence. Rather we must ask how, given his social origin and the socially constituted properties he derived from it, that writer has managed to occupy or, in certain cases, produce the positions [that] the determined state of the literary (etc.) field offered (already there or still to be made), and thus how that writer managed to give a more or less complete and coherent expression to the position-takings inscribed in a potential state within these positions. (Bourdieu 1996, 215)

Giddens and Bourdieu both examine the tensions between structural conditions and individual actions. Both also suggest that explaining the ‘social facts’ (Durkheim 1964, 1–13) is hardly possible without a close analysis of individual actions within their social context. While Bourdieu focuses on the reproduction of social structures, Giddens emphasizes the social processes of change. As studying the dynamics of change requires knowledge about tangible actors and their daily routines, Giddens exposes routines and contexts. Bourdieu further recommends analyzing the “social origin [of the actor] and the socially constituted properties he derived from it” (Bourdieu 1996, 215). Historical research, however, depends on the ­ particular

26  •  Microhistories of Memory

source situation; thick descriptions of contextualized daily routines are rarely possible. This history of Through the Night is a rare exception, though. The connections between everyday practices in the literary scene and media business, as well as the norms of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, are difficult to grasp. In most of the cases, what made actors act and how those actions affected the environment turn out to be a guessing game. Media historians such as Janet Staiger (2005) and Alison Landsberg (2004) advocate including the respective thought spaces and horizons of expectations of producers and recipients alike; in addition to media content, the organization of the media public plays an important role. In the case of postwar West Germany, for instance, it was mainly high quality media such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zetitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung that reported critically on past political issues—not popular tabloids such as Bild. According to Landsberg, it is not only the content of the media but also their inner logic that determines the formation and impact of representations of history. Hence in this chapter I address the norms that shaped the media’s handling of the Nazi past in the late 1950s and early 1960s: How was the murder of (East) European Jews referred to? What narratives or topics were considered ‘popular’? How did controversial motifs get transported into the mediated public? What consequences did stakeholders face if they counteracted the standardized rules? Literary scholars who deal with the social history of literature formulate similar questions. In order to grasp the production of ‘meaning,’ not only the literature, but all actors and organizations involved in its production need to be examined: writers, publishers, and book markets. The question is, how in the context of “literary understanding of meaning . . . conventions are on the one hand presupposed, confirmed, modified, or rejected, and on the other hand also . . . negotiated anew” (Schönert 2012, 10). This approach to literature is heavily influenced by the sociological systems theory (Heydebrandt, Pfau, and Schönert, 2011). However, contemporary sociologists have called the systems theory into question for focusing too much on the system’s structure instead of its dynamics. One of the most prominent critics is Anthony Giddens, who tried to expand the static system with his ideas of structuration and the duality of structure (Giddens 1979, 81–85); he shifted the focus to actions that can be ‘grasped’ in time and space (Reckwitz 2007, 315). Following those ideas in this chapter, I aim for an actor-centered description, and try to capture how the stakeholders in the literary and broadcasting fields mediated explicit depictions of Nazi war crimes into the public. At the same time, I examine how those depictions maintained their public presence for a number of years, until they finally disappeared from collective interest—and eventually from the memory culture. Concepts of ‘production’ and ‘reception’ play a fundamental role in sociohistorical approaches to media studies, though are usually studied separately

First Story: Actors and Institutions  27

(Hagen and Wasko 2000; Biltereyst, Meers, and Maltby 2019). According to Gillian Rose (2001, 30), however, media content is in perpetual motion and ‘circulates.’ Similar accounts had developed already in the 1970s, when the Polish sociologist of culture Stefan Żółkiewski, for example, spoke of the ‘social circulation of literature’ in which texts would circulate between production and reception in various ‘circles.’ In this sense, distinguishing between production and reception seems purely analytical; media content circulates, and production smoothly transits into reception, which again might trigger production. This circular model has great potential for studying adaptations (Hutcheon 2013) and ‘plurimedial’ works (Erll and Wodianka 2008, 2) such as Through the Night. Editors in publishing houses are usually the first to decide whether the text might be accepted by the public. Hence from the start, the reception is directly linked to the (possible) production process—if the ­manuscript, synopsis, or screenplay is rejected at this point, the reception already ends. For film, television, or radio adaptations as well as translations, additional factors apply; the decisions about the viability of adaptations in other media, or about translations in other languages, are often based on critics and their reviews. ‘Public reception’ thus significantly influences further ways of production, parallel to the ‘internal reception’ such as the editors’ evaluation of synopses and manuscripts. The model is close to Ann Rigney’s notion of ‘productive reception’ in reference to Astrid Erll’s ‘traveling memory.’ Rigney as well assumes that cultural reception and production mutually influence cultural memory: only media content that is repeatedly ‘replicated’ in new contexts is ultimately remembered (Rigney 2015, 68; Rigney 2012, 51). Forms of replication include intertextual and intermedia references such as quotations and film adaptations, but also the printing of paperback editions and the availability of audio and video material on new media (Kampmann 2011). Film history especially is rife with examples of television broadcasts and VHS or DVD editions paving the way for cultural representations of the past into academia and classrooms. But blurring the boundaries between production and reception has even more advantages. While production processes are often well documented, tracing historical reception brings about source-related challenges, as “finding evidence for reception that has taken place in the past is difficult” (Staiger 2005, 14). By including production in the reception analysis, we gain access to new sources. Historian Ulrike Weckel argues that historical reception analysis is never fully representative, and she therefore calls for a qualitative approach to texts that reflect a profound diversity of voices. Especially regarding the representations of the Nazi past, that approach can provide information about the “viewers’ self-perception and their personal assessments of

28  •  Microhistories of Memory

German guilt and responsibility” (Weckel 2019, 136). Weckel suggests evaluating sources on individual opinions that are usually difficult to access, such as interviews or surveys, as well as public statements from a diverse range of media. The case of Through the Night shows how internal documents from publishing houses, broadcasters, and film production companies can complement and support this diversity of sources.

The Author Scholz wrote the first fragments of his future novel back in the winter of 1941/42, while still stationed at Orsha. As most of the city had been destroyed during the previous German attack, the Wehrmacht personnel were housed in simple barracks. At the large marshalling yard, “during the German occupation, the trains with Soviet prisoners of war and with deported civilians met. One transport after another. Here, . . . people were unloaded, separated out, and reloaded for the respective camps” (Kohl 1995, 148). It was also here that numerous German soldiers exchanged stories and anecdotes about their experiences on other parts of the Eastern Front (Figure 1.1.). As one of

Figure 1.1.  Soldiers in front of the wardroom in Orsha, probably 1941. © Anonymous, n.d. Source: private collection. Every effort has been made to identify the original photographers as well as the individuals on the photographs but they are not traceable.

First Story: Actors and Institutions  29

Figure 1.2.  The wardroom in Orsha, probably 1941. The decoration on the wall in the background may have been painted by Hans Scholz. © Anonymous, n.d. Source: private collection. Every effort has been made to identify the original photographers as well as the individuals on the photographs but they are not traceable.

the protagonists proclaims in Through the Night, “Everyone who marched under Hitler toward Moscow, over the old Napoleonic road, passed Orsha at some time or other” (TN 66). The city was an important crossroads for both transport and communication; soldiers not only exchanged information about their daily routines, but also about German war crimes: the destruction in occupied territories, as well as the murder of East European Jews and Soviet POWs. Despite his low rank, Scholz was given access to the wardroom; as an educated painter, he had the commission to decorate the murals. However, Scholz’s notes from this period do not contain any more detail about his activities in occupied Orsha, or about the ‘liquidation’ of the ghetto he observed in November 1941. According to his own testimony, he told people about the events in Orsha during a furlough back in Germany (Scholz 1960b, Speech). After the war, however, he rarely spoke of his wartime s­ ervice—with the exception of capturing these memories in Through the Night. “Enough of the war”; or “I have seen a lot, learned a lot, experienced a lot; sad things, bad things, and beautiful things,” he answered evasively when asked about his deployment in the Soviet Union (Scholz 1966, 110; Scholz n.d. a, Personnel file, 3).

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Who was the man who observed the mass executions in Orsha in the winter of 1941/42, wrote down his detailed impressions after the end of the war, but then rarely talked about it? Born in 1911, Hans Scholz was not among the young soldiers.2 He had grown up in an upper-class family in Berlin, as his father was a lawyer. When Scholz turned thirteen, his family moved into a spacious apartment on Fasanenstraße in the district of Charlottenburg, just off the famous street Kurfürstendamm, a progressive neighborhood and a cultural center of Germany’s ‘Golden Twenties.’ After graduating from school with Abitur (qualification granted at the end of secondary education in Germany), Scholz studied art history and then painting at the Prussian Academy of Arts. He later wrote about his fellow students that “some of my peers may have joined Hitler. I did not” (Scholz 1966, 66). His father supposedly refused to hang a portrait of Hitler in his office and, according to Scholz, when it was finally acquired anyway, his daughter (Hans’s sister) “took the very first bombing as an excuse to smash the Hitler painting” (ibid.). After graduation from art school, he did not join the Reichskunstkammer (Reich Chamber of Arts) or the NSDAP; in the denazification questionnaire after the war, he stated that he had voted for the SPD in 1932. However, in the mid-1930s, he accepted a commission to create murals in the dining room of the Olympic Village in Elstal, Wustermark, near Berlin: “I never exhibited during the Brown Period . . . but, I make no secret of it, I accepted and executed commissions from public and semi-public institutions, mostly large-format things, and murals. I make no secret because otherwise I would never have come to painting, or let’s say to the commercial application of my studies” (Scholz 1969, 111). The Nazis most probably turned a blind eye to his lack of registration in the Reichskunstkammer because the work had to be completed on time before the Olympics. However, the commission in question was by no means an ‘innocent’ art project. First, the paintings presented ‘Aryan’ ideals of masculinity and femininity; one of these murals, for instance, shows a man and a boy planting a tree while the woman stands next to it with an infant in her arms (Hübner 2015, 577).3 Second, Nazi propaganda promoted the architectural concept of the Olympic Village as follows: “It is a ravishing testimony to the achievement of German architects and workers . . . and the expression of a new German culture, which manifests itself in all areas of our life” (Saalbach 1936, 33). When Scholz received no more public commissions, he mainly painted portraits for his father’s wealthy friends, and worked as a saxophonist in Berlin bars, especially the Jockey Bar not far from his home: “The Jockey symbolizes the good times: the boisterous life and the parties in the former meeting place of many international artists. . . as well as the ‘cosmopolitanism’ attributed to Weimar Berlin. Already a central venue of the social circles before the war, the bar then serves as a cultural ‘nucleus’ that persists even after world-shattering

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events, and in which the old friends now literally . . . ‘reunite’” (Heck and Lang 2018, 237). Scholz’s attitude toward Nazism remained indifferent; he refrained from political discussions and focused on painting, music, and his private life. He was neither committed to the regime nor against it; instead, he lived the life of a bon vivant in Berlin. The Scholz family lived in a centrally located, affluent neighborhood known for elegant houses, stores, and bars, in close proximity the Synagogue on Fasanenstraße. “I grew up with Jews,” Scholz (1966, 77) later stated. The Kurfürstendamm area of Berlin-Charlottenburg was home to many Jews, including the Lourié family, former owners of an arms factory in Russia, who had been forced to emigrate during the Russian Revolution in 1917, and later made their way to Germany via Sweden. Having their Russian citizenship revoked, they never received German citizenship. After Mrs. Lourié had passed, the widower and the family moved into an eight-room apartment on Fasanenstraße, where Felicitas, his daughter, met the young Scholz. Their relationship did not last long, as the Lourié family was expelled in 1934— officially because of their statelessness—and had to emigrate to Paris. Scholz followed them via Italy, but shortly after Felicitas moved to the United States’ west coast, and later married in Hollywood. Scholz returned to Berlin and took comfort in the arms of another Jewish woman at the art academy, where “the responsible local group of the NSDAP [had him] monitored to check if he was committing Rassenschande (‘racial defilement’)” (Scholz 1966, 106). Nevertheless, Felicitas remained the love of Scholz’s life. In 1958, when she sued for compensation for the stolen family property, Hans offered his help from Berlin; a year later, the couple met again in Paris, but their first encounter in almost twenty-five years was a mutual disappointment. Scholz’s wartime deployment was rather inconspicuous. He volunteered for the Wehrmacht in August 1939. We read the following dialogue in Through the Night: “Hans,” I asked. “Are you a Nazi?” “No,” he replied. “None of us here are.” “But when your Hitler calls to arms, you have to be there?” “‘My Hilter?’” We want nothing to do with the house painter. But . . . “But what?” “That’s something you cannot understand.” (TN 164)

After the war, Scholz often struggled to explain his decision to join the Wehrmacht. Once he stated that he “wanted to know what war was like and to gain experience about himself ” (Scholz 1966, 107–8). Another time he said the reason was to escape the pressure of the Nazis, because “according to Hitler’s decrees, [he], as a master student of the Reich and Prussian Academy

32  •  Microhistories of Memory

of Artists, which [he] had become in the meantime, would not have needed to participate” (Scholz 1969, 112). In 1940, Scholz was assigned to the Kraftwagen-Transport-Regiment 605. He arrived in the Soviet Union after being deployed in France, Yugoslavia, and Poland.4 As a member of a supply unit, he provided the German troops with ammunition, fuel, and food; duties also included the transport of wounded soldiers to military hospitals, and POWs to local prison camps (Schimke 2018, 41). In November 1942, Scholz was promoted to lieutenant. When his unit disbanded eighteen months later, he was assigned to the 199. Infanterie-Division (199th Infantry Division) in Norway. In January 1945, Scholz received the Kriegsverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse (War Merit Cross 1st Class). He was in Berlin at the end of the war, but then fled west and ended up in the American POW camp in Attichy, France (Scholz n.d. a, Personnel file, 3). He returned to Berlin in 1946, moved into his old apartment, which had survived the war reasonably intact, and founded a small advertising film agency. As he received few commissions, he continued to work as a painter, musician, and teacher for an art school. In 1949, the British branch of the Control Commission for Germany handed Scholz the much sought-after Persilschein—a document confirming that he had been ‘denazified.’ At least from a professional perspective, the early postwar years were a comparably quiet period for Scholz. He tried his luck as a writer, and started the manuscript that would eventually become Through the Night. The first version was an epistolary novel called Märkische Rübchen und Kastanien (Beetroots and Chestnuts from March of Brandenburg, 1953).5 It is about a group of men meeting at a bar in West Berlin; they write eight stories and letters as a wedding gift to a friendly couple. The manuscript included fragments from notes Scholz had made in the Soviet Union, in Norway, and in US captivity. He also incorporated impressions from the Spreewald region close to Berlin where he particularly enjoyed spending his free time. Between the individual texts, he integrated numerous anecdotes, jokes, and allusions to contemporary popular culture. The second letter contained fragments of a fictional diary, and also mentioned the murder of the Orsha Jews. The fictional character and author of the diary was Jürgen Wilms, a former regular at the same bar, now in Soviet captivity; his diary had reached Berlin with a Heimkehrer (returnee from captivity). Scholz’s manuscript with the eight stories and letters was dedicated to Susanne Erichsen, Miss Germany of 1950; they regularly met in the bars where he performed. During one of these evenings, Erichsen met the businessman Krafft Killisch von Horn (Erichsen 2003, 172)—the fictional bride and groom in Scholz’s manuscript are an allusion to this real-life acquaintance. Scholz worked on the manuscript for several months. He started writing from the first-person perspective, and made little use of fictionalization tech-

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niques at first: one of the protagonists had his name, and all the stories made direct references to Scholz’s biography. The first versions of the novel were a loose collection of observations and anecdotes, rather than a thought-out draft for a fiction book. Scholz was well aware of his weaknesses as a writer, as well as of his precarious position as a newcomer in the highly competitive field of West German postwar literature; he discussed his writing attempts with an extended circle of friends and asked them for advice. Even though he was not yet at the center of West Berlin’s cultural life in the early 1950s, Scholz made an effort to follow the unwritten rules of the literary field. He contacted people able to help him write and publish, including Paul Herrmann, who was celebrating the success of his adventure novel Conquest by Man (orig. 1952), or literary scholar Eva Kalthoff, who later worked with film director Helmut Käutner. But Scholz also sought advice far beyond Berlin; he sent Wilms’s fictional diary to Gerhard Rothstein, for instance, a Jewish musician who had emigrated to South America after the Nazis came to power. When Rothstein later congratulated Scholz on the publication of Through the Night, it was from the very personal perspective of a Jewish emigrant: “Jürgen Wilms and his diary can probably be recommended with a clear conscience as an antidote for all future war and race agitators” (Rothstein 1957, Letter to Scholz) The circumstances in which Scholz wrote the description of the Orsha massacre become clearer if we take a look at the contemporary debates about Nazi crimes in postwar West Germany. The mass murder of Soviet Jews had already been a topic between late 1947 and early 1948 during the ninth of the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings (Einsatzgruppen case), in which twenty-two high-ranking members of the Einsatz- and Sonderkommandos were sentenced. According to historian Hilary Earl, the common defense pattern during the trials is repeated to the present day: it was Adolf Hitler’s personal antisemitism that drove the machinery of the so-called ‘Final Solution’ top-down through the ranks. The trial only found a weak echo in the media, especially as reports on the activities of the Einsatzgruppen were not released at the time (Earl 2010, 17).6 After the end of the subsequent Nuremberg trials, several West German prosecutors investigated Nazi perpetrators, but only a vanishingly small proportion of these investigations ended up in court (Eichmüller 2008; Fischer 2015, 70). This includes an interesting case from the Darmstadt Regional Court in 1954: three high-ranking Wehrmacht officers of the 691. InfanterieRegiment (691st Infantry Regiment) were accused of aiding and abetting the murder of about two hundred Soviet Jews from the village of Krucha near Smolensk in October 1941 (Landgericht Darmstadt 1974; Beorn 2014, 93–118). The regiment was stationed between Orsha and Vitebsk at that time. It was entirely clear that the murders were part of the campaign aimed at the complete annihilation of Soviet Jews (Beorn 2014, 119–34),

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as were the mass executions Scholz observed shortly thereafter. Similar to the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trials, the Darmstadt trial did not result in any public reaction,7 perhaps because the defendants were not former SS, but Wehrmacht personnel. Two of them were sentenced to prison, one was acquitted. Historiographical research into Nazi war crimes was slowly taking shape in the 1950s, mainly in the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, founded in 1949 (Berg 2004, 193–370). Although rarely received, early research formed the basis for a developing ‘politics history.’ Current scholars of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in West Germany widely agree that the delayed, but not entirely disregarded, handling of the Nazi past played an essential role in the construction of the postwar state (e.g., Frei 2002; Herf 1997; Kittel 1993; Moses 2007; Moeller 2001). Today it is difficult to assess how Scholz might have perceived the contemporary discourse about the Nazi past. The Darmstadt trial coincided with the work on his book, but he could not have been aware of it, as there was no media coverage of the trial. In fact, there is no evidence that Scholz followed any debates about Vergangenheitsbewältigung before the publication of his novel. His personal recollections of the war certainly served as a starting point for many motifs in Through the Night; however, nothing suggests that he specifically wanted to process his war experiences in the novel—which were certainly not among the worst among the experiences of the war generation around him. For Scholz, as far as we can tell today, writing did not have a therapeutic function. Rather, it can be assumed that Scholz was simply looking for a new job, a job for which he could draw on his personal experience. The discussions he had about his manuscript with friends and acquaintances in literary circles also indicate a strong purposefulness. Although Through the Night remained Scholz’s only novel, it nevertheless established his position in Berlin’s cultural and literary scenes. He primarily worked as a journalist in the following years, reviewing music and art events, and reporting extensively on trips to the so-called ‘East Zone’ (East Germany). He mainly published in the West Berlin-based daily Tagesspiegel, for which he headed the feature pages between the years 1963 and 1976. In 1960, a collection of his essays (Berlin, jetzt freue dich, 1960b) was published, later an extensive ten-volume edition of his ‘ramblings’ through Brandenburg (Wanderungen und Fahrten in der Mark Brandenburg, 1973–1984). The title implies a homage to the German novelist and poet Theodor Fontane, who had published a series of travelogues with a strikingly similar title between the years 1862 and 1889. The single and only contemporary political topic Scholz commented on was the Berlin Wall and the division of the city (Scholz 1961). Scholz’s later claim that he could not write about something he had not witnessed can be considered an accurate self-assessment (“Boccacio in der

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Bar” 1956; Scholz, Wanderungen vol. 4, 110; Puszkar 2009, 312). The role of a proponent of Vergangenheitsbewältigung was visibly uncomfortable for him, as illustrated by an interesting episode. In the planning stages of the exhibition Ungesühnte Nazijustiz (Nazi Justice Unatoned) in the year 1960 in West Berlin, the philosophy professor Wilhelm Weischedel, who had avidly commented on the description of the Orsha massacre in Through the Night in a letter to Scholz a few years earlier (Weischedel 1956, Letter to Scholz), proposed Scholz as a member of the advisory board (Glienke 2006, 97). The board already included well-known public figures such as Heinz Galinski (president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany), Axel Eggebrecht (screenwriter), Axel Springer (publisher), and Günter Grass (writer). Scholz accepted the invitation but never participated in the meetings or discussions; he did not even mention the membership in his CVs, which he otherwise kept accurately updated. His actual contribution to the creation and public perception of the controversial exhibition was something from non-existent to negligible—and any attempt to interpret his membership as a commitment to the West German ‘politics of history’ would be an overinterpretation.

The Copy Editors Scholz initially submitted his manuscript to Rowohlt publishing house in Reinbek close to Hamburg, Germany. It was rejected by Wolfgang Weyrauch, a poet and cofounder of the well-known group of writers and critics Gruppe 47, who in the mid-1950s worked as copy editor for Rowohlt (Weyrauch 1953, Letter to Scholz; Oels 2003, 52). Weyrauch must have told Joachim Kaiser about the manuscript—a music and literary critic who also attended meetings of Gruppe 47—as Kaiser wrote about Through the Night, but without mentioning any names: “Sighing, you read a well-intentioned fabric of art for two mornings, you send it back with friendly greetings and that older gentleman finds his views on literary cliquey once again confirmed” (Kaiser 1956, 536). The ‘older gentleman’ must have been Hans Scholz, then 42 years old, who, however, was not discouraged by this rejection. He asked the writer Paul Herrmann, then under contract with Hoffmann und Campe in Hamburg, to connect with his publishers. In fact, Herrmann recommended the manuscript to his copy editor Harriet Wegener: In my opinion, Hans Scholz is a strong narrative talent, but opinions on the structure of his novel may differ. Since I have known Mr. Scholz well for many years, it was very important to me that his manuscript is reviewed by critical readers who themselves do not know him, and it has pleased me now that you,

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dear madam, have gained a similar impression as I myself have of Mr. Scholz’s book. (Herrmann 1953, Letter to Wegener)

The origins of the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house go back to the seventeenth century (Jungblut 2007, 18); initially, it made its reputation primarily by publishing the German poet Heinrich Heine. In 1941, a certain Kurt Ganske acquired the majority of shares and, after the war, added a number of popular women’s magazines to the portfolio. Commercially successful, Ganske built a North German ‘media empire’ (ibid., 149). The extremely eclectic program—it included everything from photo albums and guidebooks to important contemporary authors and classics—ensured the commercial success in the postwar era. Owner Kurt Ganske left most responsibility for the operations of the house to his trusted employee Harriet Wegener, and she was responsible for the decision to include Through the Night. Wegener had moved from Hamburg to Strasbourg at the beginning of the century, mainly because the girls’ schools in Hamburg hardly offered classes leading to a general university entrance qualification (Stubbe-da-Luz 1986, 679). After traveling through Western Europe and learning English, French, and Italian, in 1912 she began studying German language and literature as well as history at the universities of Freiburg and Munich, only to abandon her studies in 1914 to nurse wounded soldiers at a Hamburg hospital. It was not until 1917 that she resumed university; two years later, she became one of the first women in northern Germany to receive a PhD from the University of Kiel. From 1921 onwards, she played active roles in the liberal German Democratic Party and later in the Hamburg branch of the international women’s club Zonta, home of many Social Democrats and Jews (ibid.). After the club had to close in 1933, she continued to run it unofficially, resulting in dismissal from her library position a few months later (Jungblut 2007, 62). She then worked as a freelance copy editor and translator for the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house, eventually winning the trust of Kurt Ganske. Hoffmann und Campe’s headquarters, as well as some of its warehouses, survived the bombings of World War II almost undamaged (ibid., 116). Wegener quickly procured a license from the British military government and managed to publish the first books as early as 1946, giving her publisher a great advantage in the difficult conditions of the early postwar period (ibid., 122). Wegener also helped to rebuild the market liberal Free Democratic Party, technically speaking its branch in Hamburg, and was appointed as its representative to the admissions committee of the local university, assigned to check any Nazi past of instructors and students (Stubbeda-Luz 1986, 682). When Wegener received Scholz’s manuscript, she appreciated its narrative potential and the author’s observational skills, but insisted on revisions.

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She had doubts whether the readers would accept the passage describing the Orsha massacre but did not want to give it up entirely: “The description of the execution of the Jews, in itself very captivating, would also have to be shortened somewhat, since this is a subject that today’s readers do not like to read about” (Hoffmann und Campe 1953, Letter to Scholz). In contrast to Wegener, copy editor Otto Görner suggested the complete deletion of the passage (Görner 1954a, Letter to Scholz). On similar grounds, Görner had rejected the manuscript of the novel The Turncoat by Siegfried Lenz two years earlier (Berg 2016, 344–45). The manuscript was about a Wehrmacht soldier who had deserted toward the end of the war—and for Görner, “a novel with deserters from the German Wehrmacht to the Red Army in the political climate of the Adenauer era, and given the rigidification between the Western powers and the Eastern bloc, was simply inconceivable” (Berg 2016, 347). During the preparations for Through the Night, Görner recalled the failed publication, as an internal note shows: “It went the same way with Lenz, when we wanted to help him with his partisan novel” (Görner 1954b, Note). Ultimately, Lenz’s novel did not appear until the year 2016, after the manuscript was accidentally discovered in the German Literature Archives in Marbach. Although the political context of the Cold War certainly played a role in the initial rejection of the manuscript, the scholar Friedmar Apel points to another fact: The publisher probably did not know at the time, and apparently not to today, that Otto Görner was a rather dubious figure. He studied in Leipzig under the Nazi folklorist André Jolles, but his academic career floundered. Görner joined the SS and served the regime in the Heimatwerk, among other things. After the war, he fled to the West and eked out a living by freelancing for publishing houses. (Apel 2016, 10)

Görner was in fact a committed Nazi (Emmerich 2011). In 1933 he joined the NSDAP and the SA; he was a member of Goebbels’ Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Literature), and wrote for the Nazi journal Der SA-Mann (Personnel file Görner n.d.).8 In this sense, Apel suggests that Görner’s former allegiance to the Nazi regime influenced his postwar work as copy editor. Presumably, he viewed the fictional confrontation with Nazi war crimes no less critically than any signs of sympathy toward the Soviet bloc. His objections, however, were by no means an isolated case that could be entirely attributed to Görner’s problematic biography; in fact, other publishing houses proceeded similarly. Publisher Joseph Witsch, for instance, forced Erich Maria Remarque to delete all fragments of his novel A Time to Love and a Time to Die that hinted at ‘German guilt’ (Schneider 2018)—even well-known authors were not spared from having to purge politically ‘inconvenient’ passages.

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At Hoffmann und Campe, Wegener prevailed against Görner’s demands so that Scholz only had to slightly shorten the passage. One might be inclined to attribute her commitment to leaving the description of the Orsha massacre to her political views as well as her anti-Nazi stance; elsewhere, however, she suggested eliminating a minor character in the manuscript—a Jewish girl. As her correspondence with Scholz and the other copy editors at the publishing house shows, Wegener always had the publisher’s interests in mind; she had passages deleted or reworded if she believed readers would not accept them, but she also defended passages that she considered to be justifiable and acceptable. Wegener clearly assumed the role of Hoffmann und Campe’s gatekeeper, both influencing the creation of the text and ensuring the author’s “positioning in the publishing and literary fields” (Zajas 2019, 169). Her work was a constant balancing act between expressive texts that stood out in the 1950s literary production, and the need to follow trends and rules of ‘sayability’ in West German postwar society. The literary field was being reproduced permanently; at the same time, both the publishing house and its authors sought their position within it. In this sense, Wegener articulated the rules that she consciously reproduced, when she referred to the potential reactions of the recipients. However, her decision to publish the passage with the mass execution scene, despite reservations within the house, shows that she also negotiated and eventually shifted the rules. Another controversy unfolded around Scholz’s extensive descriptions of East German landscapes. His deep knowledge of regional history, his numerous explorations of the ‘East Zone,’ as well as his interest in the Sorbian language and culture, resulted in what was probably the longest section of the initial manuscript. Wegener and her colleagues refused, however, to include long descriptions of East Germany in the book. “Apart from factual objections,” they explained, “it does not seem quite appropriate to supply material to those who declare the people of East Germany to be Slavic by nature in order to draw political conclusions. We also do not believe that the western European readers, whether long established or refugees, will have much understanding for this at the moment” (Hoffmann und Campe 1953, Letter to Scholz). For the copy editors at Hoffmann und Campe, Scholz’s enthusiasm for Lusatia—a region in the southeastern part of the GDR inhabited by the Sorbs—was obviously a problem. While overly positive descriptions could provoke accusations of sympathy with the East German regime, it was also important to avoid prejudice against (ethnic) Slavic groups. In internal discussions, the copy editors at Hoffmann und Campe feared that the Sorbian motifs would be “water on the mill of the Russians, who will one day gladly declare the GDR a Slavic, because Wendish, state”9 (Hoffmann und Campe 1954b, Note). To the employees of the publishing house this seemed more

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problematic than the description of the Orsha massacre, as for them, Sorbian culture was basically an invention of Soviet propaganda. To support their argument, they sent Scholz a contemporary article that portrayed Slavic culture in Lusatia as a kind of Trojan horse of the Soviets (“Bautzen heißt jetzt Budysyn” 1954). Eventually Scholz complied with the editor’s request and shortened the manuscript by about fifty pages; however, he published the deleted fragments under the title Schkola in the cultural magazine Der Monat in the year 1956, and again two years later as a short story in the Munich publishing house Langen Müller. He unsuccessfully tried to convince SWF public radio of an audio adaptation as well (Scholz 1956a, Letter to SWF). In any case, the suspected controversy about the Sorbian motifs failed to appear: the small book, published with illustrations by Scholz, received virtually no attention. Hoffmann und Campe still benefited, however, as the publisher had acquired the rights to the manuscript before the cuts were made and thus was able to charge a license fee. In addition to reservations about parts of the content, the copy editors at Hoffmann und Campe were particularly dissatisfied with the initial structure of the text. To them, an epistolary novel seemed outdated, which is why Wegener and several other copy editors encouraged Scholz to create a new frame story. Scholz decided to draw on his experience as a bar musician, and so expanded the motif of the evening: starting with the third version of his novel, he depicted it as a night at his familiar Jockey Bar. The autobiographical references were more than obvious (Schmid 2011). On the occasion of a former POW returning home, a group of men meet at a bar. One by one, they begin to tell stories. First, the returned POW Hans-Joachim Lepsius reads the diary of his comrade Jürgen Wilms documenting his missions in Poland and the Soviet Union. Wilms’s notes start with references to everyday life in occupied Poland; they then describe the invasion of the Soviet Union at the end of June 1941, and, with remarkable accuracy, the Battle of BrestLitovsk on what is now the border between Poland and Belarus. The fictional diary then focuses on Orsha, where the protagonist observes the ‘liquidation’ of the ghetto. He recounts the events on eleven pages but, as argued in the Introduction to this book, he does not always do justice to the historical facts, especially when portraying the perpetrators. The chapter ends abruptly with Wilms’s return to his unit. The story of Lepsius reading his comrade’s diary is followed by a man called Hesselbarth recounting his experiences on the Eastern Front. Near Orsha, Hesselbarth encounters a young Russian partisan; attracted to her, he tries to save her from imminent execution, but she deliberately returns to the execution site. The following story is the synopsis of a screenplay describing daily life in a German wardroom in Norway; the routine is interrupted when the relationship between a Norwegian partisan and a German soldier

40  •  Microhistories of Memory

is revealed. The general accepts his subordinate’s behavior and does nothing about his desertion. What follows next is an embedded narrative about a certain Bibiena family, compiled from reports and letters; it mainly happens in Brandenburg and links events from the Seven Years’ War to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. The frame narrative focuses on the character of beautiful Bärbel, modeled on Scholz’s abovementioned friend Susanne Erichsen. The protagonist of the next story is a former actor from Breslau (today Wrocław in Poland) who lost a leg in the war and found refuge in East Germany; he arrives at the bar early in the morning, having had difficulties at the border controls between East Germany and West Berlin. At this point the Jockey Bar’s fictional musician interferes and talks about his experiences in an American POW camp. The last story of the book is about a cheerful vacation in Fascist Italy, and was inspired by Scholz’s real-life study trips. The frame narrative of the book also features the reunion of a couple separated by the war: the aforementioned Bärbel and the actor from Breslau. Compared to the initial manuscript Scholz had submitted, the overall changes were anything but minor. The epistolary novel became an episodic novel, in which only parts are conveyed through letters. Following the recommendations of his copy editors, Scholz deleted more than half of the text about Lusatia, slightly shortened the passage about the Orsha massacre, and, after extensive consultation with the publisher, rearranged the chapters. As a result, the account of the Orsha massacre was now first. Referencing his art training, Scholz explained the sequence as follows: “[It] deliberately graduates from the moods black, less black, gray with pink sprinkles at the end, gray and pink, pink with gray sprinkles to completely pink. The entire colored structure hangs—perhaps you could say, like a balanced mobile—on the large black bar of the first story” (Scholz 1958a, Letter to Stark). Putting the Orsha story to the beginning, and characterizing it as carrier of the remaining book, indicate the great importance the author attributed to it. It was not until three months before publication, during the final proof readings, that Scholz and the copy editors discussed the title. As the initial title Märkische Rübchen und Kastanien did not seem appealing enough, the decision was made to tie it in with Berlin motifs and a then well-known German song: Am grünen Strand der Spree (On the green banks of the Spree, the original German title of Through the Night). The idea of including the lyrics of the song in the book was not realized (Hoffmann und Campe 1955b, Letter to Scholz). Scholz only learned in 1958 that there actually was a restaurant called Zum grünen Strand der Spree in East Germany’s city of Lübbenau (Federal Ministry of Intra-German Relations 1959, Letter to Scholz). Moreover, it is uncertain if the publishing house knew about a series of brochures titled Am grünen Strand der Spree, which were small hometown almanacs with songs, poems, stories, and pictures from Berlin and Brandenburg sent to Berliner

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combat troops on the frontlines during the war (Arendt 1943). As Scholz was very interested in Berlin culture and was part of a Berlin-based unit during the war, it can be assumed that he had either received or known about the booklets; however, sources provide no evidence of any link between them and his book. The revision of the manuscript was a collective effort. One employee of the publishing house complained that Scholz “corrected and deleted in thousands of places and, on top of that, superfluously pasted slips of paper over every single one of his deletions, but at the same time added forty or more new pages and basically changed nothing of what Dr. Wegener had recommended him to revise after detailed explanations during his visit to Hamburg” (Hoffmann und Campe 1954a, Letter to Herrmann). A few months later, however, Scholz was convinced of most of the proposed revisions, and responded to the comments of the copy editors in a positive way. It is difficult to say if a specific event caused this turnaround, such as a conversation with Herrmann or Wegener, or if he realized that his negotiating position as a beginner was comparatively weak. In any case, he now accepted the power relations and unwritten rules in the literary field. Scholz personally met several times with Otto Görner and Walter Stark, employees of the publishing house, to discuss changes. Author Paul Herrmann also advised Scholz during the revisions; he commented on manuscripts and mediated difficult matters between author and publisher. If disagreements could not be resolved, the final decision rested with Wegener. Given the distance between Hamburg and Berlin, and the difficult travel conditions during the Cold War, most communication was by mail; but telephone conversations and meetings are also documented. The copy editors considered the needs and wants of the potential reader, not only regarding descriptions of the ‘East Zone’ and the Orsha massacre, but also the text as a whole. Grasping the atmosphere in the Jockey Bar in West Berlin seemed most promising to them, especially as the isolated remnant of the former metropolis generally caused intense interest in West Germany. In order to adapt the text to the West German ‘horizon of expectations’ (Jauss 1982, 18), the copy editors encouraged Scholz to expand the Berlin motifs and they developed what later turned out to be an effective strategy: to market the book as a Berolinesies (which roughly translates into ‘Belin-related publication’). Fifteen years later, Scholz lamented: “Strangely enough, almost independently of the content known to me, the book was counted among the Berolinestes, and I, consequently, among the Berolinisten [Berlinrelated writers]. Now . . . I am fed up with it. I live in Berlin and that’s that!” (Scholz 1969, 114). However, as Scholz obviously agreed to cooperate in the creation of this Berolinesie, the complaint was nothing more than coquetry.

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There is some evidence that Scholz’s compliance may have had an economic reason. As an art teacher and advertising specialist, he still, aged almost forty, did not live in financial stability. He repeatedly reported money problems when communicating with the staff of the publishing house; late deliveries of manuscripts he explained with work on synopses for ads and film productions. Hence Hoffmann und Campe paid him cash advances, which—although nobody put Scholz under direct pressure—shifted the power balance even more in the publisher’s favor. In Giddens’ categories, it can be explained as an “intensive,” “tacit,” but not “strongly sanctioned” practice of rulemaking (Giddens 1984, 22). Despite this unequal distribution of resources, however, there was no downside for Scholz; in addition to the cash advances, he was even reimbursed for the expensive air travel between West Berlin and Hamburg, for example. His contract promised Scholz 1.50 mark for each copy sold (Scholz and Hoffmann und Campe n.d., Contract), giving the prospect of an acceptable income even with smaller print runs. The way in which the author and the publisher negotiated about the book eventually became a topic of public discussion. In an interview for weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Scholz complained about the publisher’s intention to delete the passage about the mass execution, which in turn supposedly had led to tensions between him and the copy editors (Scholz 1956b, Letter to Hoffmann and Campe). Wegener pointed out that “incidentally, the Der Spiegel legend that the publishing house wanted to have the Jewish mass executions cut out had reached America [the United States], and I was berated by letter. Yet it was solely Dr. Görner’s view, and it did not appeal to anyone” (Wegener 1956, Letter to Scholz). Otto Görner, on the other hand, tried to downplay his role: “One can have different opinions about the Jewish executions. Miss Dr. Wegener was in favor of cutting the passages, I was in favor of leaving them out. But this question is probably not among the main problems” (Görner 1954b, Note). Consequently, Scholz felt compelled to explain that the problematic wording had to be attributed to the author of the article in Der Spiegel. Further, he added: The Der Spiegel legend in the Jewish question, of which I am unfortunately also indirectly guilty by misinterpreting and changing my words, is really annoying. This sounds so bad and is actually irrelevant, because after all nothing proves more than the appearance of the book which opinion the publisher really represents and has taken in this question. Or does anyone think that the author had any means of power and forced the publisher? How do Der Spiegel writers and readers think that, especially in the case of an author whom no one knew. Stupid! (Scholz 1956d, Letter to Wegener)

Apart from the fact that Der Spiegel was not entirely wrong in its portrayal of the events, the correspondence between Wegener and Scholz is further

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evidence of the actual power relations between author and publisher. Clearly, Scholz admits that the decision on the final version rested with the copy editors and that it was him who had to comply. Despite the heroic portrayal in Der Spiegel, according to which Scholz was “unyielding” regarding the execution scene, it becomes clear that if he wanted to publish the book, he simply had to follow the rules; and the publisher put commercial success before aesthetic or even ethical concerns.

The Reviewers The novel was published on 5 September 1955, and the first extensive review appeared in Die Zeit on 20 October of the same year. Hans Schwab-Felisch, who had personally received the book from Scholz a few weeks earlier, enthusiastically recommended it, praising the way the author had “mastered the Berlin and the Märkisch idiom” (Schwab-Felisch 1955). The literary critic was born and raised in Berlin as the son of Alexander Schwab, cofounder of the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany, who died in a prison in Zwickau in 1943 (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand n.d.). In the mid1950s, Schwab-Felisch’s publishing career took a decisive turn: after working in Berlin for the daily newspaper Neue Zeitung as a staff member of the star critic Friedrich Luft, he was hired by the Frankfurter Allgemeie Zeitung and moved to Frankfurt in 1956, where, alongside Karl Korn, he was in charge of the literature feature pages until 1961 (Hoeres 2019, 576). Schwab-Felisch certainly recognized the Berlin motifs in Scholz’s text that had personal meanings for him. He prepared excerpts for readings on RIAS (Radio in the US Sector) in West Berlin but did not include the episodes about the Eastern Front (Schwab-Felisch and Scholz n.d., Scripts). In his review, he emphasized the novel’s broad view of recent history, while mentioning the first story only in passing: “There is much of our time in this book; the scenes become a panorama. The war is in it with all its atrocities and crimes, and the helplessness, the error of duty and its tragedy, decency and malice, sadness, much sadness, but just as much wit and cheerfulness, above all the atmosphere, wherever the scenes are, whoever acts or suffers from actions” (Schwab-Felisch 1955). Schwab-Felisch’s review set the standard. He also recommended the book in personal conversations and sent it to the exiled German-Jewish author Gabriele Tergit in London, which prompted her to meet Scholz (Tergit 1957, Letter to Scholz). Despite his solid commitment to Through the Night, in October 1955 Schwab-Felisch was not yet in a position to substantially promote the book by himself. It was his two influential mentors, Karl Korn and Friedrich Luft, who significantly contributed the following year. Luft received

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the book through his wife, whom Scholz knew from college; in his raving review, which first appeared in Die Welt and a few weeks later with identical wording in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Luft (1956a and 1956b) emphasized the superior handling of Berlin jargon: “This is how people actually speak today between the bridge at Halensee and Bülowbogen district.” Luft, however, only mentioned the Orsha massacre between the lines. Most reviews continued to focus on the Berlin atmosphere portrayed in the novel, while details from the individual episodes were barely addressed. Major newspapers and magazines generally shared Schwab-Felisch’s and Luft’s positive judgments; regional newspapers often printed fragments from the publisher’s press release verbatim. Some reviewers suspected an experienced author behind Through the Night, and considered Hans Scholz a pseudonym. Because Scholz was a well-connected figure in West Berlin’s cultural scene, those voices were rather isolated and probably not taken seriously. However, the publishing house knew how to use the rumors skillfully, and even mentioned them in its 1956 catalog, ensuring that the rumor spread further. After Görner’s passing on 10 October 1955, Walter Stark became Scholz’s new contact at Hoffmann und Campe. Stark assumed responsibility for advertising, distribution, and marketing, while Harriet Wegener withdrew from the business side of things. The publishing house sent copies to the media, but also to West Berlin’s senator for education and culture, Joachim Tiburtius, responsible for organizing the Berlin Art Prize (Hoffmann und Campe 1956c, Letter to the Senator). Determined, Stark wrote to Scholz: “What can I do on my part . . . to assist the institutions that award the Literature Prize of the City of Berlin? I have had occasional contact with the gentlemen who award the prize, but I do not know who is in charge of it. Could you provide me with some information?” (Hoffmann und Campe 1955c, Letter to Scholz) Four months later, Scholz was indeed awarded the Berlin Art Prize for Literature, known as the Fontane Prize. The decision cannot have been an easy one, however, as unofficially the poet Gottfried Benn had been earmarked as winner for the year 1956. Earlier that year, Benn fell seriously ill and informed Tiburtius that he would have to withdraw from public appearances (Benn 1956, Letter to Tiburtius). After lengthy discussions, the jury also found Benn’s works “too important” for the recently established Fontane Prize, and preferred to honor an unknown author. The comments the jury made on Through the Night clearly resembled the reviewers’ comments, again praising the skillful use of the Berlin dialect and the combination of seven seemingly unrelated stories in one novel (Jury 1956a, Report); the depiction of the city’s atmosphere as well as numerous ties to Theodor Fontane were additional motives to award the prize. The passage about the Orsha massacre, however, was not addressed at all. Interestingly, Tiburtius dealt with

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the depiction of the Holocaust only a few days after the Fontane Prize was awarded: as a member of the Advisory Board of the Berlinale Film Festival he saw Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog at a special screening in late March 1956 (Knaap 2008, 80); the board approved the film for the Berlinale of the same year (Lindeperg 2014, 223–24). As Tiburtius was also the chairman of the Society for Christian–Jewish Cooperation in Berlin, it is rather unlikely that he overlooked the description of the Orsha massacre in Scholz’s book. The weak reception of the massacre scene confirms Norman Ächtler’s assumption that West German writers of the 1950s certainly dealt with German war crimes; however, this went widely unnoticed: “The various plot levels of the literary system masked these sensitive disclosures through various follow-up communications, filtering the textual contents before ‘releasing’ them for further follow-up communications”10 (Ächtler 2011, 400). This process, based on Luhmann’s systems theory, can also be understood as reproduction in Bourdieu’s sense: the habitus of literary critics who used their symbolic capital in dealing with the novel resulted in concealment of the massacre scene. The critics thus reproduced the literary field in its previous state. Giddens’s theory, by contrast, allows consideration of this process as a mobilization of resources and rules by the institution of literary criticism. The purpose of this action is to maintain the discursive structure in dealing with the past. The status quo in West Germany in the mid-1950s presupposed that the Nazi war crimes in Eastern Europe would not be addressed publicly. But what was the proper behavior when it happened anyway, as in Through the Night? The ‘tacit’ rule in the sense of Giddens obviously led to a discursive blockade; the critics used their strong symbolic position to draw the curtain over German atrocities during World War II. The few cultural representations of war crimes that Ächtler identifies in West German literature of the 1950s lacked a multiplier to deliver the message. The lack of engagement with the representation of Nazi war crimes in early West German literary criticism is no surprise. Remarkable, however, are similar mechanisms outside the public sphere; the ‘filtering’ Ächtler speaks of was not only employed by literary critics, but also by individual readers. Among the letters Scholz received after the publication, only a few addressed the diary of Jürgen Wilms. The poet Gottfried Benn, for instance, congratulated Scholz on the Norwegian episode, adding that Scholz was “an author who can tell and has something to tell” (Benn 1955, Letter to Hoffmann and Campe).11 Hardly anyone claimed that it was the realistic depiction of the Eastern Front or of the mass execution scene that touched them most; many, however, alluded to the dialogues at the bar, the love story, or the yearning for the ‘lost east’ of Germany. Who actually read the fragments about the

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Eastern Front thoroughly and who only browsed through them can no longer be verified. The Fontane Prize opened up new opportunities for Scholz. Part of the jury was television journalist Thilo Koch, who also published a very positive review in the liberal weekly Die Zeit. After a television appearance on Koch’s show, he and Scholz became friends. Scholz also received congratulations from the former deputy mayor of Berlin and cofounder of the main West German conservative party CDU, Ferdinand Friedensburg (1956a, Letter to Scholz). In July 1956, Scholz accompanied Friedensburg to a round table at the Kempinsky Hotel in West Berlin, attended by the president of the Free University of Berlin, the head of the Tagesspiegel, and others, in order to “discuss common questions and common concerns” (Friedensburg 1956b, Letter to Scholz). When presenting his book at RIAS, Scholz renewed his acquaintance with Friedrich Luft; other literary critics and writers such as Hans Schwab-Felisch and Gabriele Tergit, and also the German-Russian author Alix Rohde-Liebenau, sought contact with the newly successful author. In the mid-1950s, important impulses for West Berlin’s cultural life came from bourgeois circles. At a reception at the Deutscher Künstlerbund (Association of German Artists), Scholz met the president of the Federal Republic of Germany, Theodor Heuss. Scholz was even supposed to accompany the president on an official trip to Israel (Bürkle 1957, Letter to Scholz). When he applied for a visa at the Israeli diplomatic mission, he mentioned his book as well as the fact that it “deals very intensively with the problem of the Germans, the Nazis, and the Jews.” He even claimed that the novel had received a positive review by the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland (General weekly newspaper of the Jews in Germany), when in fact it was just briefly mentioned under ‘new releases’ (Scholz 1957, Letter to Diplomatic Mission). Scholz clearly knew how to use success to his advantage. Ultimately, the trip to Israel was canceled, apparently due to diplomatic concerns, as West Germany had not yet established diplomatic relations with Israel. Heuss would not complete his visit until three years later, in May 1960, when he was no longer in office (Hestermann 2016, 61). While the facts presented here about Scholz’s circle of friends and acquaintances may be incidental anecdotes, tracing his social network is certainly relevant. In the sociology of knowledge it is called network analysis; the history of philosophy developed the method of constellation research in order to understand thought spaces in which ideas evolve (Muslow and Stamm 2005). In this sense, positive comments from prominent people helped Scholz to succeed, but he was by no means as unknown as the publisher and some reviewers liked to portray him. Due to Scholz’s friendship with Paul Herrmann Hoffmann und Campe accepted the manuscript; Friedrich Luft’s

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wife, who had been Scholz’s former fellow student, arranged the contact to Luft himself, the star critic of the time. Although Scholz had no experience as an author, he had long been an active member of the Berlin cultural scene as a painter and musician. He also regularly met people from the film and fashion industries, and ‘Miss Germany’ Susanne Erichsen was just one of his many friends and acquaintances. It can be assumed that this environment of which he had been a part since the early 1930s had a significant influence; he received help from friends on how to fit socially in the literary field. By the time his book appeared, Scholz knew his way around the cultural scene very well; he knew how to appear self-confident and charming, and he did not shy away from the media. His experiences in West Berlin’s postwar scene are reflected in Through the Night: his protagonists are artists, filmmakers, actors, and a model. His contacts with journalists as well as Scholz’s presence on radio and television indicate that Through the Night became a multimedia phenomenon early on. After the success of his book, Scholz regularly wrote and illustrated for the cultural magazine Der Monat (Martin 2003, 13), financed by the American military government; the contributions served as a stepping stone for his later publishing career. Around the year 1960 in Der Monat, publisher Hellmut Jaesrich offered space to a wide variety of authors such as Max Horkheimer, Siegfried Kracauer, Günter Grass, Golo Mann, Hans Schwab-Felisch, Ferdinand Luft, and Karl Korn. Scholz mostly wrote about Berlin, solidifying his reputation as a Berlin connoisseur; his contacts with other writers, however, stayed rather limited. He also evaded questions about his opinion on literature: “The matter is this: since a lenient public has received my only novel graciously, it created the illusion that I might want to understand something about literature. But due to my whole previous education, I cannot do that at all, as I am trained only in the history of art, partly in painting” (Scholz 1956f, Letter to Siedler). This statement can certainly be read as one of Scholz’s numerous coquetries. Stefan Scherer (2020, 112–14) shows that Scholz, in fact, was not only educated in art history, but also very well-read. While he thought little of avantgarde or politically engaged literature, he had a sound knowledge of the German literary canon. His disinterest in contemporary literature as well as his absence from literary circles may explain why critics rarely compared Through the Night to other fiction, except occasional and obvious references to some classics such as Boccaccio and Fontane; but even the jury of the Fontane Prize hardly drew any comparisons. Based on the frame story, however, references to Goethe’s The German Refugees (orig. 1795) or E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Serapion Brethren (orig. 1819–21) seemed obvious. Instead, the jury called Through the Night “extraordinary” (Wilk 1955) and “exemplary” (Jury 1956b, Press Release). They emphasized the fact that it was a

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debut, thus creating the impression that a new star was born; accordingly, the press release read: “It [the subject] encompasses the burdening legacy of the immediate past—nationalism and war—as well as the no less difficult situation of the moment: the rift through Germany. Without the rendition of superficial political opinions and intentions, the recent past and the present situation are illuminated and shaped with virtuosic skill” (Jury 1956b, Press Release). Regarding the portrayal of the war emphasized by the jury, Norman Ächtler states that already in the 1950s “numerous texts in which crimes against prisoners of war and the Russian civilian population as well as against Jews probably only play[ed] a peripheral role, but [were] kept present as experience of German soldiers” (Ächtler 2011, 399). In And Where Were You, Adam? (orig. 1951), Heinrich Böll intensifies the execution of the singing Ilona by the sadistic SS man in just one sentence. In A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Erich Maria Remarque created similar pictures as Scholz: Russian civilians stand at the pit and await their death. Remarque’s protagonist speaks of slavery, mass murders, and concentration camps, although those passages had been massively cut in the original print.12 Parallel to these now canonized depictions of war, a large amount of literary fiction emerged that perpetuated a heroic perspective on the soldier’s experience on the Eastern Front. Other themes Scholz picked up were also well represented in West German literature, among them the experience of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) as described by Wolfgang Koeppen (2008) in his three novels Pigeons on the Grass (orig. 1951), The Hothouse (orig. 1953), and Death in Rome (orig. 1954); also the division of Germany, as addressed by Arno Schmidt (1991) in The Stone Heart (orig. 1956), for example. Stefan Scherer also draws parallels to Martin Walser and Hermann Hesse, as well as less-known authors such as Hans Erich Nossack, Martin Kessel, and Irmgard Keun. Scholz may have known Keun from the Jockey Bar (Scherer 2020, 109). Except for Nossack, whose novel Spätestens (At the latest) had also been nominated for the Fontane Prize in 1956, the jury did not mention any of these names; this way, Through the Night could be presented and celebrated as an ‘exceptional publication,’ as again reflected by the subsequent media coverage. In the GDR, in turn, literary critics certainly compared Scholz’s novel with other publications, although Through the Night was officially unavailable. In 1960, literary scholars who had gathered at the conference “War and Militarism Reflected by Critical and Socialist Realism since Fontane and Hauptmann” at the Humboldt University in East Berlin criticized Through the Night for a supposedly positive portrayal of Prussian militarism (Schneider 1960; Fri 1960). To prove the higher significance and value of socialist realism, they contrasted East and West German authors, as a result comparing Anna Seghers and Arnold Zweig to Heinrich Böll and Hans Scholz.

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Despite the official ban, the book was read in East Germany. In the 1950s it was still easily possible to smuggle books across the border between West and East Berlin. One reader wrote to Scholz: In general, when reading about such topics as the persecution of Jews and war, I cannot help feeling a slight sense of rebelliousness, since I belong to the generation that—during the time of the mass murders—sat in school having to yell “Heil Hitler” on command in the morning, at noon, and in between. After the collapse, when suddenly everyone was a democrat, we often asked ourselves why no one had been there before to teach us that there was something else in the world besides the Führer and National Socialism? And once again a generation is growing up in the east whose youthful idealism is being exploited to shout for a criminal system . . . In your book for the first time I find the account of these enormous problems also debatable for younger people. (Reader 1958, Letter to Scholz)

The few voices from East Germany reveal the differences between the literary fields of the two German states. While West German critics and readers consistently downplayed the description of the Orsha massacre, the few East German sources make it seem as if that there was nothing else worth mentioning in Scholz’s novel. East Germany’s anti-Fascist propaganda apparently provided a discursive structure within which it was possible to address Nazi war crimes. As a matter of fact, the discursive structure in East Germany made it impossible not to address Nazi war crimes, as it served as a centerpiece of anti-Western propaganda. The novel’s reception outside the two German states was sparse. A Polish publisher rejected a translation proposal; by the year 1960, however, Through the Night was available in the United States, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden. The translation for the United States, released by the medium-sized publisher Thomas Y. Crowell, was arranged by Joan Daves—a Jewish exile from Berlin whose father had been murdered in Auschwitz (Altenheim 2015, 241). Daves represented the most important West German authors and publishers on the US book market, and had already signed Hoffmann und Campe in the 1950s. Despite her numerous contacts, hiring suitable translators for the book turned out to be difficult. Eventually two translators worked on Through the Night, Elisabeth Abbott and Catherine Hutter, but only Abbott’s name appeared in the imprint (Wegener 1958, Letter to Scholz). Regardless of the difficulties with the translation, Daves had high hopes of selling the rights of the entire novel or individual parts to a film studio (Hoffmann und Campe 1958a, Letter to Scholz). Meanwhile, multiple translators made suggestions about how to consolidate the text to make it more accessible to readers in their respective markets. Abbott even suggested deleting the diary of Jürgen Wilms as it was too “sad [for] American readers”

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(Abbott 1957, Letter to Scholz). Scholz, however, rejected all suggestions for change. He insisted that the book should be published unaltered, and seemed irritated by the translators’ comments. As the novel had occupied his life for more than five years, he now wanted to move on instead of repeatedly revising the manuscript. Thus, Through the Night eventually found little success with foreign readers; in the United States in particular, the novel was “regarded as a specifically German book” (Lang 2020b, 296). Despite some positive reviews, the translations went largely unnoticed. After West German literary and cultural magazines initially held back, the first extensive reviews of Through the Night finally appeared late in 1956. With two exceptions, they resembled the early reviews in content, but went into somewhat greater detail. Der Monat published an enthusiastic review by Hellmut Jaesrich, who claimed that he used to be a regular at the Jockey Bar and that he had been part of a boozy night with Scholz and others years earlier, closely resembling the evening depicted in the novel. Jaesrich spoke of the text as a new The Decameron; however, he only referred to the diary of Jürgen Wilms in the conclusion of his review. In Westermanns Monatshefte, Gerhard Joop (1956) similarly compared the novel’s composition to The Decameron, as well as to the Canterbury Tales. In Neue Deutsche Hefte, Lotte Wege (1956) praised Scholz’s way of writing in authentic Berlin jargon, arguing closely along the lines of the jury’s verdict for the Fontane Prize; surely no coincidence, as the journal’s editor Joachim Günther was a member of the jury, and the suggestion to review Scholz’s book in the Neue Deutsche Hefte came from Senator Tiburtius’s office (Günther 1955, Letter to Senator). Rather than seeing it as a ‘literary conspiracy,’ however, the anecdote confirms similar readings and similar opinions among stakeholders who supported each other in their work. However, two critical reviews stand out. The presumably fiercest attack came from Joachim Kaiser, who specifically positioned himself against the review in Der Monat: And when the following sentences . . . happen to Hellmut Jaesrich: “In this respect, Scholz’s book is a rehabilitation for this generation of cheerfully lolling young people from good families who, in the course of the world history that befell them, now and then had the opportunity to pony up more character and humor than they were generally credited with”—then this remarkably appreciative quotation precisely mentions the dangers you should be alarmed by, namely that war is again being made a joust of virtues, a place of probation, where you display character and humor, even if a few million have to die. (Kaiser 1956, 541)

Kaiser, a member of Gruppe 47, accused Scholz of cynicism, and claimed that the author had trivialized German guilt. He also found it inappropriate

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to present the Wehrmacht soldiers as “good guys” who lost neither humor nor “the good heart” (ibid., 540). In addition, the critic disliked the portrayal of the war as an event over which the protagonist had no influence. Based on this review, the scholar Moritz Baßler concludes that the entire Gruppe 47 viewed Scholz negatively; in his opinion, the style that Kaiser found cynical was in fact “a discourse of intellectual-urban cordiality conducted in quotation marks” (Baßler 2020, 32). Kaiser’s scathing review may well have played a role in the public impact of the novel, which was praised in the media but rather ignored in intellectual circles. Scholar Helmut Kreuzer, for example, also accused Scholz of romanticizing the war and falsifying history, and he emphasized in the cultural magazine Frankfurter Hefte that “the extermination campaigns in the last war are no subject for an entertainment novel in which champagne corks pop” (Kreuzer 1957, 59). The fact that Kaiser and Kreuzer created awareness of the execution scene and expressed their reservations can in part be attributed to their age. While the majority of literary critics, including Jaesrich, Korn, Luft, and SchwabFelisch, were, like Scholz, born in the German Empire, Kreuzer and Kaiser were not born until the late 1920s; they read Through the Night when not even thirty years old. Both belonged to the generation of the so-called ‘45ers’ who grew up during the Nazi era and so only became adults after the end of the war. Historian Dirk Moses, who introduced the term, called it the crucial generation in shaping a critical discourse about the Nazi past in West Germany; Moses, by the way, took the designation ‘45ers’ from no other than Joachim Kaiser (Moses 2000, 235).13 Like any generation not understood as a uniform group, their more critical ‘members’ were generally against any attempts at restoration as, in this case, Kaiser and Kreuzer found in Through the Night. The two critics could hardly identify with the n ­ ovel’s protagonists who were ten to fifteen years older; in early West Germany, even much smaller age differences could result in large discrepancies in the collective memory. Heinz Bude suggested in his much-cited essay Bilanz der Nachfolge (Balance of succession, 1992) that for those born between the years 1924 and 1930, a difference of two to three years could result in completely different biographies. The reviews by Kaiser and Kreuzer, because of their negative judgments and the relatively young age of the two critics, were exceptions among the media reactions to the novel. Kreuzer’s review largely remained without reverberation, while Kaiser was openly criticized for his opinion. Literary scholar Otto F. Best, for example, accused Kaiser of not having read the book thoroughly. Best, who had worked as a translator and editor for Böll and Paul Celan, wrote an eloquent defense of Through the Night, which he also submitted to Hoffmann und Campe. The philosopher Wilhelm Weischedel also praised the book and let Scholz know that “I still think that one should

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also be a hand of time, and I think it just now after having read your book, because for me what it says above all is that man, the poor animal, cannot cope with the world, which is, after all, madly his own world. But he should finally come to terms with it” (Weischedel 1956, Letter to Scholz). Kaiser’s unsparing criticism was directed both against the author and his description of the Orsha massacre, and all those who had contributed to the book’s success: the jury of the Fontane Prize as well as “the radio . . . ­broadcasters and the film companies that will pitch into the new object” (Kaiser 1956, 537). Given that he was himself considered to be a ‘45er’, his diametrically opposed reaction to Through the Night can, in a sense, be read as expression of a generational conflict.14

The Editor of the Feature Section Among the journalists Kaiser attacked in his review was Karl Korn, twenty years his senior, who included the novel in the feature pages of the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and praised it for its “fresh narration” and “artistic skill”; but like most critics, Korn hardly mentioned the depiction of the massacre. Korn’s journalistic career had begun in 1934, first in the daily Berliner Tageblatt, later in the daily Neue Rundschau, and finally in the Nazi magazine Das Reich. However, because of a critical article about a painting Hitler liked, Korn was fired after only six months. His biographer described Korn’s political stance as follows: “As little as Karl Korn was a convinced National Socialist, he cannot be described as an unflinching critic of the regime or even as a convinced democrat” (Payk 2011, 147). This sentence also applies to Hans Scholz; in addition to their indifference toward the Nazi regime, as well as their journalistic success, both also shared a fascination for Berlin. In 1941, Korn was drafted into the Wehrmacht, but he was not sent to the front and instead served in the Inspektion für Erziehung und Bildung im Heer (Army’s Inspectorate for Education) in Potsdam. Only few weeks before the end of the war, he was transferred to a combat unit and ended up as a French POW. After his discharge in 1946, Korn worked for the Mainzer Allgemeine Zeitung and then moved, along with much of the editorial staff, to the newly founded Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1949. In his university years he had felt attached to the ideas of the so-called conservative revolution; after the war, however, he increasingly embraced critical theory and the Frankfurt School. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of that, it is difficult to locate Korn in the intellectual currents of his time: “The majority of Korn’s publications moved within the common framework of feature pages, were inconspicuous and unspectacular, and were characterized by a demonstrative absence of

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extreme views” (Payk 2008, 49). If the ‘Korn’ was replaced with ‘Scholz’ in this sentence, it would lose none of its validity. However, according to historian Marcus Payk, it is precisely Korn’s “marginal prominence” that makes him an interesting subject for research (Payk 2011, 148). In the mid-1950s, the reputation of Korn as a Kulturpabst (“cultural pope,” Hoeres 2019, 81) took a hit. In 1955 Paul Sethe, editor in charge of the politics desk of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, criticized the paper’s loyalty to the political course of Konrad Adenauer’s conservative government. What followed was a fierce dispute within the editorial department (ibid., 119–23; Berghahn 2019, 71–72), and it resulted in Sethe leaving. During the dispute, Korn had sided with Sethe, which had a negative effect on his own position (Berghahn 2019, 71). Shortly after, accusations accumulated that Korn had supported Nazi propaganda; after he vigorously criticized the antisemitic riots of 1959, he again had to answer questions about his activities for Nazi propaganda. A discussion continued in Der Monat under the central question of whether it was “permissible for someone who had once paid tribute to National Socialism to now enter the field as a campaigner against nationalist, antisemitic, and neo-Nazi aspirations and acts?” (Allemann 1960, 86). Swiss journalist Fritz René Allemann answered this question with a clear ‘yes,’ whereupon Der Monat received numerous letters with the opposite view. Korn took legal action against similar accusations, but the Munich Regional Court eventually allowed Korn to be publicly called a “henchman of antisemitism” (Payk 2008, 323). Today it is no longer possible to trace how Through the Night came into Korn’s hands.15 At that time, however, Hans Schwab-Felisch was hired by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, with the result that the novel now had two energetic advocates on the editorial board. The decision to print it as a feature novel was unusual, as the bottom section of the second page was usually reserved for unpublished fiction (Priotto 2007, 60). Through the Night was printed between 11 June and 31 August 1956; the only cut that Korn or Schwab-Felisch induced pertained to the musician’s story about the POW camp. Given Korn’s professional profile, who “already in the 1950s [had emerged] as a staunch promoter of the critical contemporary literature and its experiments of Alfred Andersch, Heinrich Böll, and Wolfgang Koeppen” (Hoeres 2019, 177), choosing Through the Night was rather surprising. However, maybe it was simply because it was the summer season that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wanted to offer its readers a more popular and, in places, lighter read.

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The Director of the Radio Play After publication of the novel, Hoffmann und Campe intensified its efforts for a radio adaptation. The staff sent a copy of the novel to the director of SWF public radio, Friedrich Bischoff. The head of the drama department, Gert Westphal, later recalled his first encounter with Scholz’s novel: It was one of those large program meetings that Friedrich Bischoff chaired himself. It was on a Monday . . . hidden under documents, I was reading the Sunday supplement of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which of course I had not been able to do on Sunday, and I still know today how I jumped as if stung by a tarantula when Friedrich Bischoff insistently . . . drew attention to the book whose hymn-like review by the old master Karl Korn I was just reading: Hans Scholz, Through the Night. An outsider, not a member of Gruppe 47, which made German literature at the time, had written a bestseller. A bestseller, even though it precariously dealt with contemporary history and an unresolved past . . . Before one of the colleagues from the literature department could act, I wired Hoffmann und Campe and ordered the option for the radio adaptation of a book I didn’t know. We got the option. (Westphal 1978, Rückblick)

Interestingly, Westphal indirectly made Karl Korn ‘co-responsible’ for the radio production. Westphal’s words can also be understood as a critique of the special status of Gruppe 47. It is no longer possible to determine if Westphal had read Kaiser’s critical review, but he certainly knew the author personally.16 It is also certain that Westphal, who frequently produced radio adaptations of critical and sophisticated fiction, above all Thomas Mann, now looked for something ‘lighter.’ Korn’s review promised a combination of sophistication and entertainment—serious content, lightly ‘packed.’ In February 1956, Scholz traveled to Baden-Baden, seat of SWF’s drama department, to talk with Westphal about the manuscript. The meeting between the two authors marked the beginning of a long-lasting friendship. Although Westphal was nine years younger than Scholz, they had much in common: an upper-class upbringing, an artistic education during the Nazi era, wartime service on the Eastern Front, and a POW experience, as well as their professional roles in the West German media landscape (Kogel and Schlüter 1999; Zoch-Westphal 1990; Westermann 1990). Westphal’s father was a factory manager in Dresden, the family lived in a large city apartment, and even as a teenager he was allowed to accompany his parents to the Dresden State Opera and the State Theater. In 1933, at the age of thirteen, Westphal joined the Hitler Youth. He attended drama school until 1940, after which he was drafted into the Reiter-Ersatzregiment 1 (1st Cavalry Reserves Regiment); he took the final exam during a leave of absence. After

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the attack on the Soviet Union, he was transferred to the AufklärungsAbteilung 121 (121st Reconnaissance Division). As part of the 121. InfanterieDivision (121st Infantry Division), Westphal’s unit was transferred across East Prussia and Latvia to the northern section of the Eastern Front and participated in the siege of Leningrad. Westphal was wounded twice but both times returned to the Front after recovery. Shortly before the end of the war, he was promoted to Rittmeister (Cavalry Master, German military rank) (Kogel and Schlüter 1999). In his recommendation to the Academy of Arts, Scholz wrote of Westphal that he had served in the 5. Reiter-Regiment (5th Cavalry Regiment) toward the end of the war and had received the Eisernes Kreuz 1. Klasse (Scholz 1973, CV of Gert Westphal). Regardless of the fact that it would have been counterproductive to refer to Nazi decorations—Westphal was not accepted into the Academy—his transfer to the newly formed 5th Cavalry Regiment turned out to be a stroke of luck. In the final months of the war, he was transferred to Hungary and ended up as an American POW in Austria; the Americans then decided to hand over the regiment’s horses to German farmers and release the soldiers (Kogel and Schlüter 1999). Hoping to see his family again in Hamburg, Westphal traveled to northern Germany and first got involved with a newly founded theater in Bremen, then with Radio Bremen public broadcasting. By his own account, he not only worked on book readings and drama productions, but also on productions intended to popularize the US ‘re-education’ program (ibid.). In 1953, aged only thirty-three, Westphal then became director of the drama department of SWF public radio in BadenBaden. Among his first radio plays at SWF was a production of Theodor Plievier’s novel Stalingrad (orig. 1945). By the mid-1950s, Westphal was a much better-known author than Scholz, despite their age difference. His readings and productions of contemporary German literature are considered legendary, probably in part because he was in close contact with the writers and poets he read. He corresponded with Alfred Andersch, Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann, Walter Jens, Carl Zuckmayer, and many others.17 Some of them regularly came to Baden-Baden, where—in contrast to recording sessions in large cities—they were free of other obligations and so spent their time at SWF almost like a vacation (ibid.). Scholz spent several weeks in Baden-Baden preparing the radio play; for him, it was like a window into a cultural world beyond West Berlin. If Westphal’s anecdote about the acquisition of the license for Through the Night is true, Jürgen Wilms’s diary was surely not the decisive factor. Under the supervision of adviser Manfred Häberlen, writer of the script for Stalingrad, and after consulting Westphal, Scholz divided his novel into five episodes. The musician’s POW account and Hesselbarth’s account about the partisan girl were cut, and the frame story was shortened, resulting

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Figure 1.3.  Work on the radio adaptation for SWF public radio, 1956. Actors in the frame story (from left to right): Wolfgang Hofman, Hans Scholz, Else Hackenberg, Heinz Klingenberg, Ludwig Cremer. © SWR/Hans Westphal, 1956. Source: SWR Historical Archives Baden-Baden (SWR Historisches Archiv Baden-Baden).

in five largely independent episodes for the radio. Compared to the long editing process at Hoffmann und Campe, the work on the manuscript for the radio play progressed quickly. The description of the Orsha massacre remained almost unchanged, which is significant as SWF public radio was not known for being particularly concerned with Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Due to the comparatively lenient censorship and denazification policy in the French occupation zone, many former war correspondents and figures with dubious Nazi pasts worked in Baden-Baden (von Hodenberg 2006, 127; Fritscher-Fehr 2019, 64). Manfred Häberlen, for example, had worked in the Reichsministerium der Finanzen (Reich Ministry of Finance) until the end of the war before moving to SWF public radio in 1947 (SWF 1973, Manfred Häberlen; Personnel file Häberlen n.d.). Although not an NSDAP party member, he was banned from working as a tax inspector after 1945, and so changed professions and moved on to radio production. The recordings occurred in June 1956. Scholz himself took on the role of Hans Schott, organizer of the evening at the Jockey Bar, and Westphal recorded the dialogue sequences of Brabender, the lawyer securing the necessary assets. Like the book, the radio play gets straight to the point: we hear

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a telephone conversation between Schott and Brabender talking about the return of their mutual acquaintance Hans-Joachim Lepsius from captivity. They are planning a welcoming party at the Jockey Bar. The listener gets the impression of a natural conversation between two friends—as if Scholz and Westphal and not Schott and Brabender were talking. The relaxed atmosphere during the recordings is captured in a photo from the SWR Archives (Figure 1.3). With eloquence and wit, Scholz quickly won everyone’s sympathy and was often the center of attention. Except for Else Hackenberg, who took on the role of secretary at the beginning of the frame story, the ­recordings—like the fictional evening at the Jockey Bar—were a strictly male circle, because “in radio, women worked mostly as secretaries, or in the editorial departments of youth, women’s, school, and church radio. Political commentary, as well as broadcasts on economic issues and contributions on ‘high culture’ topics, largely remained in male hands” (Fritsche-Fehr 2019, 70). It obviously does not mean that women played no role in the media; as gatekeepers, for example, secretaries certainly had power to influence decisions, and without female writers or editors in the background, radio productions would have been inconceivable. The fact that women were rarely mentioned by name, however, makes research about their contributions to radio history considerably more difficult. Regarding gender roles, the photo not only illustrates the work during the radio production of Through the Night but also an essential aspect of the entire media complex. With the exception of Harriet Wegener from Hoffmann und Campe, all the main actors were wealthy middle-aged men who frequently made their decisions while drinking alcohol in thick clouds of cigarette smoke. Ten to fifteen years earlier, most of them had been soldiers or POWs; the places they met—Berlin, Hamburg, and later Cologne—were, for the most part, still heaps of rubble. Baden-Baden was an exception, as the city had survived the war almost undamaged. This, too, could have contributed to the ‘vacation atmosphere’ Westphal reported at SWF public radio; influential men working on a media production and enjoying the prosperity of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). The first broadcast of the radio play ran on SWF 1 from 21 August to 4 September 1956—at the same time, the last episodes of the feature novel appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Two weeks later, the program was repeated on the sister channel SWF 2. The first episode, depicting the events in Orsha, was titled Einer fehlt in der Runde (One is missing at the meeting). In contrast to the novel, the media response to the radio play was rather modest; only one review appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau, and one in Die Zeit, as well as a few short reviews in local newspapers. Few critics agreed that the radio play was of less quality than the book, with the truth to the original, however, being the only criterion. Half a year later, in March

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1957, SWF broadcast a repetition of the first episode as an independent radio play under the title Das Tagebuch des Jürgen Wilms (The diary of Jürgen Wilms) on the occasion of the Woche der Brüderlichkeit (Week of brotherhood), a series of events aimed at intensifying German–Jewish cooperation (SWF 1957, Letter to Scholz). In July of the same year, SWF public radio repeated all five episodes of Through the Night. During his first stay in Baden-Baden, Scholz met director Max Ophüls, who was working with Westphal on a production of Arthur Schnitzler’s Frau Berta Garlan. The magazine Der Spiegel reported that Ophüls was interested in a movie adaptation of Through the Night (“Boccaccio in der Bar” 1956, 46), but there is no evidence (Asper 1998, 592–600; Asper 2018, Email to Author). Correspondence between Ophüls and Westphal suggests that the director was somehow indeed interested in the material, and he expressed “delight” in reference to the book (Ophüls n.d., Letter to Westphal). The Hoffmann und Campe archives also hold a copy of an inquiry into Ophüls’s interest regarding a possible theatrical adaptation. At the same time, Scholz asked Friedrich Luft to intercede with Ophüls (Hoffmann und Campe 1956b, Letter to Scholz). Artur Brauner’s production company CCC, which had financed Ophüls’s Lola Montez at a large loss, eventually canceled the cooperation with the director; after an alleged examination of the material, they sent Hoffmann und Campe a rejection (CCC 1956, Letter to Hoffmann und Campe). Max Ophüls, meanwhile, confirmed to both Gert Westphal and Friedrich Bischoff that Through the Night was best suited for a radio production (Ophüls 1956, Telegram to Westphal; Bischoff 1956, Telegram to Ophüls). At the same time, the publishing house advertised an adaptation of the novel to the Munich production company Schorcht-Film. Scholz’s negotiations with Peter Podehl, son of the owner, about a possible screenplay adaptation dragged on for months until the writer finally told his publisher in resignation: “Between us, we have to give up the idea of seeing the book filmed in its entirety, I think, or at least put it in deep freeze. It seems to me that it would not be wrong to let those who are still interested in the film grab what they want to grab” (Scholz 1956c, Letter to Hoffmann and Campe). Podehl accepted the proposal to use only parts of the novel, and concentrated on the frame story as well as the last, cheerful stories, for which the composer Hans-Martin Majewski was supposed to create a cheerful jazz score. The Diary of Jürgen Wilms was not considered for the film adaptation. Also in this case, Scholz turned to Luft requesting to review the planned project; however, the film critic did not respond. Shortly thereafter, two other major production companies, Urania and Ufa, expressed interest in Through the Night, but the talks remained exploratory. A cinema adaptation of the novel or selected passages could have brought the publisher considerable profit, not only financially, but also symbolically.

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The benchmark for a book success at the time was a film adaptation—ideally in Hollywood. Podehl is said to have dreamed of casting Audrey Hepburn in the role of Bärbel (Scholz 1956e, Letter to Hoffmann und Campe). In this sense, all involved strove for a ‘system-compatible’ success of Through the Night that would reconfirm the rules of the literature and film fields. The plans eventually fell through, due to a lack of funding; the project was shelved at the end of 1956. The irrevocable end of the cinema adaptation came with the death of Max Ophüls on 26 March 1957.

The Producer and the Television Director After the failed attempts to adapt Through the Night for the cinema, the story of the media complex seemed to be closed. In January 1959, however, the director of the public NWRV (North and West German Broadcasting Association), Hanns Hartmann, unexpectedly contacted Hoffmann und Campe with a request to acquire a license for a television production (Hartmann 1959, Letter to Hoffman und Campe). The NWRV had just completed the six-part miniseries based on Josef Martin Bauer’s novel So weit die Füße tragen, which, by complete coincidence, the jury of the 1956 Fontane Prize had also considered as a possible candidate for the award. Although the postproduction of So weit die Füße tragen had not yet been completed, NWRV were already planning the next television miniseries, and Through the Night seemed to be the right material. In contrast to the discussions about the cinema adaptation, the publisher and the public broadcaster quickly came to an agreement, because NWRV was interested in producing the entire novel, not just selected fragments, and it had the financing secured. Hartmann suggested director Fritz Umgelter (So weit die Füße tragen) for the project; Umgelter, in turn, insisted on working with Scholz, but Scholz declined as he was about to vacation in Greece. The publishing house and the author eventually both waived their rights; an internal memo read: “We have no possibility to influence the final version. Mr. Scholz is clear on this. He agreed” (Hoffmann und Campe 1959, Note). Walter Pindter, now a veteran of the German film industry as he had started his career at Ufa back in 1933, was the executive producer. The director of photography, Kurt Grigoleit, also started his career in the 1930s, gaining his first professional experience as a war correspondent for the newsreel series Deutsche Wochenschau (Weniger 2001, vol. 3, 407). The contract between publishing house and production company was signed during a turning point in Germany’s politics of history. In 1958, a regional court in Ulm tried the members of Einsatzkommando Tilsit, who had murdered over five thousand Lithuanian Jews in the summer of 1941. Ten

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defendants were sentenced to prison terms between three and fifteen years for complicity in murder. In the aftermath of the trial and as a direct result, the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations in Ludwigsburg was appointed (Fischer 2015, 72). In contrast to earlier trials, the media coverage was extensive, but overall adhered to the established explanatory patterns of the 1950s, according to which “National Socialism was . . . a system for which Hitler and a small circle of leaders were responsible” (Fröhlich 2011, 261). As the judges wanted to avoid a media frenzy, only major newspapers were allowed to attend; radio and television crews were permitted only in exceptional cases (Haus der Geschichte 2008, 76). The newspapers reported on the individual stages of the trial, but also very generally about the ‘atrocities’ and the ‘Lithuanian summer of blood.’ Whether Hartmann wanted to have the project in order to bring the Nazi crimes to the television screen can only be answered indirectly. To a viewer complaining about the content of Through the Night after the broadcast, Hartmann replied that there had been a lack of an unambiguous German statement on the war crimes, and added that the miniseries was supposed to “make it clear that totalitarian systems, whether they come from the right or the left, are dangerous” (Hartmann 1960b, Letter to viewer). That his concern was genuine is also evident from his involvement in the fourteen-part documentary Das Dritte Reich, a joint production of multiple West German public broadcasters, which used archival material and testimonies of eyewitnesses to examine the mechanisms of the totalitarian state (Bösch 1999; Keilbach 2003). Hartmann told Der Spiegel that the documentary supported “the intellectual debate of Germany’s recent past” (“Zwölf Jahre in zwölf Stunden” 1960, 88). The productions of Through the Night and Das Dritte Reich partly coincided, although in different departments and with different contributors (Fritsche 2003, 100–101); Hartmann participated in both. Who was the man who wanted to bring Through the Night to the screen? By the end of the 1950s, Hartmann already had a reputation as an experienced professional in the media industry. He had worked for the public broadcaster NWDR18 since its formation in 1945; in 1947, he was appointed as head of the Cologne office by the British chief controller, despite the protests of the state government. The local conservatives of the CDU saw Hartmann as a left-wing Social Democrat; this, however, turned out to be untrue—he was not even a party member (Bierbach 1978, 71–72). During the Allied denazification and re-education campaigns, a personality like Hartmann, a director born in 1901, was an excellent fit for the idea of a future West German media landscape; speaking with Bourdieu, his habitus corresponded with the requirements of the political field. Already in the 1920s, Hartmann was directing plays, first at the municipal theater in Hagen, and later in Chemnitz (Katz 2005, 34). In 1927, he married the Jewish actress Ottilie Schwarzkopf.

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After the National Socialists came to power in January 1933, he was dismissed from the theater only two months later; he then had to survive with small commissions from some Berlin stages and music publishers. Although Hartmann and his Jewish wife were considered a ‘privileged mixed marriage’ after the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, he was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Culture in 1937, and so was no longer able to work in the cultural sector at all (Harding 2015, 148–49). As an attempt to flee the country failed, they remained in Germany; they could remain together, paradoxically thanks to antisemitic legislation: because of his Jewish wife, Hartmann was not mobilized (ibid., 150). The couple spent the last year of the war, especially the harsh winter of 1944/45, hiding in a summer house in Groß Glienicke nearby Berlin that had previously belonged to the Jewish doctor Alfred Alexander (ibid.).19 The biography of Fritz Umgelter, the director hired by producer Hartmann, could not have been more different.20 Born in 1922, he was almost a generation younger than Hartmann. His mother came from a working-class family, while his father was the owner of a small passementerie factory in Stuttgart. Umgelter took little interest in the family business and quickly advanced to become a leader in the local Hitler Youth. In 1939, he volunteered for military service, with the desire to join the Luftwaffe (Air Force). Although he was a rather poor student and only performed well in art education, he obtained Abitur (i.e., he graduated from school). However, the achievement was based on “proven enlistment for military service, according to the decree of the Reich Minister for Science, Education and National Education of 8  September 1939” (Personnel file Umgelter n.d.). As Umgelter had not completed pilot training, he was assigned to 411. Flak-Division (411th AntiAircraft Division). His unit was first deployed to France and in 1941 to the Soviet Union, roughly in the same area as Kraftwagen-Transport-Regiment 605 in which Scholz served. Umgelter’s unit participated in the battles at Białystok, Grodno, Minsk, Vyasma, and finally Moscow. In March 1943, he was promoted to lieutenant, right at the beginning of the retreat from the Soviet Union, eventually via East Prussia and Pomerania. Answering a viewer, Hartmann was therefore able to point out that Umgelter “knew the war in Russia well” (Hartmann 1960b, Letter to viewer), and Scholz claimed that the production of Through the Night had been shaped both by Hartmann’s “struggle against the Third Reich” and Umgelter’s wartime experiences (Scholz 1960b, Speech). In one of the numerous qualification assessments in Umgelter’s personnel file, a superior wrote about him: “His mental elasticity and agility are advantageous. Thorough and exact work does not suit him, however, neither in the intellectual nor in the practical-physical execution. U. can easily become impatient and thus unobjective. He is highly dependent on r­ecognition

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and strongly focused on personal prestige” (Personnel file Umgelter n.d.). Regardless of the fact that it is an army evaluation written in the Nazi era and therefore must be read critically, it does portray Umgelter as a man without great ambitions in education. However, the Abitur, obtained rather by chance, enabled him to enroll in the German Studies program at the University of Tübingen after the war. In October 1946, he was hired there as a stage designer in the local theater; and in 1951, after further jobs in Wittenberg, Augsburg, and Paris, he finally became the first director at the Hessian State Theater in Wiesbaden (Umgelter n.d. a, Biographical note). In 1953, he moved to Hessischer Rundfunk public broadcasting, where he started his television career. When the age of television series dawned in the late 1950s, Umgelter was already considered a specialist in this format; he left public broadcasting, and continued his career as a freelancer. Within a few years, he earned the reputation as a highly professional director of television productions, made friends with influential men in the media industry and, not least, made a lot of money (Umgelter and Nevent du Mont 1960–1969, Correspondence). The adaptive strategies that characterized the curriculum of Karl Korn from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung are even more evident in Umgelter’s biography—most notably his opportunism, which Korn’s biographer defines as a “behavioral strategy that sets the own moral and normative premises as well as the consistency of past value systems in favor of advantages in the present” (Payk 2011, 148). Unlike Korn, however, Umgelter was never asked about his Nazi past. As Umgelter’s biography was rather typical of his generation—active membership in the Hitler Youth, voluntary enlistment in the Wehrmacht after the outbreak of war, and then deployment at the Front— there was no apparent reason (Jarausch 2018, 66–99, 101–46). His professional career in the postwar period was considered exemplary; referring to his interest in television, he was mostly praised for “recognizing early the signs of the times” (Wosi 1981). From a sociological point of view, his behavior went far beyond opportunism, and included the ability to observe the rules of social life and to adapt his individual habitus to the professional and political fields. Here, the social structure is reproduced by following the regular paths of social advancement and career mechanisms. If nothing else, Umgelter was concerned with maintaining his social status. In the summer of 1959, Umgelter and Reinhart Müller-Freienfels wrote the screenplay for Through the Night within only a few weeks. Reinhart Müller-Freienfels was born in 1925 as the son of the well-known psychologist Richard Müller-Freienfels, who had joined the NSDAP in 1933 but lost his chair at the university six years later because of “jüdischer Versippung,” Nazi jargon for affiliations with Jews (Tilitzki 2002, 434). He then specialized in popular psychology books and continued to publish until after the war, when

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he resumed work at the university. His son Reinhart, Umgelter’s cowriter, was drafted in 1942, survived the war, but ended up as a POW. After returning from captivity, he studied literature, philosophy, and history, and earned his PhD on Arthur Schnitzler; while still in graduate school, he was already accepting minor assignments in the media. Through the Night was his first major production, and the miniseries paved his way to the drama department at Süddeutscher Rundfunk, a public broadcaster based in Stuttgart. Despite little professional experience, he took over as head of the department as early as 1961, and occupied the position until 1985. As Scholz and Häberlen had done for the radio adaptation, Umgelter and Müller-Freienfels divided the novel into five parts: the POW story was cut, and the frame story shortened in a way that the individual episodes could be watched independently. Unlike Häberlen and Scholz for the radio, however, who had completely cut Hesselbarth’s story about the Russian partisan girl on the Eastern Front, Umgelter and Müller-Freienfels merged it with the report by Jürgen Wilms. Some dialogue was directly adopted from the radio play, but the execution scene was extended rather than shortened. This expansion alone signaled a relevant discursive shift, as the filmmakers intentionally directed the attention to the massacre. The shooting of Through the Night began on 7 September 1959 and lasted until 28 February 1960. A momentous chain of events coincided with the production: the so-called ‘Swastika Epidemic’ in Cologne, which culminated in the defacement of the Cologne synagogue on Christmas of 1959 (Bergmann 1990, 255). Given Hartmann’s biography and the fact that the events took place in his own city and in the immediate vicinity of his workplace, it can be assumed that he was not indifferent to them; contemporary critics did suggest a connection between the antisemitic events and the expansion of the Through the Night execution scene to a twenty-two-minute sequence (Telegram, 24 March 1960).21 However, the scene had already been scripted in the summer of 1959 (Umgelter and Müller-Friedenfels 1959, Script, 73–82). Handwritten notes in the script show only a few last-minute changes, including the rearrangement of some shots as well as the addition of the character of a sadistic SS man monitoring the Latvian collaborators. Whether the filmmakers intended to express the German responsibility for the extermination of the Jews, or rather adapt the narrative to the prevailing explanatory pattern of the ‘good’ Wehrmacht and the ‘evil’ SS, is open to speculation. A week before the first broadcast, Hartmann wrote to the governing board of NWRV public broadcasting. He asked its members to reserve time for the first episode, as it might “lead to severe controversies” (Hartmann 1960a, Letter to Blachstein et al.). Umgelter and him, Hartmann wrote, had had lengthy discussions about “not whether, but how” to shoot the scene.

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In the end, he warned, “the show is likely to be the toughest examination of our past that has yet crossed the screens of German television” (ibid.). In justifying the execution scene, Hartmann assumed a similar role as Harriet Wegener had previously at Hoffmann und Campe; Hartmann’s claim of having produced a milestone in German television history, however, should be considered in a larger context. Between 1955 and 1959, historian Christoph Classen counts seventy contributions totaling 36.5 hours on National Socialism (Classen 1999, 29–31), with the persecution of Jews accounting for about 10 percent of that time (ibid., 86). Examples of earlier films are Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog, first broadcast on 18 April 1957 (Knaap 2008, 85), and a year later the DEFA production Marriage in the Shadows (1947, dir. Kurt Maetzig). In 1960, shortly before Hartmann’s letter to the governing board, a documentary by SFB public broadcasting centered around the lives of former Waffen-SS members in postwar society (Walden 1960). However, Through the Night did in fact provide the first fictional account about the mass murder of Jews on West German television (Classen 1999, 88), hence Hartmann’s claim of a watershed moment was justified. His correspondence with the governing board indicates that he intended to change the contemporary norms of the media’s dealing with the Nazi past. The first episode, which focused on events on the Eastern Front, was broadcast on 22 March 1960. Immediately before, the Tagesschau—the only West German television news show at the time—reported on the massacre in Sharpeville, South Africa, where white police officers had killed sixty-nine black men and women. After watching Through the Night, some viewers identified racism as a common denominator between the riots in South Africa and the mass murder of European Jews during World War II (Infratest 1960, Viewers’ Survey, 7). The news anchor announced Through the Night after the weather forecast, and, striking Hartmann’s tone and preparing the audience, spoke of a ‘tough confrontation” (R.H. 1960). He also suggested parental advisory (Duisburger Generalanzeiger, 24 March 1960). The following episodes ran biweekly until 17 May (NWRV n.d. Program Brochures). According to surveys, the first episode achieved an audience rating of 83 percent; considering the number of registered television sets and the average household size, those numbers equaled an audience of about 7.5–9 million viewers.22 West German television offered only one program at the time, usually broadcasting for a half-day; hence the numbers were good, though not exceptional. Looking at the broader picture, media scholar Knut Hickethier nevertheless considers Through the Night a breakthrough in West German television history: six months later, public television showed the documentary Das Dritte Reich, then a stage production of Korczak und die Kinder (Korczak and the Children, 1961) by Erwin Sylvanus, and shortly after that a

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television adaptation of Christian Geissler’s Anfrage (Inquiry, 1962) by Egon Monk (Hickethier 1980, 192–95). The media mentioned the first episode of Through the Night about 150 times, slightly less than half being longer reviews, the rest merely brief announcements. Such widespread attention was exceptional for a television production. Seventy reviews were subsequently reprinted in the WDR yearbook, including numerous stills from the execution scene (WDR 1960). The majority of reviews were positive. The Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung wrote: “The . . . show delivered pictures that no one can avoid, because they virtually scream out historical truth in the most brutal, barely bearable form, which, as we already know, we must at least hold on to in front of our eyes” (Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 3 April 1960). Other critics agreed; the local newspaper Westfalen-Blatt, for instance, reported “uncompromising relentlessness and unsparing realism” (Westfalen-Blatt, 25 March 1960). Striking was both the high number of reviews and the fact that all of them focused on the massacre. While the depiction of the mass execution in the book and the radio play had only provoked isolated reactions, after the broadcast of the television adaptation the massacre became the central topic. The reviews showed widespread consensus about the significance of the scene and the necessity of dealing with Nazi crimes. At the same time, however, reviewers wrote about the shock of seeing depictions of the atrocities and about the limits of what was tolerable. They articulated their emotions with sentences such as “it was barely possible to keep attention for the depiction of this crime” (Der Tag, 24 March 1960), or “you need strong nerves to endure that on television” (Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 March 1960). Nevertheless, Through the Night did not provoke any public debate among notable personalities. Immediately after the first episode had aired, the Munich-based Infratest Institute conducted an anonymous survey on behalf of NWRV; it showed that the reactions of the viewers were more differentiated than those of the media. Infratest summarized the results as follows: Numerical abundance and in many cases also particular detail of the available spontaneous expressions leave no doubt that today’s film has “interested— kept in suspense—galvanized” or also “repelled” the viewers to an extraordinary degree. In any case, it “forced” them to “think” and to offer their own ­opinion . . . The viewers’ attitude toward the sequence with the “execution of the Jews” seems to be, concluding from the spontaneous reactions, predominantly negative. Although some approve the depiction of these mass atrocities—“it has struck my soul powerfully”—the opinion that one should “finally stop publicly leafing through Germany’s book of guilt” or “fouling one’s own nest” is predominant; it would have been better to “hint at” this scene at best, but under no circumstances should it have been so “broadly laid out” . . .

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Despite this criticism [of the massacre scene—M.S.-W.], however, today’s first episode of Through the Night was undoubtedly received overwhelmingly positively by the viewers. (Infratest 1960, Viewers’ Survey, 2–3)

While the more balanced arguments may have been echoed by some respondents, most viewers were outraged: “I want to relax at the television screen and not get upset” (Infratest 1960, Viewers’ Survey, 6); or, “In the evening I do not want to know anything about politics, and I do not want to see anything upsetting either” (Infratest 1960, Viewers’ Survey, 6). The public broadcaster WDR also received letters from viewers pointing out their own suffering: I and the overwhelming majority of soldiers who fought in the east and endured unspeakable things have not become aware of even one act or excess against the Jews . . . But you must not present the excesses against the Jews in a way as if it had been something commonplace that every German soldier more or less dealt with. (Viewer [R.B.] 1960, Letter to Hartmann)

In general, audiences reacted emotionally, finding the television film “horrifically upsetting,” “too cruel,” and “nerve-wracking” (Infratest 1960, Viewers’ Survey, 3). In retrospect—after all five episodes had been shown— the broad consensus was that the first episode had been the best; Die Zeit, for example, described it as the “climax of the whole thing in terms of both film art and content” (A. Th. 1960). Most editorial departments agreed. The reactions to the television adaptation of Through the Night showed many similarities to the coverage of the Ulm Trials; above all, it revealed a specific use of language. While most critics of the novel and the radio play apparently lacked the words to actually address the execution scene, film and television critics wrote about “a merciless confrontation with the past,” the “mass extermination of the Jews,” and the crimes of the Sonderkommandos. Similar language had been used previously by correspondents from Ulm.23 However, no one questioned the dominant narratives, either after the trial or after the film; Germans continued to perceive themselves as victims of a brutal war, and the Wehrmacht soldiers remained heroes. Even Hartmann admitted to a concerned viewer: “The film shows nothing but an examination of the events. Nothing against bravery in the face of the enemy” (Hartmann 1960b, Letter to viewer). The intense reactions to the miniseries also affected the afterlife of Through the Night as a media complex. Four weeks after the first episode was aired, and more than four years after the novel’s initial publication, the West Berlin Jewish Community awarded Scholz the Heinrich Stahl Prize for his contribution “to the necessary confrontation with the past” (Berlin Jewish Community 1960, Press Release). Remarkably, it was the television adap-

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tation that had drawn the attention of the community to the novel; they ultimately honored Scholz’s text rather than Umgelter’s images. Meanwhile, WDR was considering a major film production based on the episode about Jürgen Wilms, and the station even commissioned a revision at the Bavaria Studios in Munich. At the end of the year, however, Hartmann was dismissed under pressure from the conservative party CDU—the exact reasons are still unknown (Katz 2005, 36–37). Despite the fact that the project had already been initiated, Hartmann’s successor, Klaus von Bismarck, withdrew the support (Bavaria Ltd. 1962, Invoice). Bismarck was not only the greatgreat nephew of the chancellor Otto von Bismack, but also member of the nationalist-­conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP) in the Weimar Republic and a high-ranking officer of the Wehrmacht during World War II; like Scholz’s, his unit operated in France and later in the Soviet Union. After the war, he worked for the Evangelical Church in West Germany, until he became head of the WDR. However, Bismarck saw himself as a media manager who “supported programs that focused on coming to terms with the Nazi past” (Bismarck 1992, 281). He continued the work of his predecessor, Hartmann, on the documentary Das Dritte Reich, for example, which he considered a “cultural contribution to overcoming the German past and dialogue,” especially with Poland (ibid., 282). The reasons for rejecting the Through the Night film project therefore remain unclear, especially as much of the work had already been finished under Hartmann. The following year, Gabriele Tergit reworked the story about Sorbs in Lusatia into a drama, and offered it to the WDR (Tergit n.d., No Title). Interestingly, although Jewish herself and a committed critic of the Nazi regime, she showed no interest in depicting the fate of the Jews in the novel. WDR rejected her proposal, stating that the text was too complicated (Tergit 1962, Letter to Sterz).24 Considering that Tergit had presented East Germans in a positive light, the reason for the rejection may have been the same discursive rules that had previously resulted in cutting the same story from the novel; a few months after the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961, the Cold War conflict determined public life in West Germany to an even greater extent than during the 1950s. A year after the first broadcast of Through the Night, the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house inquired at WDR when the television adaptation would be broadcast again, stating that “in view of the Eichmann trial such a rerun, especially of the first part, could be of particular importance” (Hoffmann und Campe 1961, Letter to WDR). Such inquiries by Hoffmann und Campe arrived regularly; in these efforts, the prospect of licensing income may have played at least as much of a role as the urge to contribute to West German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Finally, in April 1962, the WDR replied that a rerun was no longer planned: “It depends on various factors

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within program development . . . as well as on the overarching political or aesthetic environment” (WDR 1962, Letter to Hoffmann und Campe). It was not until the political climate around Vergangenheitsbewältigung fundamentally changed during the 1960s that television took on a more significant role in historical-political debates (Classen 1999; Keilbach 2003).

Conclusion: Social Networks What do individual actions of individual social actors tell us about the structuration of memory culture in West Germany? The fact that Scholz devoted that much attention to the extermination of the Jews in his book was unusual in the discursive environment of early West Germany. Hardly any significance was attributed to the singular fate of Jews at the time—it was mentioned alongside other groups of victims such as displaced and bombed-out people, killed soldiers, and POWs. On the semantic level, the victims remained mostly ‘nameless,’ according to historian Robert G. Moeller (2001, 22–28), a fact that ultimately made Nazis and Holocaust survivors fall under one and the same category. In his novel, however, Scholz explicitly writes about Jews being executed, thus relieving them of their ‘namelessness.’ His consternation and the clear designation of this particular group of victims can probably be attributed to his life in prewar Berlin—his relationship with Felicitas Lourié, and friendships with his fellow Jewish students and his numerous Jewish neighbors. Unlike many other Germans, Scholz was aware of the void in the postwar society caused by extermination and emigration, and he addressed it in his book. Nevertheless, he reduced the problem to his personal loss—his former love Felicitas Lourié. Through the Night could not have been published if the 1950s had been totally dominated by the ‘culture of silence.’ Thus, it was the positive portrayal of the Sorbs and not the description of the Orsha massacre that triggered the fiercest internal discussions in the publishing house. Apparently, the Cold War conflict dictated a tougher discourse than Vergangenheitsbewältigung. In contrast to my initial expectations, the description of the massacre was no discursive roadblock for most people involved in the publishing process. Hence the reactions of critics, predominantly silent about the massacre, and the lack of reaction to the radio adaptation, were no longer surprising. The generally enthusiastic public reception of the novel at the same time affected the production of the adaptations and translations. The depiction of the massacre in both the book and the television adaptation we owe to two extraordinary personalities: Harriet Wegener and Hanns Hartmann. Along with Hans Scholz, they played the leading roles in the genesis of the media complex, and it was ultimately their decision to produce

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the book and the television adaptation. While Wegener defended the passage in internal discussions but at the same time had to consider the book’s market potential, Hartmann reckoned with controversy from the start. Both were aware of the discursive rules of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in West Germany, but acted under different basic conditions. Between 1954, when Wegener pushed through the publishing process of the book, and 1959, when Hartmann acquired the license for the television adaptation, the public approach to dealing with the past changed. Unlike Wegener, Hartmann made his decision after the Ulm trial and the appointment of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg. After that, the mass executions in the occupied Soviet Union became a public concern for the first time, and the miniseries could build on this discursive development. But what about the minor stakeholders in the production and reception history of Through the Night? Their positions reveal the networks in which the rules of ‘sayability’ regarding the Nazi past were negotiated at the time. The presumably largest of these networks consisted of Berlin men: Friedrich Luft, Hans Schwab-Felisch, Hellmut Jaesrich, Thilo Koch, and sometimes Karl Korn. It was no coincidence that it was a group of journalists working for mass media—dailies, radio, and television. They played a special role, as “thanks to their connections and technical skills, they found new means of articulation far more quickly than many intellectuals” (Schütz and Hohendahl 2009, 12). Gabriele Tergit, in exile since the 1930s but maintaining close contacts with Berlin and dedicating most of her work to the city, can also be located on the margins of this group. In communication studies, people deciding on the inclusion and presentation of topics in the media are called ‘gatekeepers’ (Schoemeker and Vos 2009); and those gatekeepers form their own networks. It was no different with Through the Night: when the book was published, most of Scholz’s later supporters already knew each other. Some networks even dated back to the prewar period, which was often the rule in the media world of the 1950s (Hodenberg 2006, 126). The published opinions of Berlin journalists contributed significantly to the novel’s success, but also to its label as a Berolinesie. Korn reinforced this process by including Through the Night in the feature pages of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Furthermore, Jaesrich and Koch connected the initially rather nameless Scholz with a number of editorial departments in West Berlin, which decisively advanced his journalistic career. The reviews of the two famous critics Karl Korn and Friedrich Luft had a particular influence on the reception of the novel. Like Scholz, they both belonged to the generation of the so-called ‘32ers.’ Following Dirk Moses’s concept of the ‘45ers,’ Volker R. Berghahn coined the term the ‘32ers’ to refer to precisely that generation of journalists who, like Korn and Luft, had grown up in the Weimar Republic and witnessed its end in 1933 as young

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adults (Berghahn 2019, 7–9); after the war, they were among the most influential actors in Germany’s ‘moral reconstruction’ (ibid., 5). From the second half of the 1950s, when Scholz began working for the media, he can also be considered a member of this generation. In contrast to Korn, Luft, Jaesrich and Schwab-Felisch, however, the critical reviewer Joachim Kaiser was not part of those circles; he was not only much younger (and a ‘45er’), but also had no biographical connection to Berlin. Nevertheless—or even because of that—he judged the mechanisms of success just as cynically: “A small group of narrow-minded friends occupy the key positions and feed each other lines from editorial room to editorial room” (Kaiser 1956, 536). A second, small network formed in Baden-Baden, reflected, by the way, in the opening scene of the radio play. Two protagonists of the frame story, played by Scholz and Westphal, casually talk on the phone about the upcoming evening in the bar. As Gustav Frank rightly points out, “the tone . . . reveals the etiquette of a certain group and stratum of men” (Frank 2020, 161); the professional relationship between Scholz and Westphal indeed resulted in a long-lasting personal friendship. In addition to SWF in BadenBaden, Scholz occasionally worked for RIAS in Berlin. Both broadcasters influenced his professional career, especially as it was there that he met multiple well-known personalities. In the 1950s, many authors cooperated with the radio because it was financially lucrative (Wagner 2009, 232–33). The men at the Cologne WDR, however, remained a closed group. No extra-professional connection developed between them and networks in the other cities, probably because of Scholz’s refusal to cooperate. The only connection could have been made by Thilo Koch, but after Through the Night was shown on television, he moved to Washington and worked as a correspondent. That men dominated these networks is hardly surprising (Hodenberg 2006, 236). The few women—above all Wegener, Tergit, and the agent Joan Daves—had atypical biographies, given their level of education and their political commitment. None of them could have pursued their career during the Nazi era; Tergit and Daves had opted for exile. Equally unsurprising was  the fact that the most important “invisible hands” (Zajas 2019, 210) behind the book’s production and marketing were female. The biographies of the men were more differentiated: Hartmann, persecuted by the Nazi regime; Otto Görner, a convinced Nazi; and the producer Pindter, who successfully continued his career during the Nazi era. Interestingly, of all people, Wegener and Görner cooperated closely on the manuscript, and Hartmann and Pindter did during the production of the miniseries. Between these two poles sprawled a broad spectrum of opportunistic biographies: committed Hitler Youth members, volunteering Wehrmacht soldiers, and former administrative officials of the Nazi system and propaganda. In addition to Scholz, both directors Westphal and Umgelter must also have been aware of the extent of

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the war crimes against the civilian population, especially as both had been deployed to Eastern Europe, where deportations to concentration and extermination camps, as well as forced resettlements and mass executions, were part of the daily war routine.25 The biographies of the producers of Through the Night reflect the social structure of the German media landscape at the time (Hodenberg 2006, 229–32). The middle- and upper-class background of all actors involved is striking: sons of professors, lawyers, officers, and factory owners who now strived to maintain their social status in the new reality of a democratic West Germany. And they succeeded, as von Hodenberg notes: “The journalists kept pace with . . . the incipient prosperity in the 1950s” (ibid., 235). The structure of the West German media landscape during the Wirtschaftswunder additionally promoted networking among men; “of course, you know each other,” Kaiser (1956, 536) noted in his libel about Through the Night. The feature pages of the major newspapers reveal that their editorial departments often exchanged texts of their writers; the cooperation between the regional branches and offices of public broadcasting was even inevitable. The media professionals met in editorial offices, at public events, and in private circles. In West Berlin, Scholz was well received, especially as he had previously been a regular in the nightlife around Kurfürstendamm; over time, he rose to become the feature section editor of the Berlin-based daily Tagesspiegel. I do not want to suggest any conspiracy theories about secret activities in Berlin bars, but rather point to the existence of a “semi-public parallel world” (Goschler 2009, 33) and a bourgeois habitus of the actors involved (Fritscher-Fehr 2019, 69). The largely informal support that Scholz enjoyed in Berlin illustrates Bourdieu’s and Giddens’s accounts mentioned above: while Bourdieu attributes a key role in social reproduction to social, cultural, and economic capital (Bourdieu 1986), Giddens perceives resources and everyday actions as decisive factors where “routinization” meets “societal totality” (Giddens 1984, 297). Accordingly, an informal conversation of wealthy men at the bar not only reflects elements of social structure, but also contributes to its reproduction. This also applies to memories that are reproduced in informal situations: in conversations outside the public sphere and within mostly male communities of memory, the ‘subcutaneous ­memory’ emerges. My hypothesis is that the joint environment of both the writer and the Berlin critics was crucial for the success of the book. The numerous assertions in the media that Scholz was an ‘outsider’ should be seen as a PR measure; although he made his debut as a writer at the age of only forty, he already belonged to Berlin’s high society. There was a lack of characters among his supporters, however, who could have proved to be lasting agents of cultural memory—personalities like Joachim Kaiser, for example, with his connections to Gruppe 47. Although Karl Korn, Friedrich Luft, and Thilo Koch

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all had a significant impact on the public discourse of the 1950s and 1960s, their names did not enter the mainstream of what is widely considered West German intellectual history. The network that shaped the reception of the television adaptation was much more diverse. Ulrike Weckel argues that film critics were often people who only occasionally wrote about film (Weckel 2003, 66–67). While she focuses on the immediate postwar period, it also seems applicable to the following decade. Most reviews of Through the Night are anonymous, but it can be assumed that prominent critics would usually have insisted on being named as authors. Although most reviews of the first episode were positive, the television adaptation lacked influential supporters. After Hartmann’s dismissal, not even one person at the public broadcasting company stood up for Through the Night; after showing the last episode, some critics even complained about the supposedly declining quality of the miniseries. Only Scholz (1960d) defended the show, yet with reservations. Considering the rather negative reactions of the author and the audience to the last episodes of the miniseries, it is no surprise that a planned major film production did not materialize, or that the reception of the television adaptation did not expand the existing ‘production circle.’ The impact of the media complex beyond the networks of literature, radio, and television was certainly very complex. My interest is mainly in the institution of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. For the circular flow of action, Giddens identifies the following mechanism: “The flow of action continually produces consequences that are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences may also form unacknowledged conditions of action in a feedback fashion” (Giddens 1984, 27). What is the ‘flow of action’ and its consequences in relation to Through the Night? The poor reception of the massacre sequence in its literary form may even have conditioned the production of the radio adaptation, as the material was considered attractive but ‘harmless.’ Reactions to the television adaptation, by contrast, differed substantially; maybe partly because of the difference between the media types, of course, but also because of a changing discourse concerning the Nazi past. In addition to the events mentioned above—the Ulm trial and the appointment of the Central Office—the age of the recipients also played a role. In March 1960, young people without any personal recollections of the war also watched television. The significance of structural conditions is also illustrated by the contrasting reactions in West and East Germany, as well as in the differing voices of the television critic and the individual viewer: representatives of educated bourgeois elites (critics) in comparison to a differentiated sample of citizens (interviewed viewers). The existence of parallel publics is, of course, not unexpected (Klaus and Drüeke 2017). What is interesting, however, is how reactions in the media

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public affected the productions. The recognition of the novel by the jury of the Fontane Prize was one of the reasons for its publication in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper; Korn’s review convinced the stakeholders at SWF to produce a radio adaptation; and the radio adaptation—though receiving comparatively little attention—again influenced the television production. At each stage, the producers received feedback, both through the media and the submissions from recipients. Much like we share comments about books or television shows on the Internet today, readers and viewers in the 1950s and 1960s wrote letters—to the author, publisher, broadcaster, and even the Berlin Senate responsible for the Fontane Prize—and some of them received replies. The rerun of the television adaptation in 1966, for example, was provoked by viewer requests. This mechanism of circulation was set in motion—and I wish to emphasize this point once more—by the social actions of individual social actors.

Notes   1. As discussed in the Introduction, I use the controversial term Vergangenheitsbewältigung because of its wide range (Reichel 2010, 21–22) and the fact that it is a contemporary term that shaped the discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. Following Manfred Kittel (1993), I use it as a source term rather than an analytic category.   2. My biography of Scholz is based on his estate, two autobiographical texts (Scholz 1966 and Scholz 1969), the identity records (Scholz n.d. a, Personnel file) at the State Archives in Berlin (Landesarchiv Berlin), and a short biography at the Federal Military Archives in Freiburg (Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg). Apart from some detail, it matches Scholz’s biography by Stephanie Heck and Simon Lang (2020b). Unfortunately, the authors do not state their sources, which makes it impossible to clarify the differences.   3. The reference is a contemporary photo of the room in the documentation of the Olympic Village (Hübner 2015). Soviet soldiers using the facilities after World War II repainted the mural (Schwan 2009, 48–49).   4. Information on the structure of the Wehrmacht in World War II is based on Tessin (1965– 2002).  5. Scholz’s biography in the German-language Wikipedia (last accessed on 14 January 2023) contains information about his job as an interior architect for the Soviet military government, and as an instructor of art history at an adult education center. His estate indicates that he only worked on occasional projects rather than having a full-time job. The TV productions listed in the article are short contributions and ads.   6. Pioneers of Holocaust studies such as Raul Hilberg and Léon Poliakov used the protocols relatively early.   7. This assumption is based on an inquiry at the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (German Resistance Memorial Center) in Berlin, which holds a collection of newspaper clippings for the project Judiciary and Nazi Crimes (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, 2020, Email to Author).

74  •  Microhistories of Memory   8. Otto Görner’s personnel file in the Federal Archives ends in 1939, hence I was not able to confirm Apel’s claim of Görner’s alleged SS affiliation.   9. ‘Wendish’ is an adjective based on ‘Wends,’ an old-fashioned expression for ‘Slavs,’ especially for those living in close proximity to German-speaking ethnic groups. 10. Original emphasis. 11. The connections to Benn are noteworthy, as Hellmut Jaesrich (1956, 57) assumed that the poet ‘hid’ behind the name Scholz. Thirty years later, Konrad Schuller responded by saying that both authors defined themselves through their sound poetics. However, Benn praised precisely that chapter of Through the Night in which sound poetics were used the least. 12. A commented and additionally documented original was not published before 2018. 13. The relevance of the ‘45ers’ for the development of postwar radio is object of Melanie Fritscher-Fehr’s analysis (2019, 67–69). Older research calls the generation the ‘FlakhelferGeneration,’ but Moses’s term is broader, as it refrains from reducing it to a specific experience or from implicitly suggesting the innocence of relatives. Moses explains the terminological difference in his book German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Moses 2007, 51). 14. For generational conflicts in the West German press of the 1950s, see von Hodenberg 2006, 245–92. 15. Roxanne Narz confirmed this statement; her research on Karl Korn’s role in the feature pages of FAZ enabled her to access the newspaper’s archive (Narz 2019, Email to author). 16. Westphal’s estate in the German Literature Archives in Marbach (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach) contains correspondence with Kaiser. 17. This correspondence can also be found in the German Literature Archives in Marbach. 18. NWDR was the first West German TV and radio public broadcaster after World War II, later split into WDR in the west of the country, and NDR in the north. 19. A meeting place was opened in the Alexanderhaus in 2019, remembering its former inhabitants (https://alexanderhaus.org, last accessed 14 January 2023). 20. The reconstruction of Umgelter’s biography is based on his personal file in the Federal Military Archives in Freiburg (Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg) and his estate in the Archives of the Academy of the Arts (Akademie der Künste) in Berlin. It differs in some aspects from the biography written by Heck and Lang (2020b). As they do not state their sources, it is not possible to clarify the differences. 21. Unless otherwise noted, the newspaper quotes originate from the WDR (1960) collection “Im Urteil der Presse: ‘Am grünen Stand der Spree.’” 22. The data is based on Infratest (1960, Viewers’ survey), Mühl-Benninghaus and Friedrichsen (2012, 135), and the data from the Statistical Federal Agency (Statistisches Bundesamt 1960, 266). It is further elaborated in Chapter 3 of this volume: Third Story: Media and Technologies. 23. This thesis is based on the analysis of the articles listed in Claudia Fröhlich’s essay (2011): forty articles in West German newspapers, and fourteen in East German ones. 24. The manuscript did not arouse any interest, and was neither printed nor played (Wagener 2013, 158). 25. The claim that the ‘common’ Wehrmacht soldier knew about the war crimes is based on recent research, e.g., Fulbrook 2018; Kay and Stahel 2020.

Chapter 2

Second Story Authenticity and Affects

8 In this chapter, I focus on the text of the novel, the sound of the radio play, and the images of the television miniseries. To begin, however, I share the premise of the ‘affective turn’ that no researcher can be objective but is always anchored, socially and historically; in short, it is my perspective, my East Central European background, my previous experience of doing research in the field of memory studies, as well as the respective moments when I read, heard, and saw the individual versions of Through the Night that influence my analysis. I was mostly socialized in Poland, with Polish readings and films, and with an understanding of history typical of the country, so the depiction of the Orsha massacre certainly evokes different associations in me than it did in West German recipients consuming Through the Night in the 1950s and 1960s. My interest in the media complex began with the television adaptation and its many images of Eastern Europe. I gradually immersed myself into the subject, but while I had to reconstruct certain contemporary ­contexts—such as references to West German discourses of the 1950s—it was always the East European themes in Through the Night that kept me thinking. I cannot and do not want to exclude or reduce this perspective. My personal perception of Through the Night is closely intertwined with the two focus areas of this chapter, namely authenticity and affect. Research on authenticity as well as affect theory address the relationship between representation and the external world: “If representation is always a representation of something, then there must be something independent of representation that is the subject of representation,” writes Christian Strub (1997,  8). In

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his seminal essay on authenticity, Achim Saupe (2015) suggests that for media scholars and historians it is less about determining what is authentic than what counts as authentic. Saupe follows Helmuth Lethen, who claims that “what is ‘authentic’ cannot be clarified,” and so the essential question is rather “which procedures trigger the effect of the ‘authentic’” (Lethen 1996, 209).1 Accordingly, authenticity is an expectation that comes from the outside world (Bergold 2019), and therefore the affective character of historical representations is a form of their effect on the outside world. Yet affects are not equal to emotions or feelings. Crucial in the discussion about the nature of affects are keywords such as “conditions” (ibid., 220), “cultural forces” (Bal 2002, 10), and “judgements” (Brennan 2004, 5). Affects are not emotional reactions, but can cause them; and because of their embeddedness in fiction, cinematic images, and art, they are transferable (Brennan 2004). Ernst van Alphen emphasizes that their forces can result in different emotions and actions (Alphen 2008, 24–25). This chapter is primarily concerned with analyzing the ‘ascriptions’ and ‘effects’ of the Orsha massacre’s depiction in Through the Night. I will first clarify which passages in the media complex trigger the effect of authenticity; this changes in time, however, as reception scholars consider the expectations of today’s readers, listeners, and viewers to be different from the expectations that recipients had in the 1950s. Classics of reception aesthetics, Hans Robert Jauss (1979) and Reinhart Koselleck (2018) emphasize these temporal levels in their discussions about authenticity. Jörn Rüsen follows: “The past is authentic as history if it is at the same time present and alive in its pastness and in the living presence of those who remember it. Authenticity is an existential quality of memory. By means of authenticity, the past has always inscribed itself antecedently into the present” (Rüsen 2001, 230).2 Approaching this existential quality requires a multilayered approach, because “today’s world and today’s self-interpretation play an important role in understanding the past” (ibid., 244). Hence, when doing research on the history of literature or media, we should not project our present reading onto the reactions of its contemporary recipients. Essential for the discussion of the affective potential of Through the Night is also the separation between different types of time layers. Van Alphen believes that we should examine not just the visible and invisible properties of texts and images but also their “affective operations” (Alphen 2008, 22), as their impact unfolds beyond the textual or pictorial level. He is skeptical of the concept of “representation” and, referencing research on authenticity, prefers the concept of “effect” (Alphen 1997, 10). The question is therefore not what the accounts of the massacre in Orsha convey to us but what they do to us—both in early postwar West Germany and in current East Central Europe.

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Affect theory and memory studies hold some affinity. Scholars of affect theory reference Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory and his notion of “perceptions that recall to us former images” (Bergson 1929, 44). The concepts of “affective operations” or “affective effect” are similar to Aby Warburg’s (2000, 3) idea of social memory mediated through powerful and energetic images. Brian Massumi argues that affects become manifest in “interference,” “disruption,” “vibratory motion,” and “resonance”—in them “it is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox” (Massumi 1995, 86–87) that makes him reject monocausal explanations and interpretations of any artifact. He allows for ambivalences and develops figures of thought similar to ‘traveling memory,’ but at the microlevel. They are particularly constructive when analyzing phenomena in their formative stages. ‘Disruption’ such as the account of the Orsha massacre, which anticipated the discourses of dealing with the past, only become visible ex post. Ann Rigney’s and Astrid Erll’s metaphor of ‘moving memory,’ which actually refers to movable memory, takes on a second meaning: memory that moves. What kind of mnemonic ‘disruptions’ or ‘ruptures’ moved the recipients of Through the Night? In the 1950s, much like today, media representations of historical events were often judged by their ‘authenticity,’ often by juxtaposing them with other representations of the same event, ideally with academic writings, but mostly with film and television, fiction literature, journalism, and not least with eyewitness testimonies. The difference between the 1950s and today is, of course, that the producers and recipients back then had few earlier media examples to compare the depiction of the massacre with. Through the Night confronted the West German public with a mass media representation of the Holocaust only ten (novel) to fifteen (miniseries) years after the end of World War II. The images of the Orsha massacre were therefore hardly pre-­ mediated. Instead, the media complex was directed at the generation who mostly still had individual memories of the war. How did the individual experiences affect the claim to authenticity at the time? The analysis of ‘authenticity ascriptions’ and ‘affective effects’ requires certain steps. First, it needs a close reading of the account of the massacre in all its versions, from the first manuscript of the book to the television miniseries. What are their strategies of authentication, such as statements about time and place, and mentions of other accounts? Are there any references to the autobiographical motifs in the novel? How is it adapted to contemporary discourses, and how are they incorporated into each version? As authenticity does not necessarily mean conformity to actual historical events but rather to what is considered ‘real’ or ‘true,’ parallel explanations of Nazi crimes in occupied Soviet Union are crucial for the analysis. Images and narratives that have already been present in public memory are often perceived

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as ‘authentic,’ regardless of their actual relationship to “what is independent of the depiction” (Strub 1997, 8). Strategies of authentication become especially relevant for the production and reception of mediated histories. In the case of Through the Night they include the author’s claim to have witnessed the massacre himself, the broadcaster’s assurance that the first episode of the television miniseries was the “toughest examination of the past” to date (Hartmann 1960a, Letter to Blachstein et al.), and the numerous efforts by the publisher and broadcaster to adapt the depiction of the massacre to the recipient’s expectations. The analysis of the affective potential of Through the Night is somewhat more difficult than the analysis of the strategies of authentication, especially because the affect theory has mainly been used for ‘high’ culture. The affective turn was, among others, a reaction to the impossibility of a linguistic or visual representation of traumatic events and at the same time to their potential for unfolding affects. Accordingly, the approach became valuable for cultural studies and research on the Holocaust. Massumi writes, for example, that the experience of “disruptions,” “voids,” “paradoxes,” and “holes in time” cannot be represented discursively but mediated affectively.3 The media complex Through the Night, however, consists of a novel, radio play, and television miniseries, hence of representations and discourses. Despite numerous claims regarding the opposing nature of affect and discourse, they are not mutually exclusive (Wetherell 2013, 351). On the one hand, discursive forms contain ‘blank spaces’ indicating omissions—they can be found in each version of Through the Night. On the other hand, van Alphen and Massumi both point out that the affective effect engages multiple senses simultaneously: “affect is synaesthetic” (Massumi 1995, 96). It is therefore necessary to identify the synaesthetic spaces in Through the Night. These are, among others, the ‘visualization of the text’ and the ‘visualizations in the text.’ Readers must be able to ‘see the images’ because “the affect of visualization is needed in order to engage meaning” (Alphen 2008, 28). Scholz, a trained painter, applied a variety of visualization strategies in his novel; through the additional radio and television adaptations, the passages achieve an additional synaesthetic density. Consequently, the viewers reported affective effects such as ‘shock’ or ‘disquiet.’ This also corresponds with affect theory; as Massumi writes, “the escape of affect cannot be perceived, alongside the perceptions that are its capture. This side perception may be punctual, localized in an event . . . When it is punctual, it is usually described in negative turns, especially as a form of shock”4 (Massumi 1993, 229). Eric Shouse adds, “the importance of affect rests upon the fact that in many cases the message consciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than his or her nonconscious affective resonances with the source of the message” (Shouse 2005, quoted in: Leys 2011, 435).

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In order to differentiate between contemporary and present perspectives, I address each phase of the media complex separately. It is not only a matter of the temporal distance between the postwar period and the present, but also of the comparatively short intervals between the publication of the book (1955), the radio play (1956), and the television adaptation (1960). The generational shift at the turn of the 1960s undoubtedly had an impact on the authentication strategies of each version, as the youngest viewers of the 1960s miniseries did not have personal memories of the war. In contrast to the geological process Reinhart Koselleck (2018) employs as metaphorical starting point of his ‘sediments of time,’ I do not proceed top-down (starting with the youngest layer), but bottom-up (from the oldest layer upwards). It is ultimately a stylistic decision; in fact, the research this book is based on proceeded in reverse: first, I became aware of the film; then I worked backwards via the radio play, the book, and the manuscripts; and finally I went to the sources on the ‘liquidation’ of the Orsha ghetto.

Unbearable Sequences Jürgen Wilms’s fictional diary describing the Orsha massacre is based on the author’s personal war experience. After his return from captivity, Scholz never revealed much about his memories from France, where he was stationed until 1941, or the advance through Europe into the Soviet Union. After the publication of the novel, however, he felt compelled to justify his depiction of the massacre; he told Der Spiegel: “I cannot write about something I have not seen” (“Boccacio in der Bar” 1956, 46). In his acceptance speech for the Heinrich Stahl Prize, the author again emphasized that he only recorded what he had witnessed. He added that Fritz Umgelter, director of the television miniseries, was able to draw on his own personal wartime experiences, and he recorded the sequence “in the same way or almost in the same way as it is written in the book.” To lend credibility to his eyewitness perspective, Scholz gave a more concrete account of his experiences in Orsha: At that time I voluntarily made myself an eyewitness of the events in Orsha and, already hearing the salvos from afar, went across the train depot and approached the Jewish cemetery above a small river valley, the Orschitza, on a hill where they had dug pits and where the horrible event took place in full evidence before my eyes—until I was chased away. (Scholz 1960b, Speech)

When in Orsha, Scholz made his first notes for a novel, but did not keep a diary. The actual text of the story, later combined with six more to form the novel, he wrote after the end of the war. In this sense, it is a variation on the

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Figure 2.1.  View from the railroad embankment onto the area of the mass execution, 2020. Behind the trees, the terrain descends into the Orschitza valley. © Andrei Liankevich, 2020.

‘autobiographical memory novel,’ as Astrid Erll (2017, 65) calls this genre. Scholz’s account of his voluntary experience as an eyewitness suggests a need for justification, as if he wanted to prove that the events in Orsha were not his invention. Today, his description of the terrain can easily be verified; a quick look at the topographical map of Orsha shows that the railroad embankment (Figure 2.1) indeed runs parallel to the Orschitza, and that the cemetery is located on the outskirts of the city above the rail triangle (Topografičeskije karty n.d.). In Scholz’s time, his description could only be confirmed by other soldiers who had been stationed in Orsha. In order to emphasize his own testimony, the protagonist Wilms gives details about the time and place of the event. As usual in diaries, each section begins with the date and name of the town or village. The pages describing the massacre are an exception, because, as we learn from the frame story, some of Wilms’s notes are illegible or missing. The reasons for Rowohlt’s initial rejection of the manuscript are unknown. In 1970, a fire destroyed the publisher’s archives, and what is left today is a brief, formal rejection letter by Wolfgang Weyrauch, but not the expert opinion probably written at the time. The manuscript version read by Weyrauch was still the epistolary novel, with the diary of Jürgen Wilms included in the second chapter. As the fictional writer of the diary is a Soviet POW, his

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notes are read by Hans-Joachim Lepsius after his much later return to Berlin. Wilms describes his military service in the Polish town of Maciejowice, subsequent stops on the way east, the Battle of Brest-Litovsk, and finally the Orsha massacre. References to the persecution of Jews can be found throughout: in Maciejowice, Wilms blames himself because he did not help a Jewish girl who was then beaten by members of the Jewish police; in the town of Garwolin, he flirts with a young Polish woman who makes antisemitic remarks; in another town, called Góra Kalwaria, he shares his food ration with a Jewish boy; in Brest-Litovsk, he is appalled about the fact that Jewish men are made to retrieve the bodies of dead German soldiers from the battlefield. The climax of his narrative, however, is the description of the events in Orsha; here we also learn the reason for Wilms’s focus on the suffering of the Jews: his early love for a Jewish girl. Media scholar Peter Seibert argues that the genre of the diary shortens the distance between the experience and the narrative, and pushes back the ‘epic past tense’—it does not “make it round” but rather allows fragmentary formulations (Seibert 2000, 129). Hannes Gürgen therefore calls Jürgen Wilms’s diary a “documental-chronologist eyewitness account” (Gürgen 2020, 70). Although the men listening to the diary being read meet in West Berlin’s Jockey Bar almost thirteen years after the Orsha massacre, the genre of the diary allows an ‘authentic’ narrative form in the present tense, without ‘memory loss.’ Judging by Wilms’s fictional notes alone, Weyrauch’s rejection of the manuscript may seem surprising; as a prominent member of Gruppe 47, he pushed for a debate about the recent past as well as a clear rejection of ‘Third Reich’ jargon in literature. Paradoxically, however, it may have been this very literary demand that indirectly led to the rejection. The writers of the letters in Scholz’s first manuscript are successful actors, producers, and musicians who—with one exception—survived the war unscathed; Lepsius, the reader, had served in the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, a Nazi unit supporting the Spanish Fascists. After the end of World War II, the men restarted their careers in what was now West Germany. Some of them trivialize the totalitarian system and ironize about it; when Lepsius mentions his deployment in Spain, for instance, a patron lectures him: “Do not say ‘Condor’ so loud. Of course, we are all violently anti-Communist; but in those days, we weren’t supposed to be. Remember? We’re against National Socialism, too, because the Nazis were always against the poor Communists, and so on and so forth. You get the picture?” (TN, 9). The conservative tone of restoration in the frame story will probably not have appealed to Weyrauch.5 As described in the previous chapter, the editors at Hoffmann und Campe, who eventually accepted the manuscript, also had their reservations—about the composition of the book, the detailed descriptions of East Germany, and the description of the massacre. One of the people involved even claimed

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that the description was “somewhat embarrassing” (Görner 1954a, Letter to Scholz). It was Harriet Wegener, copy editor and confidant of publisher and owner Kurt Ganske, who ultimately decided on the outcome of the controversy, telling Scholz that “most people do not like it when Hitler’s executions of Jews are served up again and again. Those who were part of the Wehrmacht’s Eastern Front emphasize that they have known such things only from hearsay. Nevertheless, I am not in favor of deleting the sequence. It is excellent in its way, and the deletion would diminish the substance of the manuscript” (Wegener 1954, Letter to Scholz). What did Wegener mean by saying that the executions of the Jews were “served up again and again?” The word “serving up” suggests that even fictional reports of the extermination of the Jews were declared to be, if not entirely untrue, then at least highly improbable, which is why they were known only ‘from hearsay.’ Furthermore, such reports must simply have been too unpleasant to read for witnesses of the events, which might also have been a reason for Görner’s remark—as reader, witness, and (most probably) perpetrator—that Scholz’s account was “somehow embarrassing.” The extermination of East European Jews was certainly not a topic discussed in detail, either in journalism or in literature, film, or radio. Although Wegener had the controversial sequence published despite the reservations of some male colleagues, she nevertheless demanded changes. In the second story of the novel, a man called Hesselbarth, one of the group at the bar, talks about his encounter with a Russian partisan, warning her of the impending executions. She, however, voluntarily chooses death together with her companions. In the original version of the manuscript, Scholz did not write of a Russian woman, but a Jewish one; presumably this detail can also be traced back to his biography, although he never commented on it publicly. Wegener initiated the following revision: “The girl in the second story . . . also has Jewish blood. As Wilms’s girlfriend was Jewish and Jewish executions are reported, this is too much. It also seems unnecessary regarding the story” (Wegener 1954, Letter to Scholz). Those remarks reveal Wegener’s ambivalent attitude toward the subject of the Jews; while she advocated keeping the depiction of the massacre, she also demanded the deletion of a Jewish character, referring to it with the antisemitic term “Jewish blood” (Spörri 2005). Harriet Wegener would certainly not describe herself, and could not be described from today’s perspective, as an ‘antisemite’; a convinced democrat already in the 1930s, she was active on behalf of Hamburg’s Jewish women in the women’s club Zonta, an activity that even led to her removal from the workplace (Stubbe-da-Luz 1986). Nevertheless, the Nazi jargon also rubbed off on Wegener’s use of language. She did not explain why she rejected another Jewish female figure; we can only speculate that she may have feared possible pushbacks from future readers, or she perhaps internally

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negotiated to eliminate the Jewish figure in order to keep the depiction of the Orsha massacre. Regardless of the internal discussions, the cuts made to the chapter were quantitatively rather minor; in terms of content, however, they were significant. Among the passages that would later be missing in the book is a description of dead corpses steaming in the cold, as well as Jewish men being forced to layer the dead bodies on top of each other, under German supervision: Are old men lined up below on the floor of the mass grave, in caftans dripping blood, for it splashes, the long silver beards and the payess dripping blood . . . everything swims in front and everything steams. Slip sometimes, the old ones. They get the finishing shot if they slip too often and show fatigue. Climbing in the back already on the first layer, over the rib cages and the many feet of the first layer. (Scholz 1953, Märkische Rübchen, 192)

There are similar accounts by witnesses who observed mass executions elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In the report about his search for traces of the Holocaust in the Ukraine, Patrick Desbois noted a conversation with an elderly woman: In a flash, I realized she was trying to convey her unspeakable experience, her suffering. Very calmly I asked her: “You had to walk on the bodies of the people who were shot?” She replied: “Yes I had to pack them down,” making the same gesture with her arms. I thought I understood: “You had to do that at the end of the shootings, in the evening, or between each volley of shots?” Seeing that I was beginning to understand, she told the rest of the story: “After every volley of shots. We were three Ukrainian girls who, in our bare feet, had to pack down the bodies of the Jews and throw a fine layer of sand on top of them so that other Jews could lay down.” (Desbois 2008, 84)

In another interview, a man reported that “in the pit itself there were Jews arranging the bodies all along the pit. Once it was full, they in turn were shot” (Desbois 2008, 139). As macabre as the account, it is likely that Scholz described exactly what he had seen. It was this dramatic realism, of all things, that probably led to the deletion of this sequence. The contrast with the public memory of the supposedly heroic Wehrmacht would probably have led to negative reactions to the initial description; it would not have been considered ‘authentic.’ The strong and affective image sketched here is, from an aesthetic perspective, a result of Scholz’s synaesthetic method, which is characteristic not only of Jürgen Wilms’s fictional diary but of the entire book (Magen 2020). Words like “steaming” and “slipping” unmistakably evoke sensual impressions of the mass murder. After cutting this passage, however, there was a noticeable gap. Wilms says: “Quite a job, stacking eighteen hundred people”

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(TN 54), and in the next paragraph continues to describe a conversation of the guards: “Hello, you two beauties. Snappy weather outside” (TN 54). The omissions, in the original German version additionally marked with ellipses “. . .”, are integral to the text, and further emphasize the contrast between the two images: the stacking of eighteen hundred corpses and a trivial conversation about fall weather. The disruption signals a “hole in time” (Massumi 1995, 86) in which something that has been silenced must have occurred. Not all references to the handling of dead corpses have been deleted, however. A few pages earlier, the book contains a similar account, referring to the Battle of Brest-Litovsk, as mentioned above. Wilms describes how Germans ordered local Jews to recover the dead bodies on the battlefield: There they are! The first Jews with spades and pieces of tarpaulin . . . They are thin, scrawny men with beards and curls at their temples, most of them wearing long dark coats or some sort of jacket . . . Several of the men wear round, plush hats, but most of them have on dark blue, flat, visored caps. They work in groups, a dark flock in a strange pasture, stopping whenever they come to a cadaver, or something else we cannot see from here. Then, with their spades, they shovel the swollen, asphalt-colored corpse onto the tarpaulin and drag it to the line of carts, which must be somewhere in the rear . . . The air is hot and sultry, and it stinks like hell. Many of the corpses are wet because they have burst open and are leaking. Blood is clotted in dark splotches on shreds of their uniforms. Many are powdered gray with the dust of shellfire. (TN 42)

Television critic Hans Schmid (2011) claims that Scholz must have known about the murder of the Brest Jews by Polizeibatallion 307 (Police Battalion 307) in July 1941. Wilms’s fictional reference to the humiliation of the Jews retrieving German corpses is, Schmid suggests, a synecdoche for this event. Of course, it cannot be ruled out that a member of a transport regiment like Scholz observed or knew about the mass executions of three to four thousand Jews (Curilla 2006, 575), but there is no evidence in the novel or other sources to verify this assumption. The impressions the narrator writes about go beyond the mere description of the murder, providing insight into the mechanisms of the genocide and the exploitation and dehumanization of the victims. Both the description of the body retrieval in Brest-Litovsk and the deleted passage about the layering of corpses in Orsha refer to the physical and tangible aspects of the genocide: cold in winter, stench in summer. The narrator emphasizes haptic, nauseating impressions, such as dead, bloody bodies sticking and glistening. This kind of description is well captured by the theory of affect, in which the body is central for the production of meanings. Synesthesia facilitates the representation of bodily experiences, but also stands for the perception of the affective body (Golańska 2017, 54). In Through the Night, the synesthetic account emphasizes the narrator’s

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physical presence in each location. What is seen, sensed, or smelled signals ‘authentic’ knowledge, not merely conveyed through ‘hearsay.’ The deletion of the passage about the corpse recovery in Orsha follows the same logic as Wegener’s demand to replace the Jewish woman with a Russian one. In both cases, the manuscript seems to have contained ‘too much.’ Repetition, be it a doubled reference to Jewish victims in the occupied Soviet Union or a doubled description of the degrading practice of forced corpse retrieval by Jews, is a legitimate stylistic instrument to emphasize certain facts. The deletion of the repetition therefore had more far-reaching consequences than merely streamlining the text. The fragmentation implied that the copy editors of Through the Night wanted to avoid descriptions considered too intrusive, and only hint at them bit by bit. By mentioning certain motifs but not repeating them, the copy editors negotiated the contemporary rules of ‘sayability’ both with the author and, in a broader perspective, with the readers. The strategy of fragmentary allusions to difficult topics is visible in another passage of the diary as well, which, although not entirely deleted, was severely cut. In the first manuscript, the execution scene is followed by a description of German policemen searching the victims’ belongings: The policemen look as purple as disgruntled. No fun at all. And dig joylessly through the pockets. They do not find anything. What they cannot use, they drop carelessly, like the dry shells of the monkeys’ fingering paws when nibbling peanuts. They drop photographs, which the breeze takes away, and lots of onion and garlic. More does not fall. Didn’t have much on earth, those standing in line. (Scholz 1953, Märkische Rübchen, 189)

While the first part of the last sentence, written in the past tense, suggests that the victims were as good as dead, the use of the present tense in the second part of the same sentence signals that the search takes place in the presence of the Jews. Given the fact that the policemen “dig . . . through” the pockets of scattered clothes, the victims must have undressed beforehand. The emerging image depicts innocent people humiliated by German men. Robbed of their dignity, they await execution while their killers destroy the most precious things they had been able to salvage from their former lives— family ­photographs, personal mementos. Again, similar clues can be found in interviews with eyewitnesses: “What did the police do with the clothes?” Desbois asks a Ukrainian witness, who replies, “They took what they wanted” (Desbois 2008, 93). Despite Scholz’s undoubtedly unembellished and detailed writing, his manuscript is not free of antisemitic cliché. Wilms writes of onions and garlic falling from the Jews’ clothes onto the ground; even if read as a reference to poverty and hunger, it is an image of antisemitic repertoire. In the end, the passage did not find its way into the printed version, where the search is only

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mentioned in a succinct sentence: “The police, true to their strict concept of duty, are ransacking the dead bodies” (TN 52). There is no more mention of searching pockets, or of photographs, onions, or garlic. The description of the recovery of the dead bodies and the abbreviated sequence with the looting policemen were not the only references to the humiliation of Jews by German occupiers. While on duty in Maciejowice, Poland, Wilms travels to Warsaw and observes scenes at a road construction on the way: The Jewish women work steadily and seldom speak to one another. They are burned brown by the sun and obviously half starved, dried out from starvation. Several of the old women are leathern, their bones moving inside their wrinkled, leathery skin, like a snake’s. Even their breasts are leathern under their inconceivable rags. What right has anyone to humiliate a human being to that extent? Who has the right to? (TN 21–22)

In the original, German version, there is a note in parentheses “(Hans Baldung)” after the words “inconceivable rags,” referring to the painting The Three Ages of Man and Death (c. 1540). It shows an old, emaciated woman whose hip is covered only by a scrap of cloth, her breasts are bare. Next to her stands personified Death in heavily wrinkled and aged skin. Once again, the narrator makes use of synesthesia, this time to describe humans closer to death than alive. Their degradation is made explicit: “What right has anyone to humiliate a human being?” it reads, apparently to eliminate any doubt as to how to read this passage. Literary scholar Norbert Puszkar claims that Scholz portrays “a crime with hardly an identifiable agent behind it” (Puszkar 2009, 316). The few passages in the manuscript that unmistakably refer to the German perpetrators were indeed either deleted or cut short, as illustrated by the examples above. What remained was a laconic reference to the “SS soldier overseeing a group of women at work on the road” (TN 21), and two remarks about policemen present at the mass execution, referred to as “comrades in green” (TN 52). The shortened interventions also indicate that the readers were to be protected from images that seemed too intense. Scholz’s interviewer at Der Spiegel summarized his account by elucidating that “without any particular grumbling, Scholz rewrote his near novel several times before the publisher was satisfied. Only when a copy editor, in order to go easy on West German nerves, wanted, as Scholz says, ‘to throw the Jews out,’ did the author remain adamant” (“Boccacio in der Bar” 1956, 45). Der Spiegel thus staged Scholz as a hero for having saved the passage in question from the publisher’s cutting rage. Although the collaboration between the writer and the publisher had not been easy—according to one of the copy editors, “Scholz is obviously an author who cannot give up on anything once

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he has conceived or written it, whether he realizes this or not” (Hoffmann und Campe 1954a, Letter to Herrmann)—it generally took place in a friendly atmosphere. The article in Der Spiegel, however, triggered a heated dispute, as, to no big surprise, the publisher was not pleased to find that internal editorial processes had proliferated in the media. Particularly irritated was Wegener, whose merit in pushing through the controversial passage cannot be denied (Wegener 1956, Letter to Scholz). A closer look at the revisions of the manuscript reveals that the “West German nerves” were only spared to a certain extent. Moving the diary to the beginning of the novel had the exact opposite purpose, which was to shock the reader. Toward the end of the editing process, only a few days before the manuscript was to be handed over to typesetting, a copy editor suggested an additional cut in the frame story: “What if the book started with the strong and exceptionally well-done diary?” (Hoffmann and Campe 1955a, Letter to Scholz). The final version now begins with a telephone conversation between Hans Schott and Dr. Brabender, who arrange the meeting at the Jockey Bar. Even before we meet the rest of the circle, Wilms’s diary commences—like a hard cut in a movie. After six pages, Lepsius finally stops reading and explains the circumstances of how Wilms had handed him the diary.6 This change alone shows the importance the publisher ultimately attributed to the Wilms story; initially faced with potential cuts or deletion, the diary was now, in the final phase of editing, of greatest relevance. Hardly any other outcome of this controversy could have illustrated better how the memory of the war crimes ‘oscillated’ at the time. Moving the diary to the beginning of the novel also had an authenticating effect. The men at the Jockey Bar consume lots of alcohol throughout the night and get increasingly drunk with each successive story; scholar Simon Lang meticulously converted each glass mentioned in the novel into the amount of alcohol per capita, and concluded that all participants must have had severe alcohol poisoning by the end of the night (Lang 2020a). This, of course, would call into question the authenticity of all later stories. The protagonists occasionally even comment themselves on the potential effect of the alcohol on the credibility of their stories; only Wilms’s diary at the beginning obviously remained unaffected. In addition to the numerous cuts, the editing process resulted in more notable changes between the initial and the final versions. Adman Hans Schott, organizer of the evening, had the author’s name Scholz in the first manuscript; and Jürgen Wilms, writer of the fictional diary, belonged to the same Kraftwagen-Transport-Regiment 605 that Scholz had served in during the war. In the final version, the protagonist Wilms serves in the Infantry Regiment 461, which seems more consistent given his detailed description of the Battle of Brest-Litovsk; the Kraftwagen-Transport-Regiment 605 only

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appears in the background. In the book, another Jockey Bar narrator, the aforementioned Hesselbarth, also shares some of Scholz’s biographical detail: he is a painter, primarily working in the advertising industry, and during the war he was first part of a supply unit on the Eastern Front and then stationed in Norway. This way, Scholz ‘distributed’ his personal background among his protagonists, although he did not do the same with others: he kept the real names of fellow soldiers, with at least four later recognizing themselves in the book and contacting Scholz with information about other members of their unit; even mothers of dead soldiers who were somehow connected to the locations in the book wrote letters to Scholz. The fact that one of Scholz’s former comrades ‘died’ in the novel even led to some misunderstanding when the ‘real’ comrade let Scholz know that he was alive and well, and would be happy to meet up (J.A. 1960, Letter to Scholz), to which Scholz apologetically replied that he had “not thought much in this literary game” (Scholz 1960a, Letter to J.A.). Undoubtedly, however, this “literary game” achieved an undeniable authentication effect.

The Detailed Description How was the Orsha massacre ultimately depicted in the final version of the novel? The mass execution is preceded by a series of actions intended to prepare the reader for the culmination at the end of the story. In a flashback, we learn that Wilms had already given thought to the persecution of Jews before the war: shortly after the Nazis obtained power, the family of his girlfriend Ruth Esther Loria was forced to emigrate. During their last meeting in Deauville, a French resort on the Atlantic coast, she told him that “You mustn’t feel bound to me personally. I am a Jewess and you are a German, and both of us know the laws” (TN 50). After returning to Berlin, Wilms got engaged to Jutta, the daughter of an aristocratic Nazi. The plot is set to start in June 1941 in the Polish city of Maciejowice—the same city Scholz’s unit was stationed in. In the novel, it serves as a synecdoche for the occupied territories in Eastern Europe. In Maciejowice, Wilms observes a Jewish girl being beaten by members of the Jewish police. He documents his impressions both in his diary and with a camera; each photograph is numbered, but none of them survives the war. When Wilms shows his diary to Lepsius in the POW camp, the pictures are already gone. But Wilms has also recorded his visual impressions through pictorial depictions: There are three men in the square. One of them, barefoot among the dandelions, with his face toward the escarpment, just stands there. Ten yards behind him, on the wide bulge of the pavement, stands another man, gun at his hip,

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wearing a steel helmet. He is staring at the back of the man near the wall. And I am standing in the empty arcade with its closed shutters and shop windows, watching them. (TN 18)

Following this scene, in which a Wehrmacht soldier is about to kill a Polish civilian, Wilms takes seven pictures of the town and the countryside, particularly capturing the general atmosphere of the place. After the Battle of BrestLitovsk, Wilms loses his camera: a fanatical soldier destroys it after Wilms takes pictures of a soldier’s funeral; ‘war losses’ are not to be documented. Later, Wilms receives a second camera from a comrade. Wilms, a ‘typical’ Wehrmacht soldier in many respects, expectedly does not identify with the perpetrators. After the execution of the civilian in Maciejowice, he notes: “I am wearing the same uniform as the man in the steel helmet. What in God’s name am I doing here in Poland?” (TN 19). The beaten girl reminds him of his Jewish lover: “I should never have left you, Ruth Esther Loria. I should not have . . . done it” (TN 21). The child who seeks shelter with him addresses him: “Fine gentlemen from Germany” (TN 24). Ruth Klüger later criticized this passage, noting it was designed to “appease the reader’s feelings of guilt and revive notions of a degenerate Jewry” (Klüger 1994, 11). Certainly, the girl from Maciejowice stands in unmistakable contrast to Klüger’s childhood memories in Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. As a Holocaust survivor, the writer did not want to accept the image of Jewish men beating up a Jewish child who eventually seeks shelter with a German soldier. Consequently, she writes: “Scholz mixes disapproval for the Nazis with contempt for their victims. The reader can pity the Jew in the guise of the child, and simultaneously reject him in the guise of the adults” (ibid.). Interestingly, Klüger does not address any other parts of the fictional diary; nevertheless, she generally notes that Scholz emphasized Wilms’s “moral superiority” (ibid.). Indeed, even apart from the sequence Klüger criticizes, Wilms gives the impression of the ‘good German’ who does not want to have anything to do with Germany’s war crimes. The novel thus reproduces a rather common topos in West German postwar literature; recent research on successful postwar authors such as Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Böll revealed that they often ‘touched up’ their war involvement, portraying themselves as more critical of the regime than they actually were (Döring and Joch 2011; Finlay 2009). Klüger blames the diary of the fictional soldier Wilms—and indirectly, of course, the author Scholz—for doing the same. Again and again, Wilms dwells on Ruth Esther and accuses himself of being passive, which makes him feel like a conformist and a blind follower. He also criticizes the criminal system he represents with his uniform, however, and questions his attitude: “It’s really difficult to be decent. I am not” (TN 25),

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he writes. Consequently, the men in the Jockey Bar judge that Wilms “wasn’t guilty, morally” (TN 16). To dispel his moral doubts, Wilms shares some canned meat with a Jewish boy he meets in the Polish town of Góra Kalwaria. This leads to a dispute between comrades in his unit—those who approve of this act and those who disapprove. Some, such as Sergeant Jaletzki, insult Wilms with antisemitic slurs: “Wilms . . . is feeding the Jews, eh? Enjoys feeding dirty Jews, does he? How’s that now? Never heard of the attitude of the German soldier toward Judaism, has he?” (TN 30). In Wilms’s fictional diary, Jaletzki is the only German antisemite; later we learn that he is an alcoholic, ascribing him additional pathological traits. In the town of Garwolin, Wilms meets a Polish woman: “She runs her forefinger across her throat to show that one should simply cut the Jews’ throats, and may do so for all she cares” (TN 36). In Orsha, shortly before the massacre, he also encounters non-German antisemites, this time Russian children telling him “Jewrei kaput” (the Jew is done for). Wilms remarks that “Pogrom is a Russian word, please note” (TN 48).7 Interpreting these sections is no easy task. From a historical perspective, the events described here are not impossible. In June 1941, when Wilms wrote his diary, the ghetto in Maciejowice had not yet been established, but the Jewish Ordnungsdienst had already begun its activities (Spector and Wigoder 2001, 780); the antisemitism of the local population in Germanoccupied Poland is also a well-researched topic (Grabowski 2013; Engelking and Grabowski 2018). Wilms could thus very well have encountered antisemitic Poles or Russians. And yet, the story of the ‘good German’ encountering mainly non-German antisemites along his way makes me uncomfortable. Almost sixty years after Through the Night, German ZDF public broadcasting aired the miniseries Generation War (2013), in which one of the five plots is similarly structured: a German Jew escaping from a transport to Auschwitz is in fear of Polish partisans; however, the non-Jewish Germans are, with few exceptions, his friends. “This is how Germans would have liked to be,” historian Ulrich Herbert (2013) commented—a judgment that could also be applied to Through the Night. After Wilms shared his meal with the Jewish boy, he writes: “I know what is poisoning the east. It is the pestilential stench of all the misery that is being visited on the Jews . . . The suffering of the Jews stinks to high heaven. Jewish suffering and Polish suffering” (TN 34). Regardless of his seemingly empathetic intentions, he describes the boy from Góra Kalwaria entirely in terms of Nazi ‘racial theory’: “The upper part of his head was much too big, and his liquid brown eyes looked huge under his moth-eaten fur cap. Chin, cheeks, and mouth were too small from sheer misery and deprivation” (TN  29). The fact that the women working in road construction remind him of Ruth Esther, Wilms explains as follows: “There are very few types of

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Jewish women, fewer than we have. A sign of race, of a homogenous race, and it explains why they so frequently look alike” (TN 22). The context also suggests compassion, but these words again reveal the extent to which the language of Wilms, a self-proclaimed critical soldier and innocent eyewitness, is infused with Nazi jargon. Nothing in the novel suggests that the jargon is used as a literary instrument to emphasize the protagonist’s ambivalence; rather, it must be assumed that we simply read the author’s—both Wilms’s as the author of the diary and Scholz’s as the author of the novel— unthoughtful language. Despite his racist use of language, Wilms is always at pains to address the persecution of the Jews and to emphasize their status as victims, which makes the novel a notable exception in postwar West Germany. Unlike other contemporary war literature,8 the focus is not on the suffering German soldier forced to fight an inhumane and horrific war, but above all on the fate of the Jews. Wilms’s attitude toward Eastern Europe is similarly ambivalent: “The east is beautiful,” he writes (TN 34), and he seems fascinated by the countries he ‘travels’ as an occupier. In this regard, the fictional soldier’s attitude is similar to the author’s personal remarks: “A great journey. War is bad, they say, but I was lucky and, as a man who rarely or never fought, had leisure enough to learn to love the countries” (Scholz 1966, 110). On the one hand, Scholz uses a typical justification narrative about innocent Wehrmacht soldiers who supposedly harmed no one (Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall 2002, 82–83); on the other hand, he reveals his emotional relationship to Eastern Europe. This passion is also palpable in Through the Night when Wilms exchanges endearments with the girl from Garwolin, takes pictures of the landscapes, writes down Polish words, and learns their pronunciation. “The manuscript was filled with notations of words he had obviously collected with great enthusiasm,” Lepsius remarks (TN 17). The authenticity effect is reinforced by the synesthetic documentation of the occupied countries. Wilms takes pictures, writes, feels, reiterates. Both in the original German version and in the English translation, the Polish words marked in italics in the text even contain correct diacritics and, to a large extent, have also been translated correctly; Russians words are mostly correctly transliterated. At this point, I want to address my own reading experience: it is rare that Polish words and expressions are used correctly in foreign language texts. Often diacritical characters and inflections are simply being ignored. That was one of the main points of critique regarding the abovementioned German television production Generation War: due to the script and the actors, the antisemitic Polish partisans speak poor Polish, even though in 2013 it should not have been a problem to hire native Polish speakers, at least for dubbing.

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Besides language, Wilms is also interested in the history and culture of the occupied countries. He recognizes the Polish national anthem and writes down the first verse and the beginning of the refrain in Polish (TN 36), although in the English translation with a typo—zglinca instead of zginęła—absent from the German original. Such details were apparently important not only to the protagonist, but also to the author; in the manuscripts, Scholz marked foreign language passages and made sure that they ‘survived’ each step of the editing process. Scholz’s—and Wilms’s—­ thoroughness regarding East European languages is evidence of his appreciation for the region—an ­attitude that was by no means self-evident during the Cold War, at the time the novel was written. It is therefore interesting that Wilms does not elaborate on the historical significance of the two main locations of his diary, Maciejowice and Orsha. After the second partition of Poland between Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia in 1792, Maciejowice was the site of an important battle between Polish and Russian forces on 10 October 1794. Under the leadership of Tadeusz Kościuszko, who later famously fought in the US Revolutionary War, the Polish army was defeated, resulting in the third partition of Poland in 1795. Poland as a state ceased to exist until it regained its sovereignty after World War I. In an earlier historical battle at Orsha in 1514, the Polish–Lithuanian military defeated the army of the Grand Duchy of Moscow; the victory of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had far-reaching consequences for the balance of power in early modern East Central Europe. It may be a coincidence that Scholz chose these very two cities as the main locations for his novel, but the lack of reference to those events is striking given his otherwise precise treatment of the regional cultures. The image as a friend of Eastern Europe also has its downside, for at the same time it is the perspective of the conqueror. Beyond all linguistic correctness, the book contains numerous confirmations of anti-East European ­clichés—the east stinks, the people there are dirty and uncivilized. The children in Garwolin have “dirty little fingers” (TN 35). Recalling his earlier assignment in France, Wilms thinks back to an encounter with a professor emeritus at the Sorbonne with whom he apparently conversed in French. In Poland and the Soviet Union, however, he writes about uneducated people and that he mainly communicates with hands and feet or with the help of drawings. His attitude is reminiscent of a colonial explorer: he endeavors to talk to the ‘savages,’ observes and takes pictures of them, takes notes. Although he is undoubtedly interested and wants to learn about the country, his quasi-colonial point of view signals the real power relations of the occupation (Hauck 2020, 56). Similar to the copy editor’s seemingly antisemitic interventions and comments, the text illustrates discursive tensions at this point; the narrator explicitly wants to dignify the victims of the Nazi regime,

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but only succeeds to a limited extent due to his colonial perspective and his use of Nazi jargon. He shows an effort to remember ‘dialogically’—to speak with Aleida Assmann (2012)—but the attempt fails. The tensions arising from this ambivalent view of Eastern Europe point to the smallest movements within cultural memory, which I call ‘mnemonic oscillations.’9 By analogy with molecular vibrations that make up the structure of physical reality, mnemonic oscillations have a constituent function in the construction of memory culture at the microlevel. Further vibrations in the still very vivid memory of the Eastern Front reveal numerous gaps and ruptures in the text; the abundance of words describing the excessive violence in pictorial poetics is contrasted by short passages marked by missing words—as, for example, the very incomplete description of Wilms’s journey to Warsaw. Hans Joachim Lepsius tries to read from the diary: “[Here the text is garbled, and the sense not clear. In one place it says:] very elegant city. Why did one never . . . places like this in the peacetime? [The word omitted must have been “visit”. Then:] must have been a great number of Sephardim among the Ashkenazim. It is quite possible that they were shoved from Spain to Germany and, finally, this far” (TN 34).10 This passage, with the comments in brackets, reads as if the diary had not been able to withstand the impressions from the Warsaw Ghetto—as if the notebook had resisted acting as a material carrier of these memories. The halting, fragmented narrative style evokes a ‘hole in time’ that, according to Massumi, signals strong affect. We do not learn what Wilms wrote down about the Warsaw Ghetto; all that remains are the words of his comrade, who addresses Jaletzki: “If that doesn’t make you puke, when you see that mess with your own eyes—how they’re dying like flies, right down on the open street, not just one . . . but dozens. I’m telling you, dozens!” (TN 30). Both the ‘missing’ text and the comrade’s dismay about the Warsaw Ghetto, which in the German version is expressed in dialect, are traces of an experience that defies a description in elevated language. The soldiers go to Warsaw and walk through the ghetto as if they were on a sightseeing tour; it is a matter of an epistemic category of experience that, as Reinhart Koselleck (2018, 4) pointed out, was in fact originally based on actively getting to know the world. The German word erfahren (to experience) means literally ‘drive-through’. In contrast to the journeys described in the other stories of Through the Night, the excursion through the Warsaw Ghetto is only fragmentarily described; by means of square brackets and omissions, it forms a visible ‘blank space’ in the text. The horror of this place is not represented in detail, but merely hinted at, and, as fragmentary as it is, left to the reader’s imagination. While I can fill these gaps today with canonical images from the ghetto, readers in the 1950s had no such tools at their disposal; Gerhard Schoenberner’s illustrated book Der gelbe Stern. Die Judenverfolgung in Europa 1933 bis 1945 (The yellow star: The persecution of the Jews in

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Europe, 1933–1945), which was among the very first German publications to include photographs from the Warsaw Ghetto, did not appear in West Germany until 1960. But in the mid-1950s, when Through the Night was published, a large number of German men still had their own recollections and thus proper images in their minds to fill the gaps in the diary. Not only narrator Wilms, but also the author Scholz, kept silent about the ghetto. In the spring of 1941, Scholz completed an advanced military training course in Warsaw; in contrast to his deployment in the occupied Soviet Union, however, he never commented on his experiences in the Polish capital—at least not publicly. When a former comrade reminded him of his training in Warsaw, Scholz did not respond to the remark (P.G. 1960, Letter to Scholz). Ernestine Schlant (1999, 7) suggests that silencing the Holocaust in West German literature was an escapist act of the perpetrators to flee from the excess of their knowledge; in Scholz’s case, this silence is significant, especially in comparison to the detailed description of the Orsha massacre. The novel partly explains the discrepancy: only after Wilms had been to Warsaw and witnessed the humiliation and exploitation of the Jews in Maciejowice, Góra Kalwaria, and Brest-Litovsk, does he decide to “look into the face of our century” (TN 48). Unlike his earlier observations, witnessing the massacre is a conscious and actively initiated undertaking. To visit the execution site, his captain grants Wilms two hours of leave, but forbids him to take the camera. The fact that Wilms decides to ‘actively’ observe the massacre distinguishes him from many ‘real-life’ soldiers who later claimed that they had “only participated in the Jewish operations by chance” (Siegling 1962, Interrogation, 886). The explanation of only seeing something but not consciously witnessing it can also be found in Theodor W. Adorno’s so-called group experiment (Adorno 2010). Adorno, however, doubts the explanations given by the interviewees in the experiment: It seems hardly thinkable, given the number of victims, that nothing whatsoever came to be known, at least during the last two years of the war. Everywhere, Jews disappeared under the cover of darkness; if, in the beginning, they wrote from Theresienstadt, for example, this soon stopped; many members of the Wehrmacht must have seen at least something of the task forces [Einsatzkommandos] that also operated outside of the hermetically sealed death camps; and, despite all the danger for those who said something, the pressure of knowing must have been so excruciating that there would have been enough men on leave who would have found some relief in giving at least hints when at home. (Adorno 2010, 57)

In contrast to the soldiers who claimed that they had not seen any crimes, or if so they had watched them either randomly or even unconsciously, Scholz’s protagonist acts decisively and independently. He makes his decision to

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observe the massacre following a conversation he overhears in which other soldiers talk about similar events in the Ukraine and the Baltics. Remarkably, in the German original of the novel, they speak about undressing women before the execution and about “giving away everything they have” (TN 48) in their Swabian and East Prussian dialects. The repeated use of dialects is a means of emphasis and authentication to make these statements stand out against other parts of the text. This way, we learn that the soldiers were ‘ordinary’ men from all over Germany: hardly any other regions of the so-called ‘Third Reich’ were further apart than Swabia and East Prussia. Nevertheless, the use of this kind of language has a strongly alienating effect, especially for readers who are not familiar with the respective dialects. It reinforces the synesthetic character of the text, and unfolds a further effect, beyond the discursive content; the exchange about the mass executions happens in a deeply internalized, spontaneous, and unreflective language, as if Standard High German resisted describing such events, or as if the use of Standard High German would have required additional mental effort that the speakers were no longer able to muster in view of the events they described. The importance of this instrument is revealed especially in the comparison with the English and French translations: in both editions, this dialogue is simply translated without a translational equivalent of the dialects (TN 47–48; Scholz 1960a, 65). For this reason, the passage loses its affective character, reducing it to an ordinary communication. Throughout, Wilms writes his diary in Standard High German, occasionally inserting Polish and Russian words he has picked up during the war, or some French when he muses about former travels and wartime engagements in France. Despite his elevated use of language testifying to a certain level of education, he repeatedly doubts his judgment: There are events of such magnitude, they overstep the boundaries of comprehension. I never knew that before. You are aware of them, but they do not seem real. That is, your mind doesn’t register them as reality, although your consciousness is telling you, ‘You’re seeing, it, aren’t you? There it is, happening! You do not believe your own eyes. There are limits to what the mind can grasp . . . Oh, the blessed unconsciousness of the reasoning faculties. Thanks to it, I can say of certain events, Yes, I saw them—and, with equal justice, maintain of the very same events that they did not happen. That is as true as it is mad, and it results automatically in half-truths. (TN 50)11

However, the remarks about the “boundaries of comprehension” seem contradictory to his extremely precise and detailed description of the massacre that follows. Given the brutality of the events, Wilms cannot be sure of his observations. Literary scholar Baßler remarks that “the executions themselves are

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depicted as an inner monologue with numerous ellipses, as already known from Schnitzler’s None but the Brave . . . In a wild flight of thought, the actual images of the mass murder are, in a stream of consciousness, mixed with memories of Wilms’s former Jewish lover Esther, while he sees himself from the outside, in the third person” (Baßler 2020, 35). In the stream of consciousness, Stefan Scherer recognizes “the literary creation of a mémoire involontaire that rises during the writing process, in memory of love encounters with a Jewish woman” (Scherer 2020, 122). Both literary scholars thus identify narrative techniques that evoke a particular state rather than simply represent an event. It is noteworthy that Scholz wrote Wilms’s diary well before the debates concerning the (ir)representability of the Holocaust. He only sporadically referred to philosophical texts, which is why it is quite unlikely that he had read Adorno’s 1949 essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” which contains the famous dictum “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 1967). Scholz may have heard one of Adorno’s numerous speeches on West German public radio (Schwarz 2011, 288), but nothing suggests that he ever consciously addressed the epistemological problem of the (ir)representability of the Holocaust. He also did not know of Hannah Arendt, who published her work on totalitarianism during the early 1950s, until one of the editors at Hoffmann und Campe told him about her writing in 1958 (Bürkle 1958, Letter to Scholz). Wilms’s reflections are thus in no way a statement on the incipient debate about the appropriate depiction of the Holocaust, but rather the formulation of a void in the text that allows doubts about the narrative. It would be an exaggeration, however, to claim that Scholz completely ignored the contemporary discourse about Vergangenheitsbewältigung. One of his storytellers addresses the culture of ‘silencing’ in a comment regarding the evening in the Jockey Bar, for instance: “Although we were careful not to ask questions that touched on the past, the very fact that we avoided them made them all the more visible” (TN 10). Yet, he basically devotes all seven stories to the war and its consequences. Furthermore, Scholz seems to echo Paul Celan’s famous poem Death Fugue (orig. 1948) when Wilms thinks of his German girlfriend Jutta in the middle of the mass execution: “I don’t love you anymore Yutta. You are too blond. Your hair is like yellow sand” (TN 51). The respective phrases in Celan’s poem would be: “He writes when it darkens to Germany your golden hair Marguerite . . . Your ashen hair Shulamite we shovel a grave in the skies there is room enough there” (Weimar 1974, 86). According to Baßler (2020, 34), the contradictions between the claims about the “boundaries of comprehension” and the actual descriptions of the execution are nothing else than a consistent stylistic instrument—a double bind. Wilms uses figurative language to describe the landscape, giving many details that suggest the scene of the crime and the time of year: “I clamber across the embankment of the railway line that runs to Smolensk, down and

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up over dusty terrain that is powdered with a light frosting of snow. Ruts and hollows, black as burned cake that has been iced. Here the ground slopes up toward the Jewish cemetery” (TN 51). The depiction of the terrain as a black, glazed cake evokes the image of hills covered with snow. The reader can only assume what recent research has confirmed: namely, that the “Jewish cemetery” is the scene of the crime. Wilms suggests that the events took place in October, but the description of the weather—next to light snow he mentions heavy frost—points to a later date. Interestingly, the numbers in the English version cause some confusion: while in the original German novel we read “–17” (AGSS 59), meaning minus seventeen degrees Celsius, the translation omits the minus sign. It says “seventeen degrees” (TN 54), which the American reader would probably read as seventeen degrees Fahrenheit, equal to minus eight degrees Celsius. In any case, the suggestion about the frost is maintained in the text. Furthermore, Wilms speaks of “eighteen hundred people” (TN 54) being murdered. The place and time of the events as well as the number of victims thus conform with the historical sources: some of the Jews of Orsha were murdered in two executions in October 1941, while the ‘liquidation’ of the ghetto happened in the Jewish cemetery on 26 and 27 November, under severe weather conditions. Witnesses spoke of 1,750 to 2,000 killed.12 Scholz’s protagonist further comments on the size of the pit: “Ten by ten meters, four in depth. Amazing how many bodies you can put into a ditch like that. Four hundred cubic meters . . . Of course you have to stack them” (TN 54). The Soviet commission later recorded larger dimensions, but only after the end of the war—by then, more people had been murdered and buried at Orsha. Likewise, Wilms is also not wrong about the practice of stacking corpses, although the detailed description of the procedure was removed from the manuscript. Stacking corpses was a typical crime; in many cases, the victims had to lie down on top of the corpses before being shot themselves: “The victims descended the earthen ramp into a pit. Packers would have been stationed in the pit, as at Babi Yar, to position the victims lying down on the bodies of those who had preceded them. A Genickschuss [shot into the neck] . . . ended their suffering” (Rhodes 2002, 211). In his diary, Wilms forces himself to watch and calls out: “Look into the trench. Look into the trench, fine gentleman from Germany. Look at it, damn you, look at it” (TN 53). What at first sounds like a moral impulse is also a clear sign for Wilms’s role as a direct eyewitness: in order to observe the victims being stacked like that, he must have been close to the pit. A specific characteristic of the killings at Orsha was the use of large barrels. As there were kolhozes (i.e., large state farms) in the immediate vicinity with curing and pickling facilities, those ‘barrels’ were probably silos or kegs. The perpetrators filled the vessels with bodies that could no longer fit into the pits. Evidence of this can be found both in the report of the Soviet c­ ommission

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and in the interrogation records of members of the Einsatzkommandos. Historian Andriej Rozenberg identified the vessels mentioned in the report of the Soviet commission (Oršanskoja Gorodskaja Komisija 1944, Report, 4) as pickle barrels (Rozenberg 2012, 51). Gerhard Schulz of Einsatzkommando 8, which carried out the executions, spoke of sauerkraut barrels (Schulz 1964, Interrogation, 1915), while Scholz has Wilms’s record of “concrete conduit pipes”: “Rahn [Wilms’s captain] said later that there wasn’t enough room in the ditch for the last group, so they stuffed them into concrete conduit pipes that happened to be lying around, stuffed them in naked and in headfirst, or anyway they could” (TN 53–54). The reference of this fact in Wilms’s diary establishes a definitive link to the historical events in Orsha in the winter of 1941/42. The use of barrels, or vessels of any other shape, was by no means a regular practice of Einsatzkommandos; in order for the fictional character Wilms to write it into his diary, the real author Scholz must have witnessed it in Orsha. In this sense, the reference is yet another indication of Scholz’s role as an eyewitness. However, it works as an authentication strategy only for those who knew or know about those specific form of atrocities. Considering the vast number of statements that can be traced back to historical facts, one very significant deviation stands out. The perpetrators in Orsha were members of Einsatzkommando 8, supported by some Wehrmacht soldiers and—presumably—local helpers. Scholz’s protagonist Wilms mentions “Latvian civilians,” none of which, however, were present at that time and in that place (Ezergailis 1996). They move away from the long, seemingly endless line of human beings, in groups of four, sometimes five, families and relatives together. Clasping hands, huddled to each other, the children clutching their mother’s skirts, they step up to the edge of the trench. There they are ordered turn, to stand some distance apart, each in front of a marksman. The marksmen are Letts, civilians with white armbands. (Civilians with armbands and weapons always look repulsive.) They carry machine guns but each man fires only once. Into the neck. Sometimes into the neck. Little flicks of the whip. It goes fast. Then they motion the next group to move up. They too step out of the long line and move forward to the edge. Each one in front of the marksman. German policemen in old, green uniforms are in charge. And I stand on the edge of the embankment and see it . . . see it and cannot believe what I see. Right there, on the spot, and can’t believe it! (TN 52)

A few pages further on Wilms writes: “The Lett militia adjust switches to sustained fire. Each man empties his magazine: rattattattatta!” (TN 56). Given the otherwise meticulously factual account, this intervention is very striking. As elsewhere in his diary Wilms places great emphasis on the differences between East European ethnicities and languages, the introduction

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of Latvian shooters can hardly be a mistake. It is therefore highly likely that the narrator deliberately wanted to conceal the identity of the perpetrators— though Wilms does mention other groups of perpetrators in passing. Before walking to the execution site, his captain warns him: “Recently, in—what do you call it?—I don’t know. I’ve forgotten where . . . there was a man who was curious, so curious that the SS forced him to participate—that is, they forced the men to shoot at something he wouldn’t ever shoot at for anything in the world. And then he shot, the poor devil. As an accomplice. Is that clear?” (TN 49).13 Apart from the blatant dehumanization of the Jewish victims referred to as “something,” the captain implies that the SS was responsible for the executions and that the Wehrmacht cooperated, even if ‘only’ in individual cases and under constraint. In Wilms’s account, however, it is not SS men but Latvian collaborators doing the executing, and the motive had already been included in the first version of the manuscript, and therefore it was not an intervention by the publisher. Did the author want to cover up or at least downplay the Germans’ responsibility for the mass killings? Did he act out of solidarity with veterans? In contrast to many of the other writing decisions he publicly commented on, his motivation in this particular case remains unknown. I take the reference to barrels and the role of Latvians as perpetrators as an opportunity for a brief digression on literature as a historical source, especially as Scholz addresses it himself. “Events, gentlemen, and the telling of them, are two very different things,” says the actor Peter Koslowski in the frame story (TN 244). Moritz Baßler understands this remark as a sign for a “medially fractured” relationship to historical truth in the novel (Baßler 2020, 10). The relation between literary fiction and historiography is indeed not a simple one. Literature by contemporary witnesses can, however, complement historiography; it is not uncommon for historians to quote fiction in an anecdotal way in order to attract the attention of the reader or demonstrate erudition. Literature is used as a source, especially when it comes to the history of discourses and ideas. But how useful is it to reconstruct historical events based on fictional narratives? Not very, most historians would say. In the case of the mentioned “conduit pipes,” however, due to the exceptionality of the practice, Through the Night seems to be a helpful source. Pipes, vessels, and barrels are only casually or cryptically mentioned in the statements of perpetrators (Schulz 1964, Interrogation, 1915) or victims and witnesses (Oršanskoja Gorodskaja Komisija 1944, Report, 4). Scholz, in turn, makes Wilms clearly state that conduit pipes were used because corpses no longer fitted into the pits. Therefore, this passage has a high explanatory value. But to what extent does the fictional diary retain its credibility when we read about the historically non-existent, at this place and time, Latvian militia a page earlier? After all, the motif of the Latvians reveals that Scholz was not

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particularly exact about documenting historical facts in his novel. Polish literary scholar Michał Głowiński (1978) argues that fiction is a good source for understanding the reality of their authors, regardless of their often multiple intentions. Like in Through the Night, the ‘authentic’ description of the conduit pipes does not exclude the ‘inauthentic’ description of Latvian militia. Indeed, both motifs refer to different presents—the war in the winter of 1941/42 when Scholz witnessed the massacre, and the postwar reality of the 1950s when he wrote the novel. As real as the disposal practices in Orsha were, as true were later attempts to downplay German delinquency. Both are evident in the text, but on two different temporal layers. Moreover, it is certainly no coincidence that the very motif of the Latvians marks the “border between fact and fiction” (Young 1988, 52). A few days after the ‘liquidation’ of the Orsha ghetto, a Latvian SS commando, in cooperation with German Einsatzkommandos, executed thousands of Jews in the forests around Riga in one of the largest German killing campaigns in the Soviet Union (Ezergailis 1996, 239; Angrick and Klein 2006, 346–60). In the novel, one of Wilms’s comrades mentions atrocities he observed in Borisov—a place where Latvians were indeed involved (Miron and Shulhani 2014, 66). The presence of Latvians in the text is thus an important sign of the ‘traveling’ memory in the postwar years. Yet, for the general public of the mid-1950s, the collaboration of the Latvians was still an unknown topic. It only came up selectively after 1958, hence after the publication of Through the Night, when the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper published a letter from a former Wehrmacht officer pointing out Latvian involvement in the Borisov executions in order to “correct” the newspaper’s coverage of the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial (Gersdorff 1958). Latvian complicity then attracted broader attention in the 1970s in the wake of the trial against Viktors Arājs, the leader of the Latvian SS-commando (Knop 1995; Plavnieks 2017). Scholz, whose unit never reached the Baltics, in all likelihood knew of Latvian collaborators from hearsay—either while his unit passed near Borissov, or later when news of the events in Riga spread. Of course, the absence of Latvians in Orsha does not mean that there were no local helpers there. As in many other places in the occupied Soviet Union (Desbois 2008, 166), local police officers could have been involved in the murder of the Jews. However, the concealment of the Einsatzkommando, which was undoubtedly responsible for organizing and carrying out the execution, gives the impression that Scholz wanted to obscure the role of the Germans. As I have already indicated, attempts at exoneration were nothing unusual in West Germany’s memory culture of the 1950s. In the interrogation protocols of the investigations against the leadership of Einsatzkommando 8, for instance, most of the defendants and witnesses incriminated other members of their units, justified themselves with the excuse they were simply carry-

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ing out orders, or claimed that locals such as the “Russian Ordnungsdienst” (Schulz 1964, Interrogation, 1915) and the “Belarusian Auxiliary Police” (Vries 1960, Interrogation, 16) had been responsible for the mass executions. But because no media reported about the investigations, such statements rarely reached the public sphere. In this sense, Wilms’s guilt defense strategy was not causally related to the statements of the Einsatzkommando members who had factually committed the murders. In a broader sense, however, the author Scholz remediated justification narratives: both his fictional text and the interrogation transcripts—as well, presumably, as thousands of private conversations—provide insight into how the men who experienced the Eastern Front talked about this Ostfeldzug and how they dismissed guilt. Standing out among the motifs repeatedly mentioned in connection with the mass executions in Eastern Europe is the unspeakable cruelty toward children. In this respect, Orsha does not seem to be any different from other crime scenes.14 But it was there, of all places, that the Belarus Holocaust Memorials Project installed a memorial to the city’s murdered Jewish children. Wilms also occupies himself with their fate. With poignant urgency, he describes a mother watching her baby being murdered, and shortly after sees the killing of a toddler: Do you read, for instance—I mean this only as an example—in the face of the young woman who steps forward now, can you read what you know she must be thinking? Can you read in her expression that they are tearing her baby from her, that she sees her baby flying through the air. . . whoosh. . . into the trench? . . . Silence. Two little bare feet, patterning forward toward the marksmen, little feet blue with cold, on the yellow sand. The gentle patter of bare feet. The brownish-gray skin around the child’s mouth wrinkles. Is the child smiling? She is all alone. No hand to clasp hers or for her to hold onto. The marksmen shove fresh ammunition into the magazines. The child walks up to the edge of the trench. Her long, loose black hair is blown forward by the wind, over the trench, stiffens. The child steps back. She doesn’t really want to look into the trench, doesn’t want to end up in it. Her yellow scarf flutters. Black and yellow . . . The little girl steps back, moves to one side, does not know where to go, will not go forward, cannot go back, lurches, flings up her arms as if she were dancing, teeters on the edge of the trench . . . her ivory-colored limbs, in the little gray dress that is too large for her, wobble on the edge of the trench. She turns her little head from side to side, the little gray dove flutters and collapses in a dainty little heap . . . The little bundle has lost consciousness. Her hair is spread out on the sand, a dark halo around her head. The marksmen do not know what to do with an unconscious offender. Insufficient training in marksmanship. They do not perform their duty. They hesitate . . . One of the marksmen leans over the little girl and shoots her while she is unconscious . . . A disjointed doll . . . light as a feather . . . whoops . . . has landed in the trench. (TN 54–57)

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Hans Walkhoff, a former member of Einsatzkommando 8 which carried out the mass murders in Orsha and the surrounding villages, stated regarding the mass execution of infants: We had to watch as the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) finished off some people with a shot in the neck. For this purpose, they had saved a woman with an infant and some men who had to climb into the pit. The woman had to lay her small child on the mound of corpses, which was then shot by an SD man from the edge of the pit. Afterwards the woman and the men, who were also already standing in the pit, were finished off by a shot in the neck . . . it was a terrible sight for me. (Walkhoff 1962, Interrogation, 1176)15

Another perpetrator reported similar incidents; Lorenz Bauer, for instance, a member of Einsatzkommando 8, testified that “the infants and children were usually put into the pit for us and then shot” (Bauer 1962, Interrogation, 989). The cruelty is therefore well documented; the accounts collected by Desbois, for example, include recollections about small children who were thrown into the pit alive (Desbois 2008, 139). It is significant that the motif of deliberate sadistic killings of infants is present in two such different types of text—a fictional novel and the transcripts of investigations and interviews. Unlike former members of the Einsatzkommando, who hardly went into details, Wilms describes the crime in a ‘close-up’; he focuses on the child’s face and her movements, and the detailed depiction gives the impression that we are watching a child’s murder in slow motion. This stylistic instrument has far-reaching consequences for the reading of this passage, especially as ‘closeups’ often appear affective, and bring linear time to a halt (Bal 2002, 9). In this time lapse, the images of a toddler’s bare feet or a girl’s too big dress, both of which evoke innocence, are juxtaposed with the extreme cruelty of the perpetrators.16 The depiction of the infanticide concludes the account of the massacre. Toward the end, Wilms throws a cigarette case—given to him by Ruth Esther’s brother— into the pit, as a “burial offering” (TN 57). The gesture is questionable, as that ritual does not exist in Jewish culture. When Wilms is discovered by the military police shortly after, he runs back. In the third person perspective, he writes about himself “He runs, he runs, that cowardly gentleman from Germany. Once before, when his train was pulling out the Gare de l’Est forever, he wept like this” (TN 57). The remark about the train refers to his last meeting with Ruth Esther in Paris; thoughts of his former lover permeate the entire depiction of the massacre; ultimately, Wilms confesses that he still loves her and regrets not having rescued her. This personal perspective sheds an interesting light on his motivation to “look into the face of the century.” Even as Wilms observes Jewish women being forced to build roads in Poland, he notes “One of them, leaning on her spade, reminds me

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of Ruth Esther Loria. It gives me a terrible shock. My God, what would I do if . . .” (TN 22). The thought that the fate of the Jews in Eastern Europe could have also struck his lover is a recurring motif in Wilms’s diary. His attention is therefore not an act of pure empathy, but a result of his feelings; he attempts to atone for earlier inaction by forcing himself to watch the atrocities. The similarities to the love story between Scholz and Felicitas Lourié are more than obvious; the details of the book and Scholz’s biography correspond, from the Berlin address Liechtensteinallee to the emigration of the Lourié family to France and the place where the lovers said goodbye.17 After Wilms returns from the execution site, he reports to his captain: “Wilms on guard. All quiet” (TN 57). Referencing Erich Maria Remarque’s famous World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the narrative ‘breaks off’ and returns to the frame story in West Berlin’s Jockey Bar. Harriet Wegener criticized the harsh narrative cut: “You read the harrowing opening story and then you are somewhat taken aback by the marginal reaction of the audience” (Wegener 1955, Letter to Scholz). What follows, in fact, is a trivial conversation about Wilms’s love stories, albeit held only at the beginning of the next chapter. But Wegener also let Scholz know that her colleagues disagreed, and she ultimately accepted their point of view. In the end, she insisted on keeping the depiction of the massacre but agreed not to comment on it any further. Among the stories collected in Through the Night, the account of the absent Jürgen Wilms is a notable exception. Indeed, with each successive story told in the Jockey Bar, the gloomy atmosphere recedes. Hesselbarth’s story about the Russian partisan also deals with the brutality of war, but the execution of the partisans takes place in the forest, and the narrator only hears the shots. Next is the rather optimistic story from the wardroom in Norway, the Bibiena family saga set in the eighteenth century, a long chapter about mysterious village life in the East German region of Spreewald, anecdotes about making music in an American POW camp, and finally a joyful love story spun around a trip to Italy. Each of these stories is interwoven with casual conversations in the bar. And although the original manuscript had mostly been chronological and started with the embedded narrative about the Bibienas, the author himself later justified the composition of the “colored structure . . . from black to pink” (Scholz 1958a, Letter to Stark). Ultimately, more or less cheerful stories dominate Wilms’s diary. The resulting narrative has a high potential for identification. Although after the affective turn literary scholars often speak of empathy rather than identification, for the analysis of ‘perpetrator literature’ Erin McGlothlin (2016a, 257–59) recommends the latter. Empathy, she argues, is a positive emotional state, while identification can describe a broader relationship between reader and text. McGlothlin’s claim is based on more recent

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literature and readers belonging to the second or third postwar generation. The contemporary readers of Through the Night, however, had had similar experiences to those of Jürgen Wilms. Their identification with the novel’s characters was based on shared experience, for which the frame story and the diary provided numerous ‘useful’ narrative patterns that made talking about war crimes socially acceptable. The story about Orsha demonstrated how a former German Wehrmacht soldier could depict a massacre without having to blame himself; Wilms can be portrayed as a pitiful man who, at the time the circle is meeting at the Jockey Bar, is still a Soviet POW. He is stunned—a typical affect in representations of the Holocaust (Diner 2013)—and overwhelmed, not by guilt but by shame: “I said nothing, I am ashamed of myself. I ran, I am alive, I said nothing . . . I am ashamed . . . I ran . . . I am alive” (TN 51). Considering the discussion triggered by West Germany’s first president, Theodor Heuss, about a ‘collective shame,’ which he addressed in two speeches—in 1949 during a ceremony of the Society for Christian–Jewish Cooperation, and three years later during the opening ceremony of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial—this motif is not surprising (Heuss 2007; Hestermann 2016, 59).18 Nevertheless, Scholz managed to cleverly twist the topic, as Wilms is not ashamed of his deeds but of his inaction. This is what made his account so attractive as a narrative role model: if all German soldiers had done nothing, there would be nothing to be ashamed of. Despite Wilms’s ambivalent attitude and the ‘gentle’ portrayal of the perpetrators, it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that Through the Night—in contrast to the best-known literary depictions of the Holocaust at the time— deals with the extermination of the Jews outside concentration camps and chronologically before the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, when the high-ranking representatives of the Nazi regime decided to totally annihilate the European Jews. Unusual at the time of the novel’s publication, the diary emphasizes the unique status of the Jews as victims, and provides what is probably the most comprehensive depiction of a mass murder to date. Norman Ächtler (2014, 95) identifies “irritation potential” for the societal communication system of the 1950s. Wilms invites himself to bear witness: “Look into the trench, fine gentleman from Germany” (TN 53), thereby making an extraordinary connection between the German perpetrators and the Jewish victims. Considering the 1950s discourse in terms of memory culture, it is also striking that the narrator mentions “German policemen” carrying out the execution, in addition to “Latvian civilians.” The diary defies clear interpretation and can neither be exclusively understood as a continuation of the perpetrator mentality, nor as a rupture in the ‘collective silence’; the novel allows both readings. Indeed, this kind of polyphony is characteristic of the memory culture in West Germany’s early postwar period, when rules of ‘sayability’ still had to be established. The competing possibilities of interpre-

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tation are also challenging for readers, especially as the diary confronts them with sometimes contradictory views of war crimes. At this point it is worth returning to Ernst van Alphen’s question of what the depictions of atrocities ‘do’ to us; in Through the Night, they take us back and forth between different images that can hardly be reconciled. They raise doubts and leave us—me, at least—baffled with the book in our hands. But it is precisely the traveling between different interpretations that reveals the oscillating movements of memory culture.

Silent Reactions How did Jürgen Wilms’s diary affect readers at the time? The sources from the publisher’s archive and Scholz’s personal files offer a rare opportunity to connect text analyses with contemporary reactions of readers. More than a hundred reviews and about fifty letters are available19—of course not representative in a statistical sense but reflecting the ambiguities and polyphony of the book and its reception. “For lack of better alternatives,” as Ulrike Weckel (2019, 121) asserts, we have the terms ‘reception’ and ‘appropriation’ at our disposal. They are anchored in two different theoretical approaches: in (German) literary studies, the first term was coined by reception aestheticians such as Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser, and the second mainly in cultural studies was concerned with how recipients handle cultural texts— Weckel mentions Michel de Certeau and Stuart Hall as examples. Other terminological options would be ‘discussion’ or ‘debate’, but the broad media coverage of Through the Night did not trigger any of them; there are no references linking the reviews. In the light of the affective turn, however, the question is about the effect of individual texts and images—above all, about the reactions they triggered. Therefore, ‘reactions’—rather than ‘reception,’ ‘appropriation,’ ‘discussions,’ or ‘debates’—take center stage below. In contrast to Norman Ächtler’s assumption, the book did not lead to any visible “irritation” in West German discourse. The passage about the Orsha massacre was largely ignored by the readers. Letters to the publisher or author were generally limited to general words of appreciation or follow-up questions about specific sections; most correspondence consisted of more or less detailed praise for the successful depiction of Berlin, the authentic construction of the protagonists, and the remarkable composition of the stories. Only one reader thanked for the “Nestbeschmutzung” (‘fouling the nest,’ a term often used in the Nazi jargon), and one reader from East Berlin compared the first story from Through the Night with the anti-Fascist discourse in East Germany (Reader A 1956 and Reader C 1956, Letters to Scholz). Another exemption was the request of a speaker at a congress of German public

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l­ibrarians in the city of Essen, who called for the suspension of the book distribution due to its “controversial” content (Schwerbrock 1957). For the most part, however, it remained unclear which motifs of the book the opinions referred to. The poet, translator, and journalist Alix Rohde-Liebenau, for example, wrote: “Through the Night is the only authentic book of our time. I would almost like to say that you gave away your life with this book” (RohdeLiebenau 1956, Letter to Scholz); whether she meant the book as a whole, the conversation tone in the frame story, Wilms’s diary, or something else is difficult to say. Pitt Severin (1956, Letter to Scholz), the editor of the highly popular magazine Quick, wrote to his friend Scholz that the book “jarred” him. It can only be assumed that he meant the depiction of the massacre, especially as Quick was one of the media outlets regularly printing serial war novels about heroic Wehrmacht soldiers (Schorntsheimer 1995). The story remained uncommented even by Felicitas Wild, née Lourié—the real-life model of Ruth Esther Loria—although she received the novel shortly after its publication. Only years later did she address the diary of Jürgen Wilms in very general terms when she tried to persuade Scholz to take a stand against the antisemitic graffiti wave of 1959/60 (Wild 1960, Letter to Scholz). Although the depiction of the execution scene caused few significant reactions, the diary was presumed to be highly authentic. Among the letters to Scholz were some written by mothers of fallen soldiers; for them, Wilms’s diary had a documentary value and they hoped to learn more about the fate of their sons. One of them wrote: “The thought that his name . . . had to be mentioned soon came so quickly during reading and was actually forgotten by the time I turned the page. I was all the more struck by the fact that on the other page his name really did appear twice” (Reader B 1956, Letter to Scholz). There is no known reply from Scholz, but given the number of German soldiers at the Eastern Front, it must have been a coincidence. Another woman recognized the name of a place where her son had been reported missing, and wanted to know if Scholz had been acquainted with him. Other readers told the writer about the war experiences of their dead sons and asked if he would like to use their stories for his next book. Although the mothers were obviously acting out of desperation, they were not entirely wrong in assuming that the novel was based on the author’s own experiences; Scholz’s former comrades, who recognized themselves in the book, were pleased with their literary immortalization—even though one of them ‘died’ in the novel. In the print media, the depiction of the massacre also received little attention. A total of 130 clippings from German, Austrian, and Swiss newspapers and magazines can be found in the Archives at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, but only nineteen of them comment on the depiction of the massacre, mostly in a very general tone. Hans Schwab-Felisch wrote an early review in Die Zeit on 20 October 1955. In his summary, he judged the composition of

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the book and the frame narrative in very positive ways; what he wrote about the diary of Jürgen Wilms, however, was telling: “Atrocities and crimes and helplessness, the error of zealous duty and its tragedy, decency and malice, sorrow, much sorrow.” Werner Wilk of the Tagesspiegel, who was a member of the jury that awarded the Fontane Prize to Scholz, did not even mention the massacre; star critics such as Friedrich Luft and Karl Korn followed the silent rhetoric. In a very general way, the former wrote in Die Welt: “There, again and suddenly, rises an entire era of double conscience, a dilemma in field gray . . . Suddenly you suspire. Unawares, the author taps into reality. Fate groans, and suddenly you hear the silence of truth beneath Berlin’s precious jargon.” Luft (1956a and 1956b) praised Scholz mainly for “hitting the jargon”; Korn, in turn, devoted only one sentence to the massacre in his otherwise quite extensive review: “It ends with poor Private Wilms, hounded by fear and tormented by conscience, witnessing one of those horrible scenes of the execution of Jews in the east” (Korn 1956a). The NWDR public radio reviewed the book with the following words: “It ranges from the loveliest to the darkest, from a gaze right into the gruesome Medusa’s face of this century to the comforting reflection of a higher serenity” (Rittermann 1955, Manuscript).20 In the local press, too, only isolated references to the massacre can be found. Most reviews primarily focused on the conversations in the bar rather than individual chapters, such as in Forum, exemplary of other journals: “Four men, members of the Berlin Jockey Club, reunite in the ruins of Berlin after war and captivity. Four remainders whose fate represents that of millions” (Untitled 1956). The regional Ostfriesen-Zeitung wrote: “A war diary from the Poland campaign is read, cheerful and worrying difficult hours come to life. It is not all pleasant to read, what is reported there, almost brutally matter-offactly about the extermination of Jews; some Wehrmacht institutions are also presented quite one-sidedly” (Fd. 1955). The Wiesbadener Tageblatt noted “a somber report, which nevertheless simultaneously has a solving effect.” These extremely brief commentaries mostly mention the diary in the context of the novel as a whole; the topic of the extermination of the Jews seemed to be possibly uncomfortable but no surprise. In no way, however, do those brief texts attest to a societal “irritation.” Although Scholz included various justification narratives that would have allowed a discussion about the depiction of the massacre, it was hardly addressed. An exception was Richard Biedrzynski’s contribution (1954) to the regional newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung; he did not explicitly comment on the execution scene but extensively quoted from it. The lack of reaction can be interpreted as a sign of speechlessness, tacit acceptance, or disinterest; as it is difficult to analyze statements that do not exist, it eludes closer examination. It is noteworthy that major national newspapers such as Die Zeit, Tagesspiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Süddetsche Zeitung were

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already ­reporting on the novel in the first months after its publication. This is why the book achieved a certain ‘presence’ in the German public sphere, reinforced by further reviews in local media. In March 1956, Scholz was awarded the Fontane Prize. The verdict of the jury did not mention the massacre at all but instead praised Scholz’s general style, his depiction of the atmosphere in West Berlin, and the clever combination of seven seemingly different stories in one novel (Jury 1956a, Report). Among the jury’s documents, however, is the equally enthusiastic and extensive review by Swiss critic Arnold Künzli (1955) quoting extensively from Wilms’s diary—by no means could they have overseen the description of the massacre; its omission in the verdict must have been a conscious decision. The prize triggered a new wave of recommendations for the novel in numerous local newspapers, and the wellknown reporter Christa Rotzoll conducted the aforementioned interview with Scholz for Der Spiegel (1956). Most reviewers, however, probably only skimmed through the book, as they merely paraphrased the publisher’s marketing text, in which the massacre was not mentioned, more or less verbatim. In the summer of 1956, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reprinted the novel, divided into seventy-one episodes and almost in full length— they only omit the story from the American POW camp. According to the announcement, it must have been Scholz’s style that prompted co-chief editor Karl Korn to include Through the Night in the feature pages of the newspaper: “This chronicle is so personally experienced, so surprisingly composed of the strangest incidents, so genuine and so youthfully fresh, so elegantly and so truthfully told, that we re-experience the time we all more or less went through” (Korn 1956b). Korn promised an authentic experience that witnesses of history also would accept. Whether they really did so can no longer be verified, as no readers’ letters relating to Through the Night were published; neither were they preserved in the archives. After the novel was printed in the feature pages, more reviews appeared in cultural and political magazines; although the authors do not reveal if they had read the newspaper version or the book, the chronology of events suggests that the reprint in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung certainly played a role in the novel’s constant public presence throughout 1956. Among the few reactions to the description of the massacre after the novel had been reprinted in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung are those published in SPD (Social Democrat) newspapers. Significantly, they directly draw attention to Wilms’s diary and reveal the political potential of the fictional account of the Orsha massacre. However, the SPD commentators did not succeed in turning the book into a political issue, especially as their opinions were all too diverse. The Europäische Zeitung, the SPD-affiliated paper of the “young generation,” enthusiastically quoted from the diary at length, calling it a “warning.” By contrast, a commentator in the party newspaper Vorwärts

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was outraged by the ignorance concerning the Nazi past among the men in the Jockey Bar, and targeted quotations from the book such as this sentence by Hesselbarth: “If I had had anything to say, I’d have rung down the curtain on Nazism, to stay. I would have asked no questions and taken no measures” (J.F.W. 1956). By far the most extensive reviews of Wilms’s diary appeared in late 1956 and early 1957, almost a year and a half after the first publication of Through the Night. Joachim Kaiser and Helmut Kreuzer in the highbrow magazines Texte und Zeichen and in Frankfurter Hefte, respectively, presumably referred to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung version of the novel, as their quite detailed synopses omit the episode from the American POW camp. Kaiser—a member of Gruppe 47—objected to Wilms’s diary: The diarist reports what was done to Polish and Russian Jews by the Germans; he himself indulged in small acts of pity . . . Wilms, as the diarist is called, remains only a spectator. In 1939, he had loved and left a Jewish woman, now he feels a vague feeling of guilt, and like a penance he takes it upon himself to watch the mass executions of the SD [Sicherheitsdienst]. But he can do no more than helplessly run away in a rage so that the SD does not catch the annoying witness; despite everything, he too finds no other answer than to continue to be a soldier of the Führer, albeit with a bad conscience. (Kaiser 1956, 538–39)

Interestingly, Kaiser writes of “mass executions of the SD”—apparently he missed the Latvian shooters. It should be noted here, however, that the structure of the Einsatzgruppen and the jurisdiction of the SD were by no means general knowledge in the mid-1950s; in fact, Kaiser projected his expertise about recent history onto Wilms’s diary. He could not refer to his own experience, as he was born in 1928 and thus was not a soldier during World War II. Instead, he represented the postwar generation. In his lengthy review, Kaiser, like other reviewers before him, focused on the frame story; unlike most of his predecessors, however, he was extremely critical of the conversations at the Jockey Bar. He accused the participants of cynicism, and criticized the combination of casual tone with serious topics: “There was a nasty war, with all sorts of fine fellows involved, they all got into a nasty mess, but they didn’t lose their humor or their good heart” (Kaiser 1956, 540). In a later radio show, he even cited Through the Night as an example of culture industry in the sense of Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 (Bf. 1957). Helmut Kreuzer, then a freshly graduated literary scholar, went even further. In Frankfurter Hefte, he devoted about two-thirds of his extensive review to Wilms’s diary, stretching over five densely printed pages. He opened with the unexpected success of the novel, considering that it dealt with the “most sensitive contemporary historical issues.” “The question of the cause [of the novel’s success—M.S.W.] has been raised,” he continued in passive

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voice, thus without mentioning who had asked it (Kreuzer 1957, 57). This question, however, remained unanswered, simply because there was no public debate about the diary. Therefore, we can only assume that Kreuzer was thinking about questions raised within internal academic discussions. It is possible that during the winter semester of 1956/57, scholars and students of German literature talked about Scholz’s book at conferences, in seminars, and at the lunch table, especially as many of them may have read the novel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung during the previous summer break. The alleged conversations, however, did not result in any academic publication— to no surprise, as contemporary German studies were known to focus on the literary canon (Hempel-Küter 2000, 132–33). Our access to this subliminal debate, which possibly developed ‘subcutaneously’ below the surface of the public sphere, is therefore very limited. If we could eavesdrop on the conversations of scholars or on discussions with their students, we would probably discover an even more complex picture of ‘mnemonic oscillations’ within the memory culture of the time. Kreuzer criticized the limited scope of most reviewers, and solidarized with Kaiser in his negative judgment of Through the Night. Similar to the critic of Gruppe 47, Kreuzer questioned Wilms’s motivation: “[He] becomes a powerless witness to a mass execution. His disgust and pity . . . justify his powerlessness, exonerate him and, with him, the reader” (Kreuzer 1957, 58). Kreuzer continues polemically: “Who beats the Jews? Answer: the Jews . . . Who was antisemitic? . . . Answer: the others . . . Who murdered? Answer: Latvian civilians” (ibid., 58–59). Kreuzer identifies thus the most problematic elements of the diary, namely the non-German perpetrators, and adds: It does not matter whether the particular elements of Scholz’s picture were in themselves factually possible or not. Decisive is the method with which Scholz deliberately arranges these elements, inwardly creates a false ‘climate,’ and suggests a dishonest overall picture to the reader . . . The extermination campaigns in the last war are no subject for an entertainment novel in which champagne corks pop. (ibid., 59)

With the exception of Helmut Kreuzer and later Ruth Klüger, no one criticized this “climate,” which suggests that most readers and reviewers did not bother about the portrayal of the murder perpetrated by the Latvians— they considered it authentic. Kaiser, as mentioned above, seemed even to oversee them, and he replaced the Latvian shooters with the SD in his review. Despite their harsh and precise attack, neither Kaiser nor Kreuzer sparked a debate, even though Kreuzer responded also to the positive voices: “One is struck by the suspicion that the triumphant progress of Scholz’s book was only possible because it has not only virtues but also certain defects that are particularly dear to certain groups among the public. It bypasses or falsi-

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fies essential problems and phenomena, and has a strong kitschy undertone” (Kreuzer 1957, 57). Scholz reacted calmly to this critique, and the publisher received some isolated letters defending the author. More or less directly, Kreuzer commented not only on the novel, but also on the expectations of the German readers and reviewers who (wanted to) ignore Wilms’s diary. The lack of reaction from both the reviewers and the protagonists in the frame story can be interpreted in two ways: it signals the speechlessness triggered by the affective impact of the diary, but it may also be indifference. At best, the book caused “irritation” – as Ächtler (2014, 95) suggested – among ‘professional’ readers such as Kaiser, Kreuzer, and later Klüger. While most recipients apparently accepted the fictional diary, the literary elite accused the text of lacking authenticity. The question of whether a far-reaching and self-critical literary reckoning with German war crimes, as Kaiser and Kreuzer demanded, could have been published at the time, remains open. When Scholz received the Heinrich Stahl Prize of the Jewish community in Berlin in April 1960, the discursive shifts came to light. Apparently, Scholz had succeeded in initiating a dialogue between perpetrators and victims after all; the prize honored personalities “who had rendered outstanding services to the Jewish community in Germany since 1945” (Riffel 2007, 45).21 The ceremony took place just a few steps from Scholz’s apartment, at the Jewish community’s headquarters on Fasanenstraße, where his former girlfriend Felicitas Lourié had once attended the synagogue. The Nazis destroyed the synagogue in 1938, and the building was restored shortly before Scholz’s award ceremony. Heinz Galinski, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, praised the author for “his ruthless portrayal of horror, which acted for a more humane future and thus served the will of the 30,000 Jews in Germany” (“Berliner Senat” 1960). Jewish media added that Scholz would not “shroud the Jews in the veil of oblivion” and that he “tugged with literary finesse at the conscience of those who would like to shrug off the recent past with a careless gesture” (Ben Arie 1960). Despite the high praise from Jewish readers in Germany and Israel, Scholz did not respond with tact. In an interview with the newspaper Tagesspiegel, for example, he announced that his “literary work is about the Germans, because it is hopefully no longer necessary to be concerned with the fate of the Jews in Germany. The first task for us Germans is a self-analysis through truthfulness” (E.R. 1960). While the call for “self-analysis” in itself gives no cause for criticism, the lack of concern for the Jews that Scholz expressed a few weeks after the antisemitic incidents in late 1959 and early 1960 was at least a faux pas. Apart from Scholz’s inappropriate remarks after the award ceremony, which also never provoked any reaction, the Heinrich Stahl Prize was evidence of an increasing willingness for dialogue in West Germany. In the

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recognition of his achievement by the Jewish audience, the mnemonic oscillations again become visible. Apparently, even Holocaust survivors appreciated the description of the massacre as a sign of rapprochement. In this sense, they were able to award Scholz for drawing West Germany’s public attention to the fate of the Jews, and for uncovering the absence of this group in the public sphere (Puszkar 2009, 323).

The Streamlined Recording The success of the book eventually led to the creation of the radio play. Due to the comparatively few sources held in the archives of SWR public radio and the limited reception, my analysis of the radio play is less detailed than that of the novel or the television adaptation. However, the shorter analysis does not mirror the significance of the radio production in the history of Through the Night: although it did receive relatively little public attention, it played a vital role in the development of the media complex. In a sense, the radio play was a necessary interlude for the following television adaptation. The first episode was broadcast on SWF 1 public radio on 21 August 1956 and repeated six months later as a stand-alone play with the title The Diary of Jürgen Wilms. Although the episodic novel was well suited for the production of a five-part play, it had to be heavily edited. Together with the playwright Manfred Häberlen, Scholz wrote the script and, under the direction of Gert Westphal, also took on the role of Hans Schott, the organizer of the men’s evening at the Jockey Bar. In its press release, SWF public radio emphasized both facts (SWF 1956, Press release). After Scholz had told Der Spiegel about the autobiographical elements in the novel a few months earlier (“Boccaccio in der Bar” 1956), his participation in the radio play was another authentication strategy; his voice now mediated between the bar and the listeners. According to radio researcher Alexander Badenoch (2008, 80), authenticity in radio is based on the relationship between speaker and text; therefore, production could now give the impression that the story was largely a personal experience of the writer. At the same time, the relationship to the listener plays an essential role for the authenticity as well as the affective impact of radio broadcasts—for example, by creating a certain intimacy, especially with difficult topics. In this sense, the monologic reading of a fictional war diary representing the experiences of large parts of a generation was an excellent fit for a radio adaptation. Manuela Gerlof (2010, 11) emphasizes this connection between the sense of hearing, interiority, and memory with reference to Erwin Wickert’s account on the “inner stage,” based on the imagination of the listener, which he presented in 1954. In this context, radio plays in the 1950s generally dis-

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Figure 2.2.  Recording for the first part of the radio play Through the Night at SWF public radio in Baden-Baden, 1956. From left to right: Else Hackenberg (secretary), director Gert Westphal (Dr. Brabender), and author and actor Hans Scholz (Schott). © SWR/Hans Westphal, 1956. Source: SWR Historical Archives Baden-Baden (SWR Historisches Archiv Baden-Baden).

played a “cult of words” (Siegert 2002, 290), especially in the so-called ‘literary’ radio play developed in the postwar period based on highbrow texts by Günter Eich, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Ingeborg Bachmann. In those radio plays, language took center stage, while other sounds only occurred infrequently. When a telephone rang, a car honked, or silverware clattered, it was an isolated symbolic representation signifying or emphasizing something important, but never developed into soundscapes. The renunciation of everyday sounds also usually characterizes the work of Westphal (ibid., 290–91), whose radio plays “are carried by words, the dialogues are thoroughly designed to the most sublime oscillations, and even every seemingly incidental noise has a dramaturgical meaning” (Alt 1957). As the picture from the recording sessions in Baden-Baden shows (Figure 2.2), the voice actors—with the exception of one woman, all male— worked with props in Through the Night. In the picture, we see Gert Westphal and Hans Scholz playing the scene of the telephone conversation in which they arrange to meet at the Jockey Bar; they do hold telephones, and when the secretary interrupts the conversation to have a document signed, she comes in with an actual folder, which Westphal then signs. Although ­common on

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theater stages, neither the telephone nor the document folder can be seen (or heard) in the edited radio play, of course. The voice actors could have comfortably sat down and simply read the text into the microphone; this theatrical approach, however, made it possible to adapt to the roles as intensively as possible, especially as Scholz had had no training as an actor. It is entirely possible that the recording of the script would not have convinced without the use of props and stage sets. It was about being ‘authentic,’ an approach during the production of Through the Night that Gustav Frank (2020, 164) recognizes as a departure from the sophisticated, literary radio play at the time. Despite the props, Westphal remained with the aesthetic of “low noise” (Siegert 2002, 290). In his analysis, Frank demonstrates that the radio play paradoxically contains fewer sounds than the novel, which employs various onomatopoeias such as references to music, sounds at the bar, gunshots, screams, airplane noise, and so on. Only a few sounds made it into the radio production. The description of the massacre “is most radically subjected to the means of the ‘literary radio play’: no ‘noise’ is allowed to intrude, hardly any cuts or breaks are noticeable . . . no more reference to mediality and its function. What becomes loud instead is the voice of an individual conscience” (Frank 2020, 167). The acoustic dominance of language, however, is caused by the fact that we are dealing with a diary that is being read aloud. For the overarching frame story, Hans-Martin Majewski composed a light jazz score, the so-called Jockey Bounce, as the opener to all episodes of Through the Night and played as background music almost every time the men talk at the bar. The melody unobtrusively marks the transitions between frame story and individual stories. The first transition to the diary is smooth: we hear the telephone conversation between Schott and Brabender talking about Lepsius’s return and the planning of the evening. The next scene takes place at the bar, where Lepsius talks about his encounter with Wilms in the POW camp and then starts to read from the diary. It also contains a brief dialogue between Lepsius and Wilms, so we hear both voices; here the role of the reader switches from Lepsius to Wilms. For the radio play, Scholz and Häberlen restored the original order of scenes, previously changed by the publisher at the last minute; instead of starting with the diary directly after the telephone conversation and only then switching to the bar, we now hear the story in almost chronological order. The changes for the radio adaptation included cuts and alterations—but hardly anything was added. Information about time and place are announced at the beginning of each episode, trying to preserve the character of a diary. After Maciejowice, Góra Kalwaria, Garwolin, and Brest-Litovsk, Wilms arrives in Orsha. In the novel Wilms remembers Ruth Esther while observing the mass execution, whereas the radio play separates both plot lines:

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the depiction of the massacre is only interrupted once by thoughts about Ruth Esther. According to Jörn Rüsen (2001, 248–50), however, a streamlined narrative diminishes historical authenticity, as the narrative coherence is now established by a separation of past and present. But it is precisely ‘­bulkiness’—which can and must be expressed, as Rüsen points out, as the only way to mark the limits of the sayable and the unsayable when narrating the Holocaust—no matter if in fiction or nonfiction. Rüsen’s account very much reflects the affective turn; Ernst van Alphen and Ruth Leys in particular argue that the Holocaust cannot generally be charted through a regular and orderly discourse. While the book conveys Wilms’s experience mainly through narrative blanks and ruptures, the radio play, by contrast, seems ordered and hence less affective, although radio would have been a particularly suitable medium to create a sense of closeness and intimacy. Numerous cuts also contribute to a diminishing affective impact. Among the deleted sequences, for example, is Wilms’s remark about stacking the victims; the listeners do not learn how many Jews were murdered, nor that they had to undress before being killed. Consequently, the sequence about the recovery of corpses in Brest-Litovsk is also much shorter than in the book; after the first sentences, the report briefly halts, and Lepsius’s voice lets us know that “the page is torn.” We do not learn that Wilms’s camera was destroyed shortly after, also due to streamlining the narrative, as the motif of taking photos was entirely cut from the radio play. If the synesthetic potential of the novel unfolds mainly at the interface between text and image, the radio play largely exhibits a coherence immanent to the medium: visual motifs are widely withdrawn, while selected acoustic elements are expanded. These changes ultimately contribute to the fact that the ambivalences and narrative oscillations characterizing the diary in the novel are hardly present in the radio play at all. The radio production seems ‘rounded’ and ‘polished,’ while the depiction of the massacre loses its ‘authentic’ effect. Selected acoustic effects are used only in the execution sequence. First, we hear Wehrmacht soldiers talk in different dialects about the murders of Jews—more over each other than to each other, a mere sequence of fragments. The phrases are articulated slowly and clearly, remaining understandable despite the heavy dialects. Then we hear the sound of an airplane; the motif also occurs in the book and, substituting the mention of the date, separates the scene in Brest-Litovsk from that in Orsha. As such acoustic effects had hardly been used to this point, they appear to be a strong signal, attracting the attention of the listeners and creating the transition to the massacre scene. The script contains stage directions such as “grievances of the Jews, single and sustained machine-gun shots” (Scholz and Häberlen 1956, Am grünen, 47). Director Westphal edited the grievances as a distant and long howling sound, of which it is hard to tell if it is human or the wind. Adequately, four

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sentences got moved from the end of the execution scene to the beginning: “They’re screaming farther down the hill. . . the whole line is screaming, from head to tail. . . Then silence again. Next. Forward” (ibid., 45). What was less exposed in the novel gains significance through the rearrangement of scenes. In addition to the gunshots, voices can be heard in the background, addressing the Jews: the script mentions “shouts of the shooters and policemen”; in the radio play, we first hear the Russian words “bystro, bystro, dawaj, dawaj” and then their German equivalents “schneller, schneller” (faster, faster). Although the German perpetrators were able to address their victims in the Soviet Union with rudimentary phrases in Russian, the choice of language in this context rather suggests the involvement of local helpers. Furthermore, the words bystro and dawaj could also have been intended to have a subliminal effect, as they belonged to those Russian phrases that German soldiers might often have heard at the Eastern Front or as POWs. Considering that these phrases do not appear in the novel, their use in the radio play is not to be interpreted as a reference but as a remediation of the reality of war. The “Latvian civilians” are also included in the radio play, although Westphal cut antisemitic fragments—for example, the children’s antisemitic slogans. At the end of the execution scene, Wilms describes the murder of the Jewish girl. His monologue is interrupted by a loud, single shot that signals the death of the child. Because of its excessive clarity, this passage does not seem to fit into the radio version as well. The howling, screaming, and gunshots in the background merge into a monotonous chant; in the o­ therwise realistic radio play with every action authenticated—through references to time and place or the use of dialects and languages—the melodic moaning in the background has an alienating effect. The final sequences of the execution scene appear dreamlike, as if none of it happened. After stylistic devices were used initially to highlight authenticity, now we experience a ‘retreat,’ which certainly allows an interpretation of the massacre as Wilms’s pure imagination. The reception of the radio play is limited to isolated and sometimes very contradictory reviews. Some praised it as an extraordinary radio “event” (Alt 1957); Die Zeit called it “excellent” and the Rheinische Post a “success.” Others criticized the edits and cuts, especially in the overarching frame story; the Kölnische Rundschau, for instance, claimed: “The best of the book, effective in the accurate depiction of a mood, a historical situation, a certain human, or social atmosphere, was almost completely lost in the episode” (Epl. 1956). The Badische Tageblatt complained about the revisions of the text, leading to a loss of authenticity in the radio play: “Although it seems to offer itself to the radio, often in the form of a dialogue, Scholz’s narrative is so full of inherent liveliness, so peculiar in its inner form, so elusive, that—and you again have to say: strangely enough—microphone and speaker function like a filter for

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this incomprehensiveness, letting through little more than the blunt and tangible” (W. 1956). The contemporary reviewers thus pointed at exactly those characteristics that also catch today’s eye and ear. Although the medium held great potential for an intimate, strongly affective conversation with the listeners, for many the streamlined radio production missed this ­opportunity— apart from the fact that, in postwar West Germany, ‘fidelity’ to the literary original was considered the most important criterion for evaluating an adaptation (Scholz, A.-M. 2013, 2). As only two reviewers mentioned Wilms’s diary, and not more than nine reviews of the radio play are available, no comprehensive comparison can be made to the reception of the book. In the Kölnische Rundschau, the reviewer focused on the conversational situation in which “most bitter memories” are told: “Those who were only victims of the events want to forget. Many soldiers and prisoners who returned home remain darkly silent when someone asks them . . . Not so the participants of the boozy party in the Berlin Jockey Bar . . . What the five friends . . . have to report, partly based on third-party chronicles, is one of the most daring things that has been reported from those days so far” (Epl. 1956). The general tone in which German war crimes were alluded to but not explicitly mentioned is reminiscent of the book’s reviews. It is noticeable, however, the way in which the reviewer mentions the gathering in the Jockey Bar: five friends meet to drown their troubles in alcohol and get their grief off their chest. In this way, Through the Night is framed within the narrative of victimhood typical of the period (Taberner and Berger 2009; Niven 2006; Moeller 2006; Assmann 2006, 193–204): the actual victims— in this case, Soviet Jews—are only mentioned in passing, while the suffering of the former German POW is moved to the foreground.

The Extended Filming After the director of NWRV public broadcasting, Hanns Hartmann, acquired the license for Through the Night in the summer of 1959 and commissioned Fritz Umgelter to direct it, swift work on the screenplay began. Together with the screenwriter Reinhart Müller-Friedenfels, Umgelter split the material into five episodes, largely following the structure of the radio play. However, the filmmakers included Hesselbarth’s story about his encounter with the Russian partisan that Scholz and Häberlen had deleted. Also, in contrast to the radio play, the depiction of the massacre was not cut but considerably expanded, and it now comprised twenty-two of the total ninety-six minutes of the first episode. The transition between the bar scene and the footage from Wilms’s diary is marked by means of a cross-fade. In a voice-over, first Lepsius and then

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Figure 2.3.  Wilms’s view through the camera while taking a picture of his comrade Hans Hapke. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).

Wilms read the diary. The cross-fade and the acoustic bracket announcing the change between the two worlds usually mark flashbacks in film. In this sense, the transition to the diary appears like a “memory film”—a category introduced by Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka (2008). Different from ‘history films,’ memory films mediate the past by means of narrating memories or recollections rather than history or historiography. Beginning in the middle of the diary in Maciejowice, Wilms describes the place: “The marketplace rises slightly, grass grows between the rough cobblestones,” while the camera shows the stony pavement in the empty marketplace. Wilms then describes a cloudless sky, while the camera pans upward. The narrative redundancy may be irritating, but it serves to introduce the genre of the diary. It takes several minutes until Wilms’s voice fades away. Twice the setting changes to the bar, only to return again to the Eastern Front. Occasionally, Wilms speaks in a voice-over, keeping the narrative form of a diary present. In both the novel and the film, but not in the radio play, Wilms takes photos. Already on the first two pages of his diary in the book, eighteen photos from Maciejowice are mentioned. While the images themselves are not included in the novel—Lepsius explains that they have got lost—, they play a prominent role in the television adaptation. Each time a picture is taken, it appears on the screen—the location of Maciejowice, for instance, is partially depicted through the lens of an imagined photo camera, the ‘snapshots’ are simulated by a brief freeze with a frame (Figure 2.3). The ‘reconstruction’ of the photos, however, leads to a loss of intermediality and synesthesia. The novel’s acoustic motifs naturally merge into the score, the black-and-white production gives no indication of colors, and smells or haptic signals are almost entirely omitted. The textual nature of the diary is only referred to in the overarching frame story, with Hans-Joachim Lepsius calling it a “manuscript.” The miniseries is adapted to the discursive order of classical film

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style22—the viewers are not supposed to concentrate on the medium, but on the plot. The Frankfurter Rundschau (24 March 1960) commented: “Those who have read the novel may have been surprised at the sharpness it gained on the screen.”23 The ‘rounding’ of the material, even more than in the radio play, leads to a significant loss of the original ‘ruptures’ and ‘vibrations.’ The first part of Through the Night follows the discursive rules of the war film genre—it is only in the final execution scene that Umgelter abandons some of the principles of the classical film style. While Wilms is taking photos, he receives orders to censor his unit’s mail. Described in the novel with just one sentence stating “Orders have come through that all mail from home is to be censored by the company” (TN 19), Umgelter expanded it into a five-minute scene in which not only mail from home, but also home is read. The duty is a punishment for Wilms for having his laundry done by Jews the day before. In front of the room, the Jewish Ordnungsdienst disciplines Jewish civilians, which Wilms’s superior, Captain Rahn, immediately forbids: “Disgusting, shall stop. Jews beat Jews.” This remark does not appear in the novel, and leads to a significant shift in the film: in the book, it was Wilms who observed the actions of the Jewish Ordnungsdienst while no one intervened; but in Umgelter’s film, it is a German officer, a sequence that almost makes it seem as if the Germans protect the Jews. The motif is repeated shortly after, when the Jewish girl stares at Wilms and addresses him as “scheener Herr aus Daitschland” (seemingly Yiddish for “fine gentleman from Germany”), hoping for protection. The historical ‘errors’ of the book, criticized by Helmut Kreuzer and later Ruth Klüger, are additionally emphasized in the film. The scene in Góra Kalwaria again portrays the Wehrmacht almost as a welfare organization. Wilms’s unit takes a break from marching; when consuming their rations, the cook distributes additional portions to some Polish children. Only the Jewish boy who later receives a can of meat from Wilms waits apart from the group (Figure 2.4). As he approaches the field kitchen, a Polish woman shoos him away, pointing her finger at him and shouting “Żyd, Jew!” For Scholz, Góra Kalwaria was probably just a name for a random place, a brief stopover during his march toward the Soviet Union. But it is still, to this day, one of the most important and liveliest centers of Jewish culture in Poland. The Jews from Góra Kalwaria fell victim to the German extermination regime at a very early stage; unlike in Maciejowice, for example, where the Jews were not segregated until the fall of 1941, the ghetto in Góra Kalwaria was established as early as June 1940. Eight months later it was ‘liquidated’; which in this case meant the deportation of all the Jews to the Warsaw Ghetto. From today’s perspective, the image of the lonely Jewish boy from Góra Kalwaria, juxtaposed with numerous Polish children in Through the Night, can be interpreted as a symbol of the annihilation

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Figure 2.4.  The Jewish boy in Góra Kalwaria. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).

of this culture. A soldier’s question implies that he, too, would soon die: “How many more days will you give him?” In fact, this question is answered toward the end of the film, when the boy gets out of a train wagon in Orsha and is murdered. The character of the woman who denounces the boy as a Jew is part of the plotline about the Polish girl from Garwolin. The sequence in Góra Kalwaria also entails the motif of a local beauty used elsewhere in the book: the Jewish boy’s older sister, to whom Wilms is visibly attracted, thanks him for his behavior with a pack of pickles. In the book, this prop does not appear until the story of Hesselbarth, who also receives pickles during his first encounter with the Russian partisan. While the second story of the novel was deleted from the radio play, Umgelter integrates a modified version into the first episode—with far-reaching dramaturgical consequences. Probably without knowing, the director returns to the original version of the novel where the girl was a Jewess. Certainly, this is a condensation of the plot (Schmid 2011), but cutting the flirt with the Polish woman described in the book results in almost all characters in the first episode of the miniseries being either Germans or Jews. After the rest in Góra Kalwaria, the unit continues its march eastward. The Battle of Brest-Litovsk is introduced by archival newsreel footage. For media scholar Peter Seibert (2001, 81) this is a far-reaching authentication strategy, not least as the following battle scene is aesthetically adjusted to the archival footage. According to Seibert, the purpose of the continuity editing is to “lend authenticity to the fictional images, to insinuate the immediacy of the testimony, as the ‘diary’ pretends to do in the text” (Seibert 2000, 138). What Seibert omits in his interpretation, however, is Wilms’s commentary; in a voice-over, he adds short, rhythmic sentences to the archival footage, almost like the newsreel announcers, but here functioning as a dissenting voice to Nazi propaganda:

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Along the road all full of equipment left behind. Four of the company dead. Jaletzki wounded. Brest-Litovsk, it was said, was taken on the twenty-fourth. The German flag flies over the citadel. Nonsense. Nothing like that. Fighting is still going on around the citadel. July second. Brest-Litovsk. It’s disgusting. The front is already at the Berezina and we’re mucking around here without any sense. Not making any progress.

So if the point of these archival recordings is to authenticate the ­depiction— and I do not want to contradict—then it is less about authenticating fictional images through historical footage, and more about the ‘authentic’ perspective, the perspective of the ordinary private juxtaposed with propaganda material. Paradoxically, it is the words of a fictional character and not the archival footage that are supposed to lend authenticity to the narrative. Compared to the novel, Umgelter considerably expanded the battle scenes in Brest-Litovsk. The Münchner Merkur (24 March 1960) even considered the war scenes as a “proof of the soldierly decency” in order to create a moral compensation for the execution scenes. We see men shooting, wounded, and dead; the director also added air raids and tank battles with Soviet troops to the plot. The scene vividly depicts German heroism next to the brutality of war—for example, an infantryman marks an area with a Nazi flag while the Luftwaffe engages in ‘friendly fire.’ Umgelter extended the tank battles, only briefly mentioned in the book, into a long scene in which Wilms heroically fends off a Soviet attack. The foreignness of the ‘Ivans’—a popular derogatory term for Red Army soldiers—is emphasized by seemingly Asian features. The Germans attack them bravely and resolutely, but also repeatedly address the mendacity of the Nazi system and the futility of the struggle. The young, fanatical soldier, who destroys Wilms’s camera, is supposed to contrast the essentially likable men in Wilms’s unit. The picture that emerges is one of mostly decent men sent to a war in which they must fight honorably but do so reluctantly. Exceptions, such as the young fanatic or the antisemite Jaletzki, just confirm the rule. We find this narrative in almost all West German war films and novels of the 1950s.24 In this respect, Umgelter fell back on a wellproven pattern, hardly questioned at the time, and definitely considered ‘authentic.’ The fact that he added air raids and tank operations had to do with the popularity of such scenes in contemporary war movies, but also with his own biography. The Flakregiment 411 (Flak Regiment 411), in which he served, was in fact subordinate to the Dritte Panzerarmee (Third Panzer Army) and took part in the Battle of Brest-Litovsk (Tessin 1965–2002, vol. 10, 116). In the discussion that followed the broadcast of the film, both Hans Scholz and Hanns Hartmann cited Umgelter’s experiences as evidence of the authenticity of the portrayal.

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After the scene in Brest-Litovsk with the abovementioned images of Jews recovering dead bodies from the battlefield at the end, the plot moves on to Orsha, where soldiers start to talk about the executions. The conversation is similar to the novel and the radio adaptation—but in the background we see Jaletzki, sitting alone at a table, silently listening to the conversation; while the others express sympathy for the victims more or less directly, Jaletzki repeatedly portrays the character of the isolated Nazi. The coats of medics can be seen hanging on the wall in the background—the camera focuses on the white brassards with a cross. In other shots we see crucifixes on walls and tombs, and close-ups of belt buckles saying: “God with Us.” Media scholar Lars Koch identified the various depictions of Christian symbols as a signal of an “existential crisis of the West,” as it is not the individual soldier who is portrayed as responsible, but the ‘godless’ age itself (Koch 2002, 84–85). In this perspective, the first episode of Through the Night fits into contemporary interpretation patterns as popularized, for example, in Heinrich Böll’s or Erich Maria Remarque’s war prose: the war is being condemned, but the soldiers remain mostly innocent. After a conversation with the soldiers, Wilms requests two hours of leave to “look into the face of our century.” He talks to his superior, first in the building and then outside—there is snow, but water is running from the roof. Wilms walks to the execution site, repeatedly hiding behind various objects to avoid being discovered by the guards (Figure 2.5). Then he gets stopped and sent away, before telling the next guard that he escorted the transport and so is let through. Compared to the novel and the radio adaptation, Wilms’s slow approach to the execution site is depicted in much greater detail in the miniseries’ episode; the former two versions only used two short sentences without even mentioning guards. By expanding this motif, Umgelter suggests, much more than Scholz or Westphal, that ‘average’ soldiers usually had no access to the heavily guarded execution sites, thus turning Wilms into a hero Figure 2.5.  Wilms hides on the way to the firing squad. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).

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Figure 2.6.  Ruins in Orsha. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).

fighting for the truth. This staging provides an explanatory pattern according to which it was almost impossible for ‘ordinary’ Wehrmacht soldiers to have witnessed such mass executions. This way the sequence contributed to the strongly propagated narrative about the innocent Wehrmacht soldiers who claimed not to have known anything about the war crimes against the civilian population. On his way to the execution site, Wilms walks along ruins of destroyed buildings (Figure 2.6); again and again we see remnants of walls and Wilms walking behind them in the background. Umgelter hence uses imagery based on historical facts, although none of it can be found in the novel or the radio play. The director resorts to ruins as symbols of wartime destruction that can be interpreted both symbolically and very specifically, for like many other places in the region, Orsha was almost completely destroyed during the German attack. In the ruins, Wilms encounters local children, a motif also not unusual at the time, as the child characters in German and international ‘rubble films,’ which were made directly after World War II—such as Somewhere in Berlin (1946) by Gerhart Lamprecht and Germany, Year Zero (1948) by Roberto Rossellini—show. Umgelter lets the children play war by pretending to shoot a Jew; to clarify their roles for the audience, one of the children wears a Star of David on his coat (Figure 2.7). Unlike in the book, where Scholz describes Russian-speaking children, they speak Polish: “Chodź tutaj, Żydzie, ja ciebie zastrzelę. Ja ciebie też zastrzelę. . . . Żydom puff, Żydom kaput, Żydom pogrom” (“Come here Jew, I’ll shoot you. I’ll shoot you too . . . The Jew bang, the Jew kaputt, the Jew Pogrom”). What at first looks like a mix up of Slavic languages is really a preparation for what Wilms is about to see: the transport and mass execution of Polish Jews. Differently than in the book and the radio play, in which local Jews are shot, in the miniseries we see people getting off a train and being led to the execution site. Among them are the boy from Góra Kalwaria and his sister,

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Figure 2.7.  Children playing war. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).

who previously gave Wilms a bag of pickles. This sequence is a significant change in many ways. While the victims in the novel were nameless Jews, here they are represented by a girl Wilms is attracted to. He wants to save her, pulls her out of the line and tells her to flee, but she returns to her brother. In this way, Umgelter integrated Hesselbarth’s story of the Russian partisan into the film. The resulting concentration ties different storylines together and introduces the tried-and-true film motif of a last-minute rescue attempt. As understandable as Umgelter’s decision is from a dramaturgical standpoint, however, as profound are the narrative consequences: the girl in the book is a partisan, while in the film a German fails to rescue a Jew. Umgelter thus suggests “what Germans could have done to actively prevent the Holocaust, rather than collectively blaming them for being actively involved,” as Kobi Kabalek (2012, 100) suggests; the director addressed what he obviously perceived as a failed memory in postwar Germany. By pointing out the moral failure of the “average German,” Kabalek says, Umgelter intends to “correct” the failure of memory (ibid.). The expansion of the rescue motif in the television version of Through the Night also involved a discursive shift: by the mid-1950s, even the officially awarded Righteous Among the Nations were not publicly honored in West Germany, which only started to change at the beginning of the following decade. The Berlin Senate, for example, granted seven hundred individuals who had rescued Jews a small additional pension (Berghoff H. 1998, 105; Riffel 2007). They were awarded during the same ceremony in which Scholz received the Heinrich Stahl Prize. It is doubtful, however, that Umgelter consciously addressed this discursive change, especially as the script shows that the motif of the failed rescue was merely added for dramaturgical reasons. The film had to provide an explanation for the sudden appearance of people from Góra Kalwaria in Orsha, hence the motif of transport was introduced (Figure 2.8). The freight car is also one of the strongest and probably

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Figure 2.8.  The arrival of the transport. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).

best-known icons of the Holocaust (Stier 2015, 32–67). Even though, at the turn of the 1960s, the freight car usually implied flight and expulsion or  the return home from captivity, the German audience was also familiar with this image as a symbol of the deportations of the Jews. The freight car had already appeared in the documentary Night and Fog (1955) by Alain Resnais, shown in numerous theaters in 1956 and on public television in April 1957 (Knaap 2008, 85). Umgelter shows the freight car in the background with close-ups of tracks and buffer stops edited into the sequence, highlighting the railroad track as infrastructure rather than focusing on the symbolism of the wagon, which further developed in the following decades (Bredekamp 2004, 58–62). Today, restored freight cars of the era are central objects in the United Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and in the World War II Museum in Gdańsk, among others. One key detail, however, distinguishes the trains in Through the Night from comparable images: the Cyrillic letters CCCP and the hammer and sickle symbol on the sides of the railroad cars identify them as Soviet freight cars. The Jews get off the train, walk along the rail tracks and pass—like the victims of the concentration camps—through a gate. Instead of the Nazi slogan Arbeit macht frei (Work sets you free), the gate in Through the Night is decorated with a large five-armed star attached to the top; in the black and white production, its red color can only be assumed. Umgelter obviously replaced Nazi iconography with Soviet symbols. His intentions can hardly be reconstructed today; was it simply a matter of marking the geographical space in which the events took place, or was this an attempt to slander the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War? Similar motifs appear in Umgelter’s abovementioned television miniseries So weit die Füße tragen (As far as your feet take you). The railroad scenes in Through the Night are reminiscent of those used in So weit die Füße tragen, thereby suggesting a Soviet involvement in the Holocaust. And there is another aspect: in Eastern Europe in the

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Figure 2.9.  Piles of victims’ shoes. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).

1950s, images of Soviet railroad cars symbolized deportations to the forced labor camps of the Gulag system (Bredekamp 2004, 61). For many German viewers, they may have provoked associations with their own experience of suffering as POWs. Another Holocaust icon is the large piles of shoes (Figure 2.9). Schmid (2010) and Stiglegger (2015, 50) argue that the naked corpses of the victims could not have been shown on television in the early 1960s, so it had to be implied synecdochically through images of undressing; we see the victims removing their shoes one by one. Again, at the time of the broadcast of Through the Night this kind of iconography was not new. Like images of freight cars, images of piles of shoes were already part of the early postwar representations of the concentration camps—for example, in the film Majdanek – Cemetry of Europe (1944), which was made by Aleksander Ford and Roman Karmen on behalf of the Red Army and distributed all over Europe (Drubek-Meyer 2020, 146). Hanuš Burger and Billy Wilder used similar images in Death Mills (1945)—a documentary commissioned by the US military government in Germany and screened in West Germany, most often in the American Occupation Zone, hence also in Stuttgart and Frankfurt, where Umgelter lived after the war. Piles of shoes were also displayed in the very first museum exhibition in Auschwitz, as early as in 1946 (Wóycicka 2014, 210), which was part of Resnais’ footage for Night and Fog. Therefore, by using the images of shoes, Umgelter both relies on existing symbols and advances them as he uses them in a fictional context. In this sense, the television adaptation of Through the Night might have been a catalyst for Holocaust iconography and a pattern for later television productions, including the miniseries Holocaust (1978) by Gerhard Green and Marvin J. Chomsky (Stiglegger 2015, 47), although there is no evidence that Green and Chomsky had seen Umgelter’s adaptation of Scholz’s novel. To use Astrid Erll’s words: the execution scene in Through the Night “remediated” existing

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Holocaust images and “pre-mediated” subsequent representations, regardless of the actual references and inspirations. The fact is that Umgelter’s images followed similar motifs of the Holocaust and yet preceded them at the same time, long before such images dominated international media. Nevertheless, Umgelter shifts their meaning, especially as the motif of the pile of shoes had until then been part of concentration camp iconography; their usage in context with the execution sequence is therefore intended to convey symbolically that war crimes in Eastern Europe were as systematic as the murder of people in concentration and extermination camps. “As remnants of destruction on display,” the materiality of the shoes refers “to the absence the Shoah has left in its wake; they represent the Holocaust metonymically—they are parts of a whole, as it were—because their existence as postmemorial artifacts is predicated upon the murders of those who wore them” (Stier 2015, 15). Wilms follows the shots. He passes soldiers and policemen supervising the transport and preparing the ammunition. By expanding this ‘preparation phase,’ Umgelter was able to illustrate the ‘machinery of extermination,’ as Christian Hißnauer points out: This sequence visually communicates very impressively the mass murder that is staged here, reminiscent in its blunt execution of monotonous assembly line work: behind a truck, Latvian soldiers reload their machine guns. The camera moves away from them, pans across the army truck, and captures the long line of Jewish victims moving quietly and slowly toward the execution site. More Latvian People’s Army soldiers come into view, moving behind the truck to reload their magazines with new cartridges. The camera has made a circular movement, which it repeats twice. In the background, machine-gun fire can be heard continuously. (Hißnauer 2019, 75)

The film deviates from the script in one significant point, however. In the script we read: “Two Jewish men unload a crate and place it on top of a stack. You can read the labeling on the crates: Pi 9 mm 1939. Everything looks like an assembly line”25 (Umgelter and Müller-Friedenfels 1959, Script, 82). The—from today’s perspective—unacceptable suggestion that Jews executed Jews was not implemented. Instead, it is German policemen that unload the ammunition from German vehicles and hand it to the executioners. However, the impression of a mundane activity of “notorious order and silence” (Stiglegger 2015, 49) remains. Ultimately, it is non-German perpetrators who actually shoot the victims, as Umgelter adopted the motif of the Latvian People’s Army, although, in the film, they do not act independently. The mass execution is supervised by an “affected-looking” (Stiglegger 2015, 50) SS man who does not appear in the novel. He sits at the edge of the pit, smokes a cigarette, and gives the shooters wordless instructions on how to place the victims and when to shoot (Figure 2.10). He looks as if he is having

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Figure 2.10.  The psychopathic SS man in command of the mass execution. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).

people lined up for a photo, representing a typical “excessive perpetrator” (Exzesstäter) (Hirschfeld 2004, 11). While this motif is internationally typical for Holocaust depictions (Ebbrecht 2011, 251), Through the Night was one of the first films shaping the visual repertoire in this regard. Umgelter created what was probably the first scene in film history to include an SS man ordering and overseeing a mass execution of Jews. Of course, claims about first references or uses of particular motifs always run the risk of missing a little-known production; however, in all likelihood, the media complex of Through the Night is the first detailed account of a mass execution perpetrated by the Germans in Eastern Europe. In this respect, the addition of the SS man to this scene obviously has a pioneering character. In accordance with the ‘code of separation’ (Koch 2002, 87), which emphasizes the distinction between the ‘innocent’ Wehrmacht and the ‘guilty’ SS, it is hence not the soldiers but this single SS man who bears the ultimate responsibility for the mass murder. An important clue for the intended interpretation of this figure is the dueling scar on the face (a so-called Schmiss) of actor Helmut Förnbacher, implying membership in conservative, often nationalistic student fraternities due to their rituals of sword playing. Furthermore, since at least the Hollywood classic Scarface (1932), facial scars marked ‘bad people.’ Asked for his opinion on the addition of the SS man to the plot, Scholz stated that he saw him as an “enrichment of the whole” (Scholz 1960c). Although the SS man is obviously an alibi, Umgelter’s addition has indeed ‘enriched’ Holocaust iconography. At the same time, Umgelter introduces a prop that blurs the strict separation into ‘evil’ SS men and collaborators on the one hand, and ‘good’ Wehrmacht soldiers on the other. The shooters wear white armbands reading “Latvian People’s Army. In the service of the German Wehrmacht,” which is visible in a thirteen-second close-up (Figure 2.11). Lars Koch concludes that “in this way, the film suggests that the Wehrmacht, as the executive force of

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Figure 2.11.  Armbands of the Latvian executioners. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).

the criminal ‘Lebensraum plans,’ was structurally involved” in Nazi crimes (Koch 2002, 87). Hans Schmid adds that “this is why Umgelter previously showed the armbands with the Red Cross on the medics’ coats: to visually link what had been neatly separated in postwar Germany” (Schmid 2011). The shift in symbolism away from the novel is essential; in Scholz’s book, the Wehrmacht’s complicity consists solely in knowing about the crimes; neither Wilms nor his comrades can claim not to have known about the mass executions. Umgelter, by contrast, insinuates that the Wehrmacht, at least symbolically, shared responsibility for the Holocaust. In the last minutes of the execution scene, we see the brother and sister from Góra Kalwaria climbing into the pit. They look up to the sky, the SS man gives the signal to shoot. Wilms stands at the edge of the pit and watches the murder of the two (Figure 2.12). In a voice-over, we hear Wilms’s thoughts: he confesses his feelings for Ruth Esther and claims not to love his German girlfriend anymore. His thoughts are accompanied by the Yiddish song Bei mir bist du scheen, which he used to listen to together with Ruth Esther. Director Umgelter uses a recording by the Andrew Sisters which could be heard in Nazi Germany despite the ban on Jewish music, and which did not lose its popularity after the war (Nimmo 2007, 76; Badenoch 2008, 70). The audience of Through the Night certainly recognized the song, and in combination with the images of the execution it might have had a thoroughly ‘disturbing’ effect. For the interplay of the individual elements of this sequence, the positioning of Wilms is relevant. In the novel, following Scholz’s descriptions based on his autobiographical experiences, he stands below the hill and watches the mass murder from a distance; only very discreetly the author gives isolated hints that Wilms may have been closer to the pit. Scholz constructed his protagonist as a spectator. This rhetoric of the passive, ‘average’ German who did nothing wrong dominated the discourse on World War II in early

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Figure 2.12.  Jürgen Wilms at the pit. Screenshot from Am grünen Strand der Spree (NWRV, 1960, dir. Fritz Umgelter).

West Germany. Even former SS men testifying before German investigative authorities recurred to this motif: “During a visit to Mogilev, I happened to take part in an execution of Jews as a witness,” Hans Siegling (1962, Interrogation, 886) from the Einsatzkommando 8 deposed at the State Office of Criminal Investigation in Kiel, for instance. The claim to have been a ‘witness’ worked as an argument for innocence, as the categories of witness and perpetrator are usually mutually exclusive in both legal and epistemic terms; a person suspected of a crime cannot serve as a deponent. Moreover, since the late 1950s, Holocaust survivors increasingly appeared publicly as witnesses (Wieviorka 2005); anyone who called himself ‘witness’ under these circumstances consequently dismissed any guilt, and implied instead that he or she was an injured party.26 Back in the film, Wilms is shown in a close-up shot, standing at the edge of the pit. While in the voice-over he continues to portray himself as a witness and spectator of the execution, he stands, of all places, where only the perpetrators could stand. He approaches the crime scene until he is exceptionally close; a viewer defending the image of the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht referred to this scene explaining in a survey that it was “a bit exaggerated, because a Wehrmacht member would never have gotten to the edge of the pit through the checkpoints” (Infratest, Viewers’ Survey, 6). Today’s viewers are likely to interpret it differently, as we now know that the presence of Wehrmacht personnel at the edge of an execution pit was by no means an ‘exaggerated’ image. The edited close-ups of the armbands of Latvian executioners acting “in the service of the German Wehrmacht” further remind us that Wilms, as a member of this very Wehrmacht, is complicit in this war crime. Thereby the film suggests Wilms’s complicity in a much more obtrusive way than either the novel or the radio play—which, in this respect, makes Umgelter’s version of Through the Night far ahead of its time. As Wulf Kansteiner (2019b) has shown, the portrayal of ‘average Germans’ as passive witnesses

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to the Holocaust was a common rhetoric on West German television until the late 1960s; any claims that those ‘average Germans’ could also have been perpetrators did not surface until the 1970s and 1980s. Through the Night thus introduced motifs that would only much later find their way to the West German public on a larger scale. The long close-ups of brassards and the images of shoes and bare feet illustrate how Umgelter gradually abandons the classical rules of film style in the execution scene and tries to implement the fragmentary, fractured language of Scholz’s novel. The ‘rounded’ narrative that characterizes the film up to this point is abandoned in the second half of the execution scene. The director contrasts details with panoramic shots of big crowds of people walking toward their deaths. The camera quickly pans back and forth, switching between the different perspectives of the victims and the perpetrators. At one point we see close-up shots of the SS man and the executioners, followed by Wilms looking down on the victims from above. The score consists of interwoven sounds of the machine-gun salvos, Wilms’s voice-over monologue, and the Yiddish song of the Andrew Sisters. Umgelter ‘spares’ the viewer the sight of the child being killed, which Scholz describes in so much detail in the novel. He also shows no corpses; at the moments Jews are shot, there is a cut and the subsequent shot shows Latvian gunmen or Wilms. At the end of the scene, when Wilms throws the cigarette case into the pit as a “burial offering,” a policeman shoos him away. He scrambles until he finds his unit. He reports to his officer several weeks or even months later, however, as Umgelter ‘fast forwards’ the chronology of the film. We see Wilms in the guardroom, the Eiserne Kreuz (Iron Cross) he has since been awarded pinned to his uniform. Looking back, he remembers the execution in Orsha and Ruth Esther; in a semi-close-up, we see him at the table writing; again, in voice-over, we hear his thoughts. In this way, Umgelter emphasizes that the preceding account of the massacre is individual memory; however, as we are still ‘within the diary,’ it is ‘memory within memory.’ Hence after the end of the execution scene, Umgelter employs similar stylistic instruments as Westphal in his radio play: by emphasizing the subjective character of memory, he virtually relativizes the authentication methods employed earlier. Wilms concludes his report with a paraphrase of the Polish national anthem: “Jeszcze Niemcy nie zginęły. Noch ist Deutschland nicht verloren, solange wir leben” (Germany is not yet lost, as long as we live). The meaning of these words, however, is explained again by Lepsius, after the scene changes back to the Jockey Bar in West Berlin. Researchers on Through the Night so far disagree on the interpretation of Wilms’s diary, especially in its televisual version. While some see Umgelter’s version as a game changer in West Germany’s memory culture, others perceive it as a clever continuation of the historical relativism of the 1950s. For

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Knut Hickethier (2000, 94), the depiction of the Orsha massacre is a caesura in television history; Hans Schmid (2011), Marcus Stiglegger (2015), and Fabian Bähr (2015) share Hickethier’s view. According to Peter Seibert, the television adaptation even “broke with the taboo of images” (Seibert 2001, 74). Kobi Kabalek (2012) interprets the ambiguous execution sequence as an attempt to link historical facts with the postwar discourse of memory. For Lars Koch (2002), however, the television version of Wilms’s diary is merely another expression of West Germany’s memory culture, aiming at “a moderate confrontation with the war of extermination on the Eastern Front for the directly or indirectly affected television audience” (Koch 2002, 80). The multiperspectivity of its reception is specific of the media complex; it illustrates the arduous formation and negotiation of rules of sayability as well as the entangled memory culture on a microlevel. Indeed, depending on where we focus our attention, Through the Night provides material for different and sometimes highly contradictory readings. In the novel, the ‘blanks’ signaled topics that only selectively entered the public discourse after the publication. In 1958, journalists at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted court witnesses testifying on the implied massacre during the Ulm trial, reporting how Germans collected the valuables of Jews, how the Jews were forced to dig their own graves and to undress, and how they had to watch the deaths of their family members and neighbors before falling into the pit themselves, seemingly lifeless (“Massenerschießungen” 1958; “Richter stellen sich” 1958; Wohner 1958; Krammer 1958). As the court proceedings dealt with crimes similar to the one described by Scholz and filmed by Umgelter, the Ulm trial could have provided a relevant reference for the television adaptation. Anticipating the results of my analysis, however, I already have to dismiss this assumption; direct references to the Ulm trial are hardly available among the reactions to the film.

Affective Reactions Holocaust imagery on television is no longer unusual for today’s viewers, but Through the Night was the first opportunity for most West Germans to see detailed footage of the Holocaust in their own living rooms. What reactions did these affectively charged images trigger? Did former Wehrmacht soldiers contrast the film with their own memories? What were the differences, if any, between the reactions in the media and those outside the mediated public? Umgelter’s strategy of adapting the film to the aesthetics and narrative patterns of the time apparently had an effect. Numerous reviews27 attributed

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absolute credibility and authenticity specifically to the execution scene: “The . . . broadcast translated [the novel] into images, images that no one can avoid, as they virtually scream out historical truth in the most brutal, barely bearable form, which, if we already know it, we must at least hold on to with our eyes,” wrote the Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (3 April 1960).28 The reviewers attested the film an “inner truth” (Der Kurier, 23 March 1960); symptomatic descriptions included “uncompromising honesty” (Der Tagesspiegel, 24 March 1960), “unsparing realism” (Westfalen-Blatt, 25 March 1960), and images “appallingly drawn from life” (Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 March 1960). The Telegraf (24 March 1960) emphasized the authenticity of the fictional dialogue: “Younger people ask in shock: ‘Is that really what happened?’ And the answer must be: ‘yes.’” The magazine Das freie Wort (2 April 1960), affiliated with the West German market-liberal party FDP, asserted that “everyone who experienced and suffered on the Russian Front will attest to the filmmakers after the first episode, ‘That is exactly how it was!’” Ernst Johann, the reviewer of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (28 March 1960), went even further and asked: “How many ‘decent Germans’ may have recognized themselves in Wilms?”—as the empathetic tone suggests, however, the writer considered Wilms rather a passive bystander than a possible accomplice. The majority of reviewers did not name perpetrators, and semantically tended toward evasive passive constructions, as here in the Rheinische Post (24 March 1960): “Jewish men, women and children were shot.” Hardly anyone questioned the portrayal of a German soldier as a witness to a mass murder— on the contrary, the Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (3 April 1960), for example, even praised the depiction. The mass execution itself appeared to be an abstract concept, such as a “horrible inferno” (Der Kurier, 23 March 1960). As already mentioned, while this may well have been conceivable in 1960, no direct reference was made to the Ulm trial, which had certainly caused an uproar at the time. Considering the many voices describing Wilms’s diary as realistic or even ascribing documentary value to it, the statement of the Stader Tageblatt (26  March 1960) stands out: “You should approach such material only if you have urgent and genuine statements to make. It is not done with a plumsoft black-and-white painting of secretly grumbling, leaden privates, loyal Sonderkommandos, sadistically grinning SS officers, non-German executioners recruited from the population, and the washed-out moral conflicts of a corporal.”29 The Westfälischer Anzeiger (24 March 1960) expressed similar concerns: “Generally the Germans, with the exception of a piffling sergeant, were almost frighteningly good fellows, and mass executions were of course carried out by Poles and other foreign races.” Apparently, both the Stader Tageblatt and the Westfälischer Anzeiger expected more from a t­elevision ­production

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that had been advertised as a “tough examination of the unresolved past” (R.H. 1960). Many of the reviews are solely initialed or not signed at all. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that most texts were written by men, as journalism at the turn of the 1960s was still an almost entirely male-dominated profession. The authors’ ages are difficult to assess as well, but in all likelihood numerous veterans from the Eastern Front were among them, a point that lends additional authority to the reviews; it is not an exaggeration to claim that parallels between the film and the affirmation of reviewers expressing that it shows ‘real events’ specifically served to authenticate the execution sequence in Through the Night. However, the authentication procedure also ran opposite, with Umgelter’s film functioning as a simulacrum (Baudrillard 1993, 50–53): men of the Wehrmacht generation invoked this fictional footage to authenticate their views of the war, usually using vague formulations that did not address the singularity of their actual individual experience. When the author of Das freie Wort writes about “everyone who experienced and suffered on the Russian Front,” he implies that, for him, a universal truth of the war existed and that it had to be observed. This is how the idea consolidated in the West German public that the majority of Germans had fought on the Eastern Front against their will, and occasionally were plagued by remorse. Self-critical views, such as those from the Stader Tageblatt, however, were much less common. What did the supposedly ‘realistic’ images of the first episode of Through the Night ‘do’ to the viewers? Kansteiner (2019a, 24) claims that television creates an illusion of ‘non-engagement,’ allowing its audience to assume the position of a bystander. However, the reactions to Through the Night prove even more: fifteen years after the end of World War II, West German viewers identified themselves primarily with the victims. The daily Telegraf (24 March 1960), for example, described “the horrible, terrible, gruesome, too quickly forgotten truth that jumped at the people in front of the screen.” The notion that images ‘attacked’ the audience was very prevalent in the reviews, as well as statements that the execution sequence was almost unbearable, that you could hardly “sit it out” or “endure” watching it on television (Der Tag, 24 March 1960; Westdeutsche Allgemine Zeitung, 23 March 1960). Those statements were not directed against the film, however, rather the contrary: the majority of contemporary reviews expressed praise for Umgelter’s craftsmanship, which, so they said, brought the war ‘into the living rooms.’ Reviewers of the Berliner Morgenpost (24 March 1960) and the Süddeutsche Zeitung (29 March 1960) claimed that the film had “taken their breath away,” and the writer of the Telegraf (24 March 1960) was apparently unable to sleep after seeing the program. There was also talk of “abusing” the viewers (Westfälische Rundschau, 23 March 1960) and of what could be considered “acceptable”

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for them (Generalanzeiger Wuppertal, 23 March 1960), as well as of a “bang” (Untitled 1960, from Fernseh-Kritik). The pictures clearly went ‘under the skin’ of the (re)viewers—a better proof of the affective effect of the images can hardly be found. But what were the intentions of the reviewers? As I have already indicated, the majority of them—if this can be verified—were men, the older ones with their own war experiences. Was it not cynical to be shocked by fictional imagery when reality had shown worse? Maybe the shock effect was partly caused by the fact that the footage of the massacre was unexpectedly seen in the familiar surroundings of the home. But the critics’ statements about the images were as vague as the assurances about their authenticity. Sleeplessness or discomfort in front of the television can be attributed to ‘horror,’ but also to returning war memories. Specifically large national newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Die Welt cleverly employed nebulous formulations with little meaning; their writers hardly ever specified what exactly ‘shocked’ them about the film. Instead, the public impression increasingly hardened that Germans had not known about the atrocities committed during World War II but had only learned of them on television. The general assessment of the first episode, however, was largely positive. The Frankfurter Neue Presse, for example, wrote that Through the Night would “go down in television history because of its first part. As one person dared to do what no feature film has yet risked: to depict the horror of the extermination of the Jews” (Kirn 1960). Other newspapers wrote about the “confrontation with yesterday” (Westfälische Rundschau, 23 March 1960), about the attempt to “come to terms with the past” (Mittag, 26 March 1960) and about a “bitter reckoning” (Die Zeit, 1 April 1960). There was a broad consensus both in the national and local media, as brought out by the Welt am Sonntag (27 March 1960): “What cannot and must not be forgotten must be overcome, must be dealt with. As for the individual, this applies to our people. The guilt is unredeemed.” The educated upper-middle class, from which most reviewers were probably recruited, thus regarded The Diary of Jürgen Wilms as a positive example of ‘coping’ with the past—tangible ­suggestions about how the Vergangenheitsbewältigung could proceed, however, failed to appear. Private reactions were different. Although most viewers seemed to be affected, they drew different and often more emotional conclusions than professional critics. “The anger of the affected,” as the Frankfurter Neue Presse reported, “gave vent in letters to the broadcasting stations, because one [did] not want to see how horrible reality was” (Kirn 1960). The isolated letters that have survived confirm this comment. A woman from Mönchengladbach, for example, wrote to the director that “at that time I was still too small to

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­ nderstand all that. Only through television can I really ‘experience’ the war. u What is the point of such inhumane programs?” (Viewer [A.G.], n.d. Letter to Umgelter). The viewer’s statement was typical, as evidenced by a survey conducted through the Infratest company: the respondents showed admiration for the new medium and for the filmmakers’ achievement, but the majority rejected the execution sequence. Compared to emotional accusations of ‘fouling the nest’ and ‘disturbing the peace,’ positive opinions remained few and far between. In this sense, the reactions to the film version of Wilms’s diary resemble the outrage almost forty years later aimed at the so-called first Wehrmacht exhibition (Heer 1999). In their introduction, the authors of the published Infratest report point out the strong affective impact of the film: “Numerical richness as well as in many cases particular detail of the available spontaneous expressions leave no doubt that today’s film ‘interested—kept in suspense—shook up’ and also ‘repelled’ the viewers to an extraordinary degree, but in any case ‘forced’ them to ‘think’ and to make their own statement” (Infratest, Viewers’ Survey, 1960, 1). Although the specific meaning of the expressions “numerical richness” and “particular detail” is not documented, it seems that an indifferent position toward the first episode of Through the Night was hardly possible. The audience was upset about the “gruesome” images, but even more about the fact that the film “publicly leafs through the German guilt” (ibid., 3). Despite isolated confirmations of the authenticity of the material, highlighted in statements such as “I saw something like this myself during the war,” and some demands for more reporting from “our darkest time” (ibid., 4), outraged and concerned viewers set the tone, with arguments such as “most people have certainly had enough of war stories . . . The executions of Jews, they were too broad” (ibid., 7); “we should finally let rest the events of that time” (ibid., 9). In contrast to the media, the majority of which were in favor of at least some kind of dealing with the past, many viewers did not want this part of German history to be pursued any further or in such detail. WDR public broadcasting, for example, received a letter from a former soldier who asked if it was not time “to finally put an end to these kinds of programs that accuse us over and over again?” (Viewer [R.B.] 1960, Letter to Hartmann). Another put it more casually: “Does something like this have to be served up again?” (Infratest, Viewers’ Survey, 1960, 9). Six years earlier, Harriet Wegener had anticipated such a reaction almost verbatim when she cautioned that “most people do not like it when Hitler’s executions of Jews are served up again and again” (Wegener 1954, Letter to Scholz). The difference between the ‘positive’ consternation of the press and the ‘negative’ consternation of individuals points to subliminal processes of opinion formation in West Germany at the time. According to Kansteiner, television in later years contributed to steering Germans away from a “col-

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lective of former Nazis and bystanders into a democratic society that maintains a surprisingly critical attitude toward its own past” (Kansteiner 2002, 577). In this regard, the reactions to Through the Night illustrate the role that not only television but also reviews played in this process. Tobias EbbrechtHartmann (2020) uses the example of recent television productions to argue that media responses—and not the productions themselves—are decisive for the ‘­resonance’ of historical motifs in memory culture. This mechanism reaches back to at least the early postwar period, as Through the Night demonstrates: while numerous individual viewers held on to a culture of forgetting, journalists were already calling for an ‘overcoming’ of the past. What exactly they meant, however, remained unclear for a long time. The ‘overcoming’ or ‘coming to terms’ with the past were rather “linguistic templates that on the one hand condemned National Socialism, but on the other stripped it of any concreteness” (Berghoff 1998, 104). Of course, television critics were not the only writers and public figures who would involve the audience in the new discourse. A similar disparity could already be observed during the Ulm trial. Journalists tended to welcome the verdict while not questioning the fact that the defendants were convicted only of being complicit in murder, and that hence Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich were still considered the main perpetrators (Fröhlich 2011; ma. 1958). The population, by contrast, remained predominantly skeptical of any attempts to come to terms with the past. In this context, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the trials triggered a “certain unease” even among “contemporaries who are not suspected of having learned nothing from our past” (“Richter stellen sich” 1958). In the same year, the reactions to the installation of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg turned out to be similar. While German media representatives seemed convinced of its necessity, the population predominantly reacted in a negative way (Krösche 2008, 349–51; Weinke 2011). Regardless of legal proceedings, political decisions, or media images of history triggering a social debate, the professionalized public and the individual opinions of West Germans did not seem to merge into a coherent collective memory (Berghoff 1998). Rather, they formed a ‘dual’ memory culture, according to Aleida Assmann (2005, 131), still visible sixty years after the end of the war, divided into a public memory of guilt on the one hand, and the private sphere in which individual suffering was in the foreground, on the other. Furthermore, the difference between the reception of the book and of the television adaptation is striking. Most readers commenting on Through the Night omitted the description of the massacre, while viewers of the film almost exclusively referred to this sequence. This difference, as I argue, is not only caused by the fact that it is different media with specific modes of reception: the written word has a different effect than television images screened

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into the living room. In fact, between the publication of the book and the television broadcast the West German memory culture changed. This change is best visible (or readable) in the language of the reviewers who use phrases such as “die Vergangenheit bewältigen” (coping with the past) and “sich mit der Vergangeneheit auseinandersetzen” (dealing with the past). However, they did not make clear what exactly they meant with these phrases. Within five years, the very communication about war crimes changed; the ‘silence’ or rather ‘speechlessness’ that had characterized the book’s reception in the mid-1950s seemed to have evolved by the time the miniseries was broadcast. A new era dawned in which firmly established terms described the history of the war. The discursive development was, among other things, a result of the legal processing of Nazi crimes: the number of investigations against Nazi perpetrators increased significantly after the Ulm trial and the installation of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg (Eichmüller 2008, 626), which in turn made Nazi crimes an increasingly frequent topic in the media. In 1959 specifically, numerous events fueled a debate about how to deal with the Nazi legacy, including, above all, the abovementioned antisemitic riots, but also the movie Roses for the Prosecutor by Wolfgang Staudte, as well as novels such as The Tin Drum by Günter Grass and Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll. The latter, incidentally, first appeared as a feature novel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and only later as a book. Böll’s novel traces personal continuities between Nazi- and West Germany. In the second half of the 1950s, The Diary of Anne Frank also gained enormous popularity, although it had already been available in German since 1950. Between 1957 and 1958 alone, half a million copies were sold. This success led to several stage adaptations and a film, shown in German theaters in the ‘watershed year of 1959’ (Lorenz 2011; Berghoff 1998, 99; Kittel 1993, 276–81; Scholz, S. 2011). Again, in the same year, Adorno gave his famous lecture in which he addressed the meaning of ‘coming to terms with the past’; HR public radio broadcast it on 7 February 1960, six weeks before the first episode of Through the Night was shown on television. The tribute to the execution scene as well as the general consensus among journalists regarding the need to ‘come to terms with the past’ reflect the new use of language mentioned above; meanwhile, letters and the Infratest survey show that the discursive turn was initially limited to the public sphere. Individual viewers still preferred to ‘let bygones be bygones’ rather than ‘come to terms’ with the past.

Conclusion: Contradictions Stefan Scherer and Moritz Baßler agree that Through the Night does not ignore guilt and is not a sign of the suppression of Nazi history from the

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collective memory. Rather, they argue, the novel as the origin of the media complex encourages cheerfulness and joy without fading out the past war (Scherer 2020, 124; Baßler 2020, 36–37). This attempt at a pointed interpretation of the novel, however, is at odds with the other hypothesis brought forward by both literary scholars, namely that Through the Night embodied a polyphony of opinions, genres, and aesthetics. Scherer’s and Baßler’s analyses of polyphony in the novel, radio play, and television miniseries can, as I want to conclude, be reconciled very well with the polyphonic mnemonic discourse in Through the Night. The media complex and all the reactions it triggered illustrate that there is no such thing as the one cultural memory, not even on the microlevel of a book chapter. We can only speak of memory cultures in the plural which influence and refer to each other yet constitute a dynamic and moving web of discourses and images. The depiction of the massacre in the novel, radio play, and television adaptation allows many interpretations: formulations such as “breaking with the taboo of images” (Seibert 2001), and statements about a “relativizing interpretation of the Nazi past” (Koch 2002). They are not mutually exclusive but express different readings of the media complex. This refers not only to the general judgment of Through the Night, but also to its individual elements; Scholz’s synesthetic style, for example, may have led to strongly affective reactions in some readers and to a rejection in others, due to its “kitschy undertone” (Kreuzer 1957). Each version of the media complex includes strongly affective elements, signaled by ‘ruptures,’ ‘gaps,’ and ‘disruptions.’ They refer to the bodily, extra-linguistic experience of war from the perpetrator’s perspective, which can hardly be transferred into a discursive form. Through the Night confirms the basic assumptions of affect theory as proposed by Brian Massumi, which so far has primarily been applied to Holocaust literature and art created from a victim’s perspective. Ernst van Alphen’s work is therefore concerned with the fundamental question of how the trauma of Holocaust survivors is expressed when it cannot be communicated discursively. This approach is not simply applicable to artifacts that deal with perpetrators or accomplices, however. It remains unclear which emotions are hidden behind the artistic strategies of the ‘rupture’ and the ‘gap’: fear of prosecution, or perhaps shame, after all? The ethical consequences of a narrative with gaps are also problematic, as crimes neither verbalized nor visualized pave the way for an ambivalent approach: if you wanted, you could see clear evidence of German responsibility for the murder of millions of civilians in the execution scene; if you did not, you could continue to use stylistic ‘gaps’ and ‘ruptures’ in order to conceal guilt. They made it possible, as Ernestine Schlant (1999, 36) noted regarding West German literature of the 1950s, not to address issues that should have been addressed urgently.

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The different reactions to the imagery of the Orsha massacre illustrate both the synchronic complexity of memory culture and its diachronic development. Between the publication of the novel and the television adaptation, a change marked the West German public opinion regarding Vergangenheitsbewältigung. In the mid-1950s, racist comparisons, appeals to ‘hearsay,’ and a ‘colonial’ perspective of Eastern Europe were not uncommon. Five years later, terms such as ‘coping’ and ‘coming to terms with the past’ dominated public reactions to the television miniseries, albeit in very vague interpretations. Individual viewers, however, were only moderately impressed, and openly wanted to ‘let bygones be bygones.’ There has been a broad consensus in memory studies that for the formation of collective memories, as heterogeneous as they may be, the media probably play the most important role. Consequently, the media construed the notion of ‘authentic’ history by pointing to Scholz’s autobiographical experience, and confirming the ‘authenticity’ of the imagery. The depiction of the Orsha massacre undoubtedly exceeded the limits of what could be said in the 1950s; it had a strong impact because the media image of the Holocaust, apart from extermination and concentration camps, was new and different from the established patterns of representation at the time. Despite isolated voices stating the opposite, the majority of reviewers attributed a high degree of authenticity to Umgelter’s images. Nowadays, depictions of the massacres in all their versions have lost their drastic effect: the images of the transport, the Latvian gunmen, and the torn soldier Wilms no longer generate the affective power they had over sixty years ago. Countless sources that have since come to light show that the reality was even worse, and many male readers, listeners, and viewers who were exposed to Through the Night between 1955 and 1960 must have known. Critical voices like Joachim Kaiser and Helmut Kreuzer, and the writers at Stader Tageblatt and Westfälischer Anzeiger, were rare. Instead of criticizing the fact that most readers, listeners, and viewers did not come to similarly critical conclusions, however, it is important to note that these contributions existed in the first place. After all, following the television miniseries Generation War in 2013, Ulrich Herbert was the only German historian who publicly questioned the narrative of the ‘good Germans’ who had suffered under ‘evil Nazis’ (Saryusz-Wolska and Piorun 2014)—which again illustrates how far ahead of its times the Orsha chapter in the media complex of Through the Night really was.

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Notes   1. Own emphasis.   2. Original emphasis.   3. Referring to Massumi, Dorata Golańska developed a concept of “affective connections,” which can be traced back to bodily encounters with memorial art (Golańska 2017).   4. Original emphasis.  5. Ernst Rowohlt simultaneously tried to win over notable conservative authors for his publishing house in order to offer a wide range of themes and positions (Oels 2003, 179–85).   6. The English translation is based on the chronology of the frame story: the gathering in the bar follows the telephone conversation. It is only after we have learned about Lepisus’s encounter with Wilms and the diary that Lepsius starts reading from it. There are no sources, however, to prove how this change was introduced.   7. Original emphasis.   8. Notable examples are Heinrich Böll’s Stranger, Bear Word to the Spartans we. . . (orig. 1950), Erich Maria Remarque’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die (orig. 1954), as well as numerous depictions of the “generation in tanks” (Ächtler 2013) such as Theodor Plievier’s bestseller Stalingrad (orig. 1945).   9. See Introduction. 10. Original square brackets and omissions. 11. Original emphasis. 12. For more information about the ‘liquidation’ of the Orsha ghetto, see Prologue. 13. I quote differently from that in the published English translation which reads: “And then they shot the poor devil, too. As an accomplice” (TN 49), suggesting that the soldier was shot by the SS because he saw too much. In German, however, it reads: “Und schoß, das arme Schwein. . . schoß mit als Komplice!” which means that the soldier joined the shooters and therefore became an accomplice (AGSS 55). The difference between the translation and the original is probably a mistake, not an intentional change. 14. Concerning the killings of children in Orsha, see Walkhoff (1962, Interrogation, 1176) and Vinnitsa (2011, 303). 15. Own emphasis. 16. Tobias Ebbrecht (2011, 286) detected the motif of contrasting child victims with cruel perpetrators in multiple Holocaust movies. 17. The entry about Hans Scholz in the German Wikipedia (last accessed on 15 January 2023) suggests that the figure of Ruth Esther from Through the Night is a reference to Ruth Baumgarte, a German painter and one of Scholz’s students to whom he gave painting lessons in the late 1940s. However, in the estate of Scholz there are no documents to prove this claim. The only feature the fictional Ruth Esther Loria shares with the real Ruth Baumgarte is their first name, which was quite a common one among Jewish women in Germany in those days, hence it may just be a coincidence. 18. The extensive research on the culture of shame is mostly focused on the immediate postwar era—e.g., Jeffrey Olick’s In the House of the Hangman (2005, 270–329), which discusses the interrelation of shame and guilt discourses. Aleida Assmann und Ute Frevert (1999, 97–139) reflect on the ‘shameful’ handling of the legacy of 1945. Ulrike Weckel (2012) similarly analyzed West German reactions to allied re-education campaigns. 19. The letters to the publisher and author are part of the Scholz estate at the Academy of Arts Berlin; the exact number is hard to determine, as some fall under multiple categories, such as letters from friends commenting on Scholz’s book. In some cases, only carbon copies of the author’s answers are preserved, not the letters he received.

142  •  Microhistories of Memory 20. The Medusa metaphor is interesting: Siegfried Kracauer used it some years later in his Theory of Film (1960) as a starting point for his reflections on the relation between film and reality. This section indirectly constitutes one of the first accounts on the (ir)representability of the Holocaust (Koch and Gaines 1991). 21. The prize was named after the former chair of the Jewish Community in Berlin, Heinrich Stahl, who was in office from 1933 until his deportation to Theresienstadt in 1942. 22. “Classical film style” means a linear narrative, following the line of vision, with almost ‘invisible’ editing, a synchronization of video and audio, etc. (Bordwell 1997). 23. Unless otherwise noted, the newspaper quotes originate from the WDR (1960) collection “Im Urteil der Presse: ‘Am grünen Stand der Spree.’” 24. Literature on the depiction of World War II in fiction and film of the 1950s is substantial. For literary studies, see Norman Ächtler 2013 and Ursula Heuenkamp 2001. 25. Own emphasis. 26. For witnesses in Through the Night, see my essay “‘Ich war gezwungen zuzusehen’. Zu Holocausttätern, die sich als Zeugen inszenieren” (Saryusz-Wolska 2022). 27. Shortly after the first screening of Through the Night, WDR published a collection of reviews—a first in the history of West German television. Although the editors promised an “almost complete collection” (WDR 1960, 41), the book only contains 70 of about 150 reviews. The selection is understandable, as most omitted texts are short notes, reprints from other magazines, or paraphrases of the broadcaster’s press releases. 28. Unless otherwise noted, the newspaper quotes originate from the WDR (1960) collection “Im Urteil der Presse: ‘Am grünen Stand der Spree.’” 29. Original emphasis.

Chapter 3

Third Story Media and Technologies

8 Ever since Jacques Le Goff (1992) published his essay collection History and Memory in the late 1970s—unfortunately ‘discovered’ much too late by memory scholars—we know that the history of memory follows media history. The German and English translations were not published until 1992, the very same year as the German original of Jan Assmann’s groundbreaking book Cultural Memory and Early Civilization (2011), whose theories are in many ways related to Le Goff’s. A year later, psychologist Douwe Draaisma submitted his dissertation Metaphors of Memory (2000)—originally in Dutch—analyzing the transformations of memory concepts through developments in media technology. The scholars independently, it seems, made similar observations, each in a different field. The Digital Revolution was dawning, and the impact of new technologies on cultural memory, opening up new possibilities for archiving and updating the past, was already observable. Although Le Goff, Assmann, and Draaisma addressed contemporary media changes only marginally, the concurrency certainly played a role in the success of their ideas. In the following decade, Aleida Assmann continued to explore the ‘history of memory as media history’ (Assmann 2004). However, the transnational reception of German contributions on cultural memory still focuses on the ways of dealing with the Nazi past; the media-technological component, which I consider to be the nucleus of the German academic tradition of memory studies, gets much less attention. All accounts mentioned are based on the assumption that every media innovation significantly changes the modes of memory. Collective memory

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originated in oral traditions, hence through the development of language; written language enabled the preservation of memory across generations, and with the invention of print, it could be easily reproduced. Photography expanded the field of visual memory and conveyed the feeling ‘capturing’ the past—the motion picture accelerated this development. Radio and television, in turn, offered the possibility of participating in live events from around the world. Finally, digital media brought new storage and selection methods, but also discussions about manipulations of memory and its authenticity. Furthermore, changes in media during the past century influenced images of history. As Vivian Sobchack stated: “These new twentieth-century technologies of representation and narration (most significantly television) have increasingly collapsed the temporal distance between past, present, and future that structured our previously conceived notion of the temporal dimensions of what we call history (as the latter is differentiated from experience)” (Sobchack 1996, 4–5). Just as Marshall McLuhan once coined the slogan “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964, 7–21), the history of memory can be summarized by the phrase “the medium is the memory” (Erll 2011a, 115). The reference to McLuhan is not just a simple analogy, as in the 1980s, scholars such as Jan and Aleida Assmann followed the Toronto School of Communication theories with great interest. Eric A. Havelock’s studies, for instance, are a particularly important basis for Jan Assmann’s idea that written language plays a crucial role in the development of cultural memory. Interestingly, Assmann makes little reference to other scholars affiliated with the Toronto School, including Harold A. Innis, even though Innis’s account is important for two reasons. First, he investigated the role of different linguistic and written cultures for the evolution of ‘monopolies of knowledge’ (Innis 1951); second, he was among the first to claim that technology and materiality have an impact on the social order. Innis convincingly shows that the beginnings of the press, for example, are linked not only to the formation of a public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century—as had been widely assumed since Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory—but also to the development of wood and paper industries. Innis thus illustrates the global change in raw materials and technologies, and points at the importance of the periphery for the emergence of the power centers of public life. The public, who existed through the press, in turn depended on industries funding the press through advertising (Innis 1952). Innis, asking how technological conditions extend into the formations of knowledge, has received considerable attention in historiography; he could also have had a significant impact on memory studies, as, for instance, the relationship between the emergence of ‘monopolies of knowledge’ and a powerful public on the one hand, and the evolution of national memory cultures on the other, are of central importance.

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Shortly before the concept of cultural memory became mainstream in the humanities, Friedrich Kittler developed the theory proposing that media shaped the human mind and not vice versa. In his two most important books, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (orig. 1985) and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (orig. 1986), the main focus is on the relationship between the respective technical device and its user. Kittler’s concept is probably most vividly illustrated by his remarks on the typewriter, especially on the traces of machine writing in Friedrich Nietzsche’s prose: according to Kittler, the novel device affected the philosopher’s work (Kittler 1990, 197–205). McLuhan’s theory is more about an inverse relationship: he views media as human “extensions” (McLuhan 1964). Although, with the exception of Jan and Aleida Assmann, few memory scholars explicitly mention the Toronto School, it nevertheless had a lasting impact on memory studies—not least as many working in the field in the 1990s and early 2000s ‘grew up’ reading McLuhan or Havelock, but rarely Innis. The latent influence of McLuhan’s media concept is most evident in Alison Landsberg’s book Prosthetic Memory: her account of mass media as ‘prostheses’ for collective memory is very close to McLuhan’s image of ‘extensions.’ Landsberg’s book, programmatic for scholarship on mediated memories, also illustrates, however, that the relationship between media and memory is reduced to cultural representations of the past. The technological-material structure of cinema and television only plays a minor role in Landsberg’s argumentation. Browsing through current journals and conference programs in the field of memory studies confirms the impression that scholars often discuss mediated memories but significantly less often the techniques behind them. The focus is on what memory consists of, what is included or excluded, and how that is the case. Looking at all analyses on political actions and symbolic expressions, the focus is obviously on the narratives and the representative modes of the past. In this study, the remediation of the ‘difficult past’1 (i.e., the murder of the Orsha Jews in November 1941 depicted in the media complex Through the Night) is of central interest as well. In contrast to existing research on media representations of the Holocaust, however, I would like to emphasize the material and technological character of the media. Indeed, as Gabriele Schabacher points out, “they are tangible only in the shape of infrastructural and spatial arrangements. Media, understood this way, exist only in or as infrastructure” (Schabacher 2013, 129). Apart from the ever-growing curiosity about the digital world, the interest among memory scholars in the infrastructural aspects of media is rather modest. One way to compensate would be to follow either Kittler or the Toronto School; another option is the actor–network theory, as it emphasizes—similar to infrastructure studies—the necessity of uncovering hidden processes. Representatives of the actor–network theory such as Bruno Latour,

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Steven Woolgar, Michel Callon, and John Law demonstrate the importance of, for instance, diagrams, microscopes, and reagents, all indispensable in the construction of scientific facts. When considering the development of nation states, constructed not only through symbolic and political practice but also through everyday “telephone systems, paperwork, and geographical triangulation points,” technology needs to be taken into account as well (Law 2006, 7). This observation inevitably references Innis, who wrote about the importance of the lumber and fishing industries and North American transportation systems for the evolution of a national consciousness in Canada. I argue that in memory culture, we observe analogous mechanisms of the construction of symbolic orders. Only the “inseparable entanglement” (Schabacher 2013, 133) of actors and media techniques enable the mediatization of memories. For the creation and preservation of cultural memory, material, and technological aspects such as book formats, screen resolutions, and reception are of no less importance than the mediated images themselves. In short, collective memory, like all cultural techniques, is built on an infrastructure that remains largely invisible to their users (Star 1999; Schabacher 2013). In attempting to implement the actor–network theory in memory studies, however, the aim is not to adopt the relevant vocabulary in its entirety, but rather to consider the idea that non-human actors—referred to as ‘actants’ by Latour (1999)—have agency in the process of constructing memories as well. In the process of shaping memories, actants are neither passive objects nor external instruments, but subjects of the memory-cultural network. According to Latour, the network of human and non-human actors establishes its own societal theory; applied to memory culture, this means that the network regulates the construction of memory itself. It is not ‘politics’ or ‘discourse’ that help decide how memory culture works, but, as Latour (2005, 11–12) would probably put it, the assembly of initially inconspicuous elements. In order to scrutinize how the material and technological dimensions of media affect memory culture, it is worth taking a deeper look into the production processes in publishing houses or broadcasting studios. Their archives contain images of history that have never been conveyed to the public, but also give insight into the ‘black box’ of memory culture (Latour 1987, 1–17; Latour 1999).2 Derived from cybernetics, Latour uses the notion of ‘black box’ as a metaphor for the invisible processes of constructing scientific facts. In engineering, the black box is an algorithm or circuit between the input— such as a keystroke—and the output—such as the appearance of a letter on the screen. Users usually do not think about how this mechanism works; they just want to write a text on the computer with as little effort as possible. According to Latour, similar processes can be observed in the social environment of science: the routine processes between phrasing a research question and publishing the results are invisible and incomprehensible to most peo-

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ple. To describe and structure them is the task of the sociology of knowledge. Accordingly, I postulate that the mechanisms of memory culture are also hidden in a black box. The focus of memory studies so far has been on the input—in the case of this study it would be the ‘difficult past’—and the output—the media representation of the ‘difficult past.’ The socio-technical construction of memory culture, however, remains hidden in the black box. The first story on Through the Night in this book was devoted to human actors and their social actions. Yet, the founders of infrastructure studies, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, criticize the actor-centered approach for its overly strong focus on ‘heroic actors’ (Bowker and Star 1999, 34). In their view, the focus should be less on the ‘heroes’ in the spotlight but more on the infrastructural conditions in which the actors act. Following this suggestion, I now examine memory making with a special focus on the actants and their agency. In Latour and Woolgar’s (1986, 47) concept, technical devices transfer diffuse processes into intelligible, discursive forms, such as diagrams; the authors refer to these processes as ‘inscriptions.’ By choosing this term Latour and Woolgar contribute to media theory (Gertenbach and Laux 2019, 84), especially as any object involved in inscribing—be it a computer, a microscope, or a chemical substance—advances to a medium that, as the Latin root of the term implies, acts as a ‘mediator.’ We observe something similar in the construction of representations of history: through media technologies, elusive ideas about the past are ‘translated’ into comprehensible narratives and images. In what follows, the ‘mediators’ range from conversations to television. To refer to the material properties of media, I occasionally speak also of ‘carriers’ or ‘devices’ describing individual objects such as books, newspapers, radios, and television sets. The great merit of Through the Night as a case study is the fact that the media complex comprises just about all technical means of transmission available in the 1950s and 1960s. The circulation of Hans Scholz’s book (1955), the serial publication in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1956), Gert Westphal’s radio play (1956), and Fritz Umgelter’s television adaptation (1960) occurred in the context of a rapid transformation of the West German media from book and radio to television cultures. Parts of the media complex were also mediated via records and readings. But the repeatedly failed plans for a motion picture should also be mentioned. All of these carriers played an active role in the construction of cultural memory; at the same time, their respective technical and material characteristics contributed to the fact that Through the Night, including the depiction of the Orsha massacre, could not permanently find its way into memory culture. No less interesting are the media-related meta-commentaries in the novel, radio play, and television production; Stephanie Heck (2020, 237–40) analyzed them under the headings of media self-reflexivity and self-referentiality.

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These aspects of Through the Night will be examined more closely in this chapter as well.

The Conversation The remediation of the Orsha massacre initially began without technological support. On 26 November 1941, shortly after returning from the execution site where Hans Scholz observed the murder of the Jews, he reported it to his superior: “The commander, a farmer and civilian, to whom, of course, a non-military excursion had to be reported, had me come . . . He offered some booze and, against the rule, let me sit down to give my report. I must have looked like that” (Scholz 1960b, Speech). In this immediate report, Scholz ‘translated’—to stay within the terminology of the actor–network ­theory—his affective impressions of the massacre into a discursive form. In memory studies, such moments are of particular importance: Maurice Halbwachs (1992, 37–41) has illustrated how the formation of memory is based on the act of narration: even if we only remember ‘for ourselves,’ we internally ‘translate’ the images into a narrative as if we were talking to another person. Although Halbwachs formulated his ideas almost a hundred years ago, today’s scholars confirm the importance of memory talks for the construction of memory (Welzer 2017, 16; Meise 2006; Mullen and Yi 1995). Unlike affective impressions, narrative forms of memory are comparatively easy to remediate—oral narratives, later ‘retranslated’ into other media. For this reason, I consider Scholz’s report to his commander as a possible trigger for the creation of Through the Night. By obeying the presumed order to report what he had seen immediately beforehand, the future novelist is forced to find words for the execution of the Orsha Jews, and construct a narrative about what he has witnessed. According to his own words, Scholz still had further memory talks about the events in Orsha during the war: “I already told the events at that time— without novelistic packaging—and there are quite a few people in this city to whom I poured out my heart during furloughs and who did not believe their ears, just as I had thought on the spot that I could not believe my eyes when I saw what should have never and nowhere been seen!” (Scholz 1960b, Speech). Today, historians are familiar with numerous examples of conversations that prove that German soldiers did talk about the extermination of the Jews (Neitzel and Welzer 2011, 39–40, 145). Such conversations are expressions of memory, which is conveyed orally and in passing (Welzer 2017, 16). While some things may be concealed from outsiders in order to paint a positive picture of oneself, more detailed information is often revealed within a close circle of those involved, as illustrated by a statement of former SS

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member Helmut Seitz about the executions by Einsatzkommando 8: “Among ourselves, we talked freely about the executions” (Seitz 1962, Interrogation, 458). It is not the actual conversations but rather the fact that the men talked ‘among themselves’ and ‘freely’ which is of concern; indeed, the ‘free’ conversation shapes both the form of expression, such as the use of colloquial terms, and the memories that come up along the way. The fact that certain topics are preferably transmitted in oral but not written or visual form, by the way, confirms the phrase ‘the medium is the memory’; because, as McLuhan argued, the medium affects both the form and the content. However, the oral communication among the soldiers cannot be equated with communicative memory, which is memory that is transmitted orally from one generation to another (Welzer 2010), because the conversational partners in the soldiers’ memory talks share their experiences, and hence are part of the same mnemonic communities: they knew from their own experience what was being talked about, so they did not need extensive explanations, detailed descriptions, or even complete sentences. One word was often enough to trigger the proper association. We should therefore talk about a ‘subcutaneous memory’ that is activated beyond established discourses of memory: fragmentary allusions are sufficient for a mutual, wordless understanding. If conversation partners can build on common knowledge or experience, they do not need to recount in detail in order to jointly remember. The statements, usually made in private, are easily understood by all, thanks to the common frame of reference. Sporadically it even happened that soldiers reported self-referentially, but rather uncritically, about their own perpetration. In a much-cited letter from the police secretary Walter Mattner to his wife, we read: “When the first vehicles [bringing the victims] arrived, my hands trembled a bit when I started firing, but you get used to it. At the tenth vehicle, I aimed calmly and shot with confidence at the women, children and numerous babies” (quoted in Ingrao 2013, 302). Later, the perspective of the eyewitness prevailed: instead of reporting in the first person singular, like Scholz or Mattner, former members of the Einsatzkommandos, interrogated after the war, usually reported either in the third person plural or in passive voice.3 Former Waffen-SS member Karl Strohhammer (1963, Interrogation, 1999), for instance, testified that it “was not only the SD that shot, but all members of EK 8 [Einsatzkommando 8] had to actively participate in these executions”; and former Gestapo (German secret police) officer Lorenz Bauer (1962, Interrogation, 998) claimed that “over time, individual Jews or occasionally families of Jews were picked up again and again.” The change of perspective is caused by specific frames of reference of these statements—on the one hand, the men were usually summoned as witnesses and not as defendants, and on the other hand, they felt under pressure to justify themselves. The majority therefore only wanted to

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have known ‘by hearsay’ about the war crimes. This expression eventually established itself as an inherent part of the perpetrators’ language (Stoll 2012, 218). It certainly was an alibi, especially as it was meant to indicate a spatial distance of the respective speaker from the atrocities. At the same time, the word ‘hearsay’ suggests that exchanges about the war crimes did happen. Suggestive examples include the much-cited ‘group experiment’: in a series of focus group discussions conducted by Theodor W. Adorno together with the staff of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1950, some of the participants admitted to having heard about the extermination of the Jews from family members or neighbors (Adorno 2010). One of the places where war experiences were part of conversations in the postwar period was, of course, the regulars’ table at the bar. The exclusive round of talks, reserved only for selected participants, was among the most important infrastructures of the ‘subcutaneous memory.’ Without family, in the smoky corner of the familiar bar, they could tell each other anything without risking that it would be overheard by ‘unauthorized’ persons. “Veterans wanted to tell and be told by others, orally and face to face,” writes Thomas Kühne (2006, 219) in his study on camaraderie. Interestingly, Scholz did not want to be a part of this kind of group, and he declined invitations to meetings of his former Wehrmacht unit (Scholz n.d. b, Letter to G.P.). Keeping a dismissive attitude toward ‘common regulars’ tables,’ the frame story of Through the Night depicts an evening in the upscale milieu of the West Berlin media world. At a table in the luxurious Jockey Bar, we initially read about an actor, an advertising executive, a screenwriter, and a former professional soldier who now also wants to work as an actor or as a film consultant. Before the men were drafted into the Wehrmacht, they had often met at the very same table. At the beginning of the evening in the Jockey Bar they decide to talk about cheerful things, but when former POW Joachim Lepsius reads out the diary of their mutual acquaintance Jürgen Wilms, the topic of war enters the conversation; only the mention of another mutual friend opens up space for lighter topics. German literature scholar Otto F. Best thus interprets the frame story of Through the Night as follows: “It is about a reunion and a healing. The fact that the reunion is solemnly celebrated should not obscure the fact that it is a deadly serious event. The Jockey Bar . . . is a place for sharing intimate experiences” (Best n.d., Letter to Hoffmann and Campe). In the first story told in the Jockey Bar, conversation as a medium of memory emerges even more clearly than in the frame story. Jürgen Wilms describes conversations of soldiers talking about mass executions. One soldier saw them in Novo-Borisov, a town on the Berezina River, others observed mass executions in Ukraine and Lithuania (TN 48). Both in the novel and in reality, the soldiers met in Orsha, as the town was a central hub for the German army on the Eastern Front due to the intersections of important rail

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lines and roads. In Through the Night, a courier traveling in the occupied territories clarifies that the observed executions are by no means military measures but rather the planned extermination of an entire ethnic group: “There are also some Jewish girls from Germany among them, and from Holland and France, wherever they could lay hands on them” (TN 48). These reports trigger Wilms’s need to see the execution of the Orsha Jews with his own eyes. Because the conversations are so significant from a dramaturgical point of view, they were also included—although staged differently—in the radio and television adaptations. In the radio version, Westphal mixed the speaking voices in a certain way, giving the impression that the soldiers are talking past each other. In the television version, however, Fritz Umgelter expanded the scene: the men sit together at the table; their conversation is structured, one character speaks after the other. In addition, we see how Sergeant Jaletzki, previously portrayed as a convinced Nazi and antisemite, listens attentively. He personifies those soldiers who after the war claimed to have known about the mass executions ‘only from hearsay.’ Conversations are elusive media of memory. Despite their lasting impact on memory culture, they are difficult to grasp; only a recording or transcript makes their analysis possible. That also applies to the examples at hand. Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer analyzed conversations of former Wehrmacht soldiers intercepted in British and American POW camps. Thanks to generous funding, their research group was able to “pitch into the unmanageable amount of text” (Neitzel and Welzer 2011, 10); hence in the end, they examined transcripts. We know about the conversation between Scholz and his superior only because Scholz mentioned it in a speech, which he did not deliver ad lib but read it off his notes. The manuscript of that speech is now in the Archives of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The conversations in the Jockey Bar, in turn, belong to a different category of text; as parts of a fictional novel they are at least partly invented. Gert Westphal and Fritz Umgelter adopted them for the radio play and the television production, and ‘translated them back’ into speech with the aid of actors. This little survey alone shows that the study of memory talks can rarely pass on written texts, and should also consider the associated infrastructure: the table at the bar, or the wiretap in the POW camps. Thus, only the transmission of memory talks enables the networking of non-human actants with speaking human actors.

The Written Media Scholz made his first notes for the book during the war. He initially wrote short stories and episodes, which he eventually tied together into a novel. Regarding the composition of seven stories and an overarching frame story,

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Scholz added the subtitle So gut wie ein Roman (As good as a novel) to his book, absent from the English translation. From a memory studies’ perspective, the act of writing is just as important as the act of telling, as written media initiate the transition from communicative to cultural memory, from the oral transmission of certain historical narratives to their permanent mediatization (Assmann, J. 2011). Written media are considered lasting memory carriers as they codify memory long term. It is important to note, however, whether the text is handwritten, typescript, manuscript, or printed. Innis notes in this regard—although not of memory but of ‘knowledge dissemination’—that “our knowledge of other civilizations depends in large part on the character of the media used by each civilization in so far as it is capable of being preserved or of being made accessible by discovery” (Innis 1951, 33). The same principle applies to the transmission of cultural memory: handwriting must be deciphered, manuscripts read, the printed word reproduced. Among the few documents in Scholz’s estate that date back to the war, none mentions the execution of the Orsha Jews. Instead there is, handwritten on paper scraps with the heading Jazz für Schloss Pörnitz (Jazz for Pörnitz Castle), a text about an amusing meeting of the Berlin upper class in a fictitious castle in the region of Brandenburg (Scholz 1941, Jazz für Schloss Pörnitz). Some of the loose sheets have been torn out of notebooks and others are on typewriter paper; some pages bear a hotel logo. Apparently Scholz received the paper scraps by army mail from friends or relatives so that he would have something to write on. Most text is written in his legible, almost calligraphic handwriting; however, some other sheets are barely decipherable. I could not determine if they had been written by another person or if the differences were simply caused by external circumstances such as the lack of a desk, or the hectic pace of war. The shallow jazz music played at the fictional Pörnitz Castle was notated by Scholz on a hand-drawn music paper. Parts of the narrative later made it into two of the stories in Through the Night: the motif of the castle in the fourth story, which describes the saga of the Bibiena family; and the jazz in the sixth story, in which the saxophonist at the bar talks about his POW experiences. Should Scholz have made notes about the massacre, they might have looked similar. In the novel, we read: “Then follow a number of almost illegible scraps. . . . Three follow several well-preserved pages, also probably written in Orsha. The heading is missing” (TN 47)—the English translation uses the italics to mark the meta-commentaries by Lepsius. Apart from the fact that they are based on freely invented notes, they refer to an often fragmentary and difficult-to-read medium which does not always live up to its function as ‘translator.’ A closer look reveals that it is not clear what the sheets (from which Lepsius reads the account of the massacre) actually are. In all media versions of Through the Night, the diary is mentioned; in the television adap-

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tation, we even see the small black notebook twice: first in the frame story in the hands of Lepsius, then at the beginning of the flashback in the hands of the diarist Wilms. Lepsius, meanwhile, explains that he had previously copied the text and revised it into a script or film synopsis; at the beginning of the book, we learn about “Something Hans-Joachim [Lepsius] has written. A story” (TN 7). Later, another man in the bar holds “typewritten paper” (TN 342) in his hand that Lepsius had given him in the meanwhile. In the television adaptation, Lepsius fetches “the manuscript” from the dressing room; instead of loose sheets, however, he returns with a black notebook. His friends want Lepsius to read from it, because “when Hesselbarth [one of the men at the bar] gets wind that someone somewhere is putting something down on paper, he doesn’t rest until he knows: is that going to be a script or not?” Neither in the novel nor in the adaptations does the text Lepsius presents resolve this ambivalence. On the one hand, Lepsius complains about Wilms’s writing which is difficult to decipher; on the other hand, he claims to have revised the diary into a synopsis. This notwithstanding, the very act of ‘translating’ or ‘inscribing’ memories into written media is already brought up in the diegesis; more precisely, it is the reason for the men’s meeting in the frame story. The detail in which Wilms—or possibly Lepsius, after all?—describes the Orsha massacre supports the assumption that the diary was revised into a script or synopsis. Contemporary readers were certainly familiar with the stylistic specifics of war diaries, especially the straightforward character of entries. In his autobiographical novel In My Brother’s Shadow. A Life and Death in the SS (orig. 2003), writer Uwe Timm quotes numerous passages from his fallen brother’s war diary: terse phrases, only one or two sentences long, such as “24 April. Bridge-building—our tanks are on the way” (Timm 2005, 24), and “15 February. Danger over, waiting” (ibid., 133). Timm calls them “laconic entries,” the scarcity of paper and time having forced the soldiers to be brief. Mass executions were not among the events covered in detail, although the documentation of those ‘measures’ was not officially forbidden until 1942 (Jahn and Schmiegelt 2000, 25). The soldiers’ general attitude on this subject can now be read in numerous published or archived diaries4— for example, in the diary of Max Rohwerder, whose unit completed almost the same route as the fictional Jürgen Wilms in Through the Night: “A few stations after Borisov, the station master told me that 7,000 Jews had been shot in Borisov in the previous few days”5 (Rohwerder 1941/42, Diary, 6). Rohwerder does not provide more information about the events. Similarly laconic and written in space-saving shorthand was the corresponding diary entry of Willy Kirst (1965, Letter, 2224) who told the investigators of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg about the Orsha massacre: “Jews of the ghetto are shot today. Men, women, and children, two thousand. Lord God save us,

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innocent of these things, from your vengeance.” By contrast, one of the most extensive descriptions of this kind is quoted in Hannes Heer’s book Vom Verschwinden der Täter (On the disappearance of the perpetrators, 2004, 83) from the diary of Sergeant Friedrich Fiedler. On 17 October 1941, Fiedler described the execution of sixteen hundred Jews from the village of Lubny on just over half a printed page.6 The fictional soldier Jürgen Wilms wrote down his observations, thoughts, and feelings without abbreviations, on a total of eleven printed pages. Unlike his protagonist, Hans Scholz did not leave a war diary behind. He wrote his memoirs post-factum in the form of a book manuscript, which, compared to the usually fragmentary diary entries, gave the material not only greater detail but also greater coherence. This was a turning point for the afterlife of the commemoration of Orsha because the principle of ritual or textual coherence is—according to Jan Assmann’s (2011, 4–6) theory—the basis of cultural memory. Coherent texts can be easily repeated and visualized; they can be transferred to the experiences of the readers, re-narrated, and remediated. Hans Scholz wrote after the war and, as was customary then, on a typewriter. Typewriters provided the basic infrastructure for literary production at the time, and their agency is also evident in Through the Night. Scholz used the popular Adler 7 model, famous for the fact that its twenty-nine keys each have three characters assigned instead of the usual two (Reese 2018). The typewriter came on the market around the turn of the twentieth century, and remained a fixture in countless German offices for almost half a century. “The reasons for its great success at the time were certainly its technical brilliance, reliability, and robustness” (Henke 2015). The device was also one of the most expensive of its kind, and the investment had to be amortized through long use. Scholz, trained as a painter, was an aesthete even when it came to typing: if he wanted to change something, he retyped entire pages or added missing words by hand, with calligraphic precision that imitated typewriting (Figure 3.1). An editor at the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house complained about Scholz’s methods: “He corrected and deleted in thousands of places and, on top of that, superfluously pasted over his deletions with little notes in every case” (Hoffmann und Campe 1954b, Note). For Scholz, the old typewriter was presumably an object that established continuity between the pre- and postwar periods, though if it was exactly the same device cannot be determined. Regardless of the origin of his specific machine, the Adler 7 was part of the mise-en-scène in the prewar world and the nostalgic device with which Scholz first transformed diffuse memories and impressions into a discursive and legible form. Despite its robustness, however, the typewriter failed him toward the end of the editorial work. The actor–network theory refers to such events as ‘disturbing’; they are relevant insofar as they allow insight into the black box: only when a disturbance

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Figure 3.1.  Pages from the initial manuscript of Through the Night, with handwritten markings by Hans Scholz, 1954. © Robert Scholz, n.d. Source: Hans Scholz Archive, Archives of the Academy of Arts.

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Figure 3.2.  Hans Scholz at the typewriter, 1956. Taken for the purpose of the Fontane Prize award ceremony. © Fritz Eschen, 1956. Source: SLUB Dresden/ Deutsche Fotothek.

occurs do previously hidden processes and technologies become visible. This is what happened here as well: if Scholz’s typewriter had worked properly, he might not have mentioned it to his publisher. Because he did mention it, I learned which model he had used. As time was short and Scholz had no money for a new machine, he asked the publisher for an advance of four hundred DM (Scholz 1955a, Letter to Hoffmann und Campe). Instead of money, however, he received a package with a new typewriter that he had to get used to (Figure 3.2). It was a lighter machine, with many more keys and smaller spaces between them, and a different system for capitalization and line changes. During the final editing phase, which involved the correct spelling of dates, quotation marks, and so on, Scholz justified his tardiness by referring to the new, unfamiliar device (Scholz 1955b, Letter to Hoffmann und Campe).

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The novel Through the Night left the printing press on 5 September 1955. It went into distribution a few days later. The first run was only 3,600 copies, relatively low for the West German book market at the time (Altenheim 1999, 54–56); the publisher initially seems to have been rather skeptical of the book’s sales potential. Caution was a general stance of the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house: a month earlier, for instance, Suleyken by Siegfried Lenz, a book that soon became part of the West German literary canon, started with fewer than 3,000 copies (Jungblut 2007, 226). By Christmas 1955, however, the first edition of Through the Night was already sold out. Reprints totaling 14,000 copies followed in January and March 1956, after Scholz was awarded the Fontane Prize. In 1958, Hoffmann und Campe sold a license for another 60,000 copies to the Bertelsmann book club, which had over two million members at the time (Mühl-Benninghaus and Friedrichsen 2012, 129; Kollmannsberger 1995, 33). The principle of the book club was simple: for a fixed but small regular payment, registered members could select two books per quarter from the club’s program (Kollmannsberger 1995, 33). For each copy, Bertelsmann paid a license fee of 20 pfennige (pennies) to the publisher (Hoffmann und Campe 1958b, License to Bertelsmann). Years later, the renowned publishing houses DTV and Rowohlt published paperback editions of Through the Night—the latter had originally rejected Scholz’s manuscript. According to information from the Hoffmann und Campe archive and the German National Library, approximately 200,000 copies of Through the Night have been published to date. These figures are of interest inasmuch as the novel is often considered a bestseller; Christian Adam and Hans Schmid, for example, claim that 200,000 copies were printed just a few months after its initial publication (Schmid 2011; Adam 2018, 100). However, the sales figures at the beginning were much lower, and could by no means keep up with popular contemporary books such as Hans Hellmut Kirst’s Gunner Asch trilogy (orig. 1954–55) or Heinz Konsalik’s The Doctor of Stalingrad (orig. 1956), the runs of which were already counted in millions. Even Peter Bamm’s autobiographical war novel The Invisible Flag (orig. 1952), almost forgotten today, reached a circulation of 630,000 copies between 1952 and 1962 (Estermann 1990, 45). Regardless of the actual numbers, the press treated Through the Night as an extraordinary bestseller. The publisher immediately informed the public that the book was out of print, but without mentioning the initial run. The ‘sellout’ created an impression of success; in the years 1955 and 1956, the book was considered a must-have, and the fact that Scholz had been completely unknown added an additional surprise element. It was an effective advertising campaign, but not easily recognized as such. In addition to trade magazines, which printed industry-specific ads (Hoffmann und Campe 1955,

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“Anzeige”), information about Through the Night spread mainly through reviews and recommendations in newspapers. Shortly after the book’s presentation, the publishing house initiated bids for a translation from German into other languages. The editor of the cultural magazine Der Monat, Melvyn Lasky, commissioned by the US military government, promised to help find a US publisher (Scholz 1955c, Letter to Hoffmann und Campe); Hoffmann und Campe ultimately hired the successful Joan Daves agency. Although the renowned publishing house Criterion expressed interest in the book, it had difficulties finding a translator. The English-language version was eventually published by the lesser-known Thomas Y. Cromwell Publishers, who, however, also reported problems: the editors were dissatisfied with the quality of the initial translation and eventually had it revised by a second translator. Both had suggestions for improvement: the first, Elisabeth Abbott, wanted to delete the story about the Eastern Front: “The story of Jürgen Wilms is very beautiful and impressive, actually touching, but too sad. That is why we fear it might easily upset the reader to find it at the beginning of the book” (Abbott 1957, Letter to Scholz). The second translator, Catherine Hutter, whose name does not appear on the front matter, suggested that the story from the POW camp be omitted, as it portrayed US soldiers in a bad light (Scholz 1958b, Letter to Wegener). Scholz did not agree with any of these suggestions. Despite generally positive reviews, the English translation of Through the Night was a financial failure; the Swedish, Dutch, and French translations received even less attention, even though the latter was published by the prestigious Gallimard publishing house (Scholz 1960a). The men’s views about the war and the postwar period discussed in the Jockey Bar, as well as their Berlin jargon, had proved untranslatable. The foreign publishers ultimately had to bear the financial consequences, while Hoffmann und Campe made profit with foreign license sales. The first edition by Hoffmann und Campe was published as a hardcover in linen, as was customary for the publisher. The price was 15.60 DM, almost twice the average book price in the 1950s (Zedler and Hummel 2009, 31) and the equivalent to up to ten tickets for West Berlin’s movie theaters. It is not surprising that the publisher was frugal with free copies; the five-member jury of the Fontane Prize, for instance, received only one copy, so other copies had to be borrowed from West Berlin’s US-American Memorial Library (Hoffmann und Campe 1955d, Letter to the senator); the Senate staff, all women, had to spend weeks reminding jury members, all men, to return the books. West German readers complained about the price of the book; for East Germans, it was simply unaffordable. A reader from East Berlin wrote to the author on a broken typewriter without capital letters:

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i have to raise almost sixteen west marks now! considering its content your book is never suitable to be licensed in our democratic berlin, so that one could get it for eight to ten east marks, as it should be for thomas mann, heinrich and klaus mann, for the books of the rowohlt licenses or even thomas wolfe and hemingway. nor is there any chance of picking up your young book in tattered condition in an antiquarian bookshop, nor is there any chance of getting it cheaply bound, since your publisher is heinrich heine’s, of all things hoffmann und campe. now i will just continue to let the wallpaper of one of my rooms hang down in tatters, deny my appetite for supermarket pleasures for a few days, and perhaps darn a few stockings that i would otherwise have thrown away. (Reader D 1956, Letter to Scholz)

The language of her letter suggests that the author in all likelihood had not enjoyed higher education and had no money to repair the typewriter—an expensive service, as Scholz’s difficulties in the same matter had shown. If you believe her ironic complaint, the high price of the book had a negative effect on her everyday life, her apartment, clothing, and eating habits. The letter also stands out for its explicit, laudatory mention of the war motif: “here as in the west, all sorts of things have come out since 1945, but no such comprehensive—i would like to say, historical work or anthology of the german man of world war II. and that has ignited like a flamethrower. now it’s burning” (ibid.). If the East Berlin reader had been patient for another year, she would have been able to purchase the book for DM 9.90, the price of the fifth edition published in 1957. The Bertelsmann edition was available to its members for a contribution of 2.20 DM; in 1965, an edition in the rororo series hit the market for the same price. In 1978, Hoffmann und Campe brought out a special edition for 16.90 DM, which, given general price trends and considering adjusted income, was much lower than the first edition. Every new edition, directly marketed by Hoffmann und Campe or licensed, obviously brought royalties: by the end of 1957, more than 58,000 DM had been deposited into Scholz’s account at the publishing house. This was a considerable sum of money at the time: for comparison, the equivalent to about fifteen Volkswagen Beetles. The author had his royalties paid out in small installments every month, which meant that he now had a secure income. The contract with Bertelsmann also included regular mandatory book readings, but he complied only reluctantly, complaining about extremely low fees. In a commercial enterprise like Hoffmann und Campe, it is not surprising that financial factors have a significant influence on book production. It is no less remarkable how much space the topic received in communication with the author and in internal meetings. The media historian Hans-Ulrich Wagner also observed this tendency in the correspondence of other authors

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and publishers at the time, which “are full of it. The letters of German postwar authors not only formulated literary plans and dealt with aesthetic questions. Far more often they compared notes: ‘The best pay, as I said, has [the broadcasting company in] Hamburg’” (Wagner 2009, 232). The correspondence, contracts, and invoices unmistakably show the great importance of the actant money and its strong agency; the idea that publishers, editors, and authors would talk mainly about the content or style of their respective books turns out to be naive. While decisions about the content or style of the book were made comparatively quickly during the work on Through the Night— even those made with the commercial potential of the venture in mind—­ negotiations about financial matters sometimes dragged on for weeks, such as the appropriate fees for a writer’s public reading, or whether the publisher should directly book or reimburse the author’s airline ticket. Money was undoubtedly the factor that regulated the processes in the black box of the publishing house—as self-evident as that may be in a market-driven environment, it is rarely considered in literary studies. Obviously, financial considerations also played a role in the circulation of the depiction of the Orsha massacre, as the passage was hardly ever included in readings, probably in order to avoid scaring off potential buyers. The book’s market presence also tells us a lot about the intended target groups. The low print run and the high price of the first edition suggest that the publisher initially wanted to appeal to a wealthier audience that could have identified itself with the men in the Jockey Bar. The price reduction two years later was probably aimed at broadening the societal target group, followed in 1958 by the low-price edition for the Bertelsmann book club with its particularly female membership. The decision to take this step is interesting in that the plot of Through the Night had by then already been conveyed through other media, namely radio and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. The book’s path from the first small hardcover edition, to inexpensive copies for the book club, and finally the paperback editions in the 1960s suggests a certain democratization of the material. The commercial aspect certainly played a role in the reception of the book. In the publisher’s program booklet for 1955 and 1956, Through the Night was recommended as a ‘Berlin novel.’ Hoffmann und Campe expected the label to be a market success, as literature about the divided city was popular among West German readers in the mid-1950s (Hoffmann und Campe 1954b, Note); however, only the overarching frame story takes place in Berlin, while the individual episodes do not. But short reviews of the book in local media were often based on the program booklet only, sometimes even copied verbatim. In terms of infrastructure studies (Schabacher 2013), comparing multiple reviews reveals this seemingly invisible form of standardization of literary criticism. Especially for smaller newspapers, which could only employ one

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Figure 3.3.  Scan from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 June 1956, p. 2.

or two authors for their feature pages, reprinting press material was common practice. Considering the high number of reviews, it was simply impossible for the reviewers to read all books thoroughly; publishers also did not send free copies to smaller editorial offices, which in turn could not afford to buy all the books needed. Paradoxically, it was the publishers who profited from this situation: almost invisibly to outsiders, they intervened in the reception by providing detailed press materials. The reviews in local and regional media therefore reflected the hierarchy of topics that had been preset by the producers. In this way, Through the Night became a ‘Berlin novel,’ while the chapter about Orsha received almost no public attention. The reading as a Berlin novel was further reinforced by its reprint in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The editors changed the original German subtitle So gut wie ein Roman (As good as a novel) to Berlin Decameron (Figure 3.3), emphasizing both the context of Berlin and the genre of novella. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung printed the overarching frame story and six of the seven stories in their entirety, including Jürgen Wilms’s diary. Thanks to its episodic character, Through the Night was well suited as a feature novel, as readers did not necessarily have to remember or read all of the episodes in order to follow the plot. Also, readers of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung predominantly consisted of the novel’s most important target group: educated middle-class males. For five days a week in the middle of summer, they could read an excerpt on the second page; each newspaper episode was about three and a half original book pages, printed without intentional cliff-­ hangers. The depiction of the Orsha massacre was published on three consecutive days from 24 to 26 June 1956. Reprinting in the newspaper hence was a process that in a way contradicted the textual coherence, as the novel had been ‘carved up.’ The editors at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung intervened only slightly in the text, but the segmentation into seventy-one equally long episodes changed the act of reading; it is impossible to ‘immerse’ oneself in a text when it continues to break off after only a few minutes. At the same time, the feature novel allows a more critical and analytical approach,

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as ­readers who cannot easily follow the plot have the opportunity to focus on the respective sections. Typically, newspapers published feature novels before the books came on the market. The best-known example is probably Kirst’s novel Gunner Asch, which (in its original German version) first appeared in the Neue Illustrierte (Echternkamp 2014, 359). The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was no exception. In her dissertation on feature novels in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Cristina Priotto (2007, 60) claims that advanced printing of novels was the rule in the paper. And yet, Through the Night was printed almost a year after its initial appearance as a book. Less remarkable, however, was the popular character of the novel: while most readers today remember more serious titles printed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung —such as Max Frisch’s I’m not Stiller (preprint 1954), Marin Walser’s Runaway Horse: A Novel (preprint 1977), Heinrich Böll’s Billiards at Half-Past Nine (preprint 1959), and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Estate (preprint 1978/79)—the newspaper published a broad stylistic spectrum ranging from world canon to trivial literature (ibid., 58–59). For Scholz’s publishers, the good reputation of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was the decisive factor for the cooperation (Hoffmann und Campe 1956a, Letter to Scholz). Hoffmann und Campe probably counted on the advertising effect of feature novels, just like with the aforementioned Gunner Asch (Mühl-Benninghaus and Friedrichsen 2012, 129). In terms of circulation, however, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung could not keep up with the most widely read newspapers and magazines at the time: while the illustrated weeklies Stern and Quick, for example, each had a run of several hundred thousand copies in the mid-1950s (Schorntsheimer 1995, 10), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung only had about 150,000 (Hoeres 2019, 579). Nevertheless, it was many times more than Through the Night could ever have achieved in book form. After all, in a 1955 survey, 38 percent of newspaper readers stated that they read feature novels (Meyen 2001, 126). The percentage may have been smaller in the case of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung readership, but even if only one in four readers read Through the Night, the number would still have exceeded the book’s total circulation. Unfortunately, there is no empirical evidence for the reception of the feature novel. Immediate reactions to it have not been preserved, although we must assume that, as usual, the newspaper received numerous letters from readers. Regrettably, the company’s archive does not keep unpublished texts over long periods of time (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2016, Email to author). It is noticeable, however, that a large proportion of the reviews of Through the Night appeared only after it had been published as a feature novel. It is therefore possible that at least some critics referred to the latter and not to the book. This assumption can only be substantiated in one

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case: Joachim Kaiser (1956, 537), probably the harshest critic of Through the Night, claimed that the serialized novel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was partly responsible for “the machinery of success.” His negative judgment was mainly directed against the depiction of the Orsha massacre, which he called ‘cynical’ (ibid., 541). The literary scholar Helmut Kreuzer held a similar opinion. Kaiser wrote for Texte und Zeichen, a highbrow cultural journal that lasted only two years despite having well-known editors; Kreuzer published in the Frankfurter Hefte, which enjoyed a high reputation but had difficulty establishing itself on the market. By the mid-1950s, its circulation had shrunk to barely 8,000 copies, a tenth compared to the immediate postwar period (Żyliński 2004, 48; Hodenberg 2006, 89–90). The reservations formulated by both critics about the novel, and specifically the depiction of the massacre, only reached relatively narrow circles. Consequently, Through the Night did not trigger any literary controversies. The reprint as a feature novel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as well as the book’s distribution through the popular Bertelsmann book club show that Through the Night was intended to reach the broadest possible audience. In press reviews, the stories on the Eastern Front were consistently bypassed; instead, announcements and readings focused on Berlin motifs. A discussion of German crimes in the occupied Soviet Union was easily avoided. A comparison with the reactions of readers in East Germany shows how relevant the advertising strategy was for the public reception of the book. In the east, Through the Night was not officially available, which is why reviewers could not direct the public’s focus on the Berlin motifs. Nevertheless, the book was read—more or less secretly—and, of the few East German reactions we have, all without exception focus on the depiction of the war crimes. After Scholz had written down his individual war experiences and ‘translated’ them into book form, further ‘translations’ into sound and visual media followed. Obviously, the immediate basis for the adaptations, both radio and television, were scripts. Although scripts are usually considered written media, they already transition into graphic forms—thanks to their characteristic structure with visible dialogue sequences and stage directions. During a film production, the screenplay is often additionally supplemented by storyboards and set designs. In the case of Through the Night, such visual materials have not been preserved—if they ever existed at all. However, the script for the television miniseries contains handwritten annotations apparently added during shooting (Figure 3.4). These additions illustrate the processual nature of the screenplay, for unlike printed books or screened television productions, screenplays are not ‘finished’ work but traces of the ‘translation’ process. Despite numerous cuts, the scripts for the radio and television adaptations of Through the Night for the most part stick to the dialogues written by Scholz; at the same time, they include media-specific changes that refer to sounds

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Figure 3.4.  Script of the first episode of Through the Night; additions to the footage of the SS man at the execution site, 1959. © Fritz Umgelter Archiv, Archives of the Academy of Arts Berlin.

and images. While in the radio script we read unmistakable stage directions, the script for the miniseries also shows certain ‘literary’ characteristics. At the beginning of the execution scene, for instance, we read the instruction: “The whole thing appears like an assembly line” (Umgelter and Müller-Friedenfels 1959, Script, 82). The script does not specify how the cameramen and actors are to translate this specific instruction into image and sound. Considering that some text sequences were added by hand, crossed out, or marked, the distinction between typescript and handwriting tells us a lot about the work processes during the shooting. Accordingly, the close-ups on the armbands of the executioners with the inscription “Latvian People’s Army in the Service of the German Wehrmacht” were originally supposed to be shown shortly after the arrival of the transport with the Jews. Moving their appearance to the execution scene with handwritten notes in the script (ibid., 83) gave them a more prominent place in the plot. The shot of the SS man overseeing the execution was also added to the script through handwriting (ibid., 82) (Figure 3.4.).

The Sound Media The fact that sound plays an important role in the media complex can already be inferred from its original title. Am grünen Strand der Spree—the ­original

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German title of the novel—was also a popular song in mid-nineteenthand early twentieth-century Berlin. A jazz interpretation by Peter Thomas, released as a record in 1956, was used for the television adaptation; however, not the radio play. The radio production can rather be traced back to the serial character of the novel. After the success of Ernst Schnabel’s three-part radio play Der sechste Gesang (The sixth chant, 1955/56), SWF public broadcasting decided to produce more “novels for the radio” (SWF 1957, 25). As noted in the station’s annual report for 1956 and 1957, with Through the Night “the ‘great form’ achieved . . . its most convincing realization to date” (ibid.). Stephanie Heck, Simon Lang, and Stefan Scherer (2020, 16) retrospectively confirmed the media potential of the novel taken up by contemporary radio: “While the novel already stages serial narration in its layout, the technologically based audio and audiovisual media develop aesthetic procedures to unfold narrative breadth by virtue of their ability to organize segments through leaps in time.” The SWF adviser Manfred Häberlen, who prepared the script for the radio play together with Scholz, omitted two of the seven stories. One of them is about the encounter between a German soldier and a Russian partisan; it was the shortest one and was insufficient for a one-hour episode. The second story Häberlen omitted, however, is an impression of an American POW camp in the French Champagne region with numerous musical motifs and great potential for a radio adaptation. This chapter was the only one missing from the feature novel. As Scholz and Häberlen were working on the radio script at about the same time as the Frankfurter Allgemine Zeitung made the decision to print it, a direct relation between the omissions of the POW story in both versions is unlikely, unless it was Scholz himself who made the decision (for which there is no evidence). In both cases it was an attempt to cut and shorten production; as Scholz had introduced this story as a digression in the first place, the choice was probably obvious. The radio play first aired on MW from 21 August to 4 September 1956, and on FM from 8 to 22 September. It is almost impossible to determine the number of listeners: in addition to some unregistered listeners absent from the statistics (Falkenberg 2006, 219), SWF’s broadcasting area officially had 1.4 million registered listeners that year (SWF 1957, 69). However, radio plays were not among the most popular programs—in 1955, 68 percent of registered listeners showed interest in radio plays (Meyen 2001, 115), while other genres achieved much higher ratings. In a 1957 survey, asking about frequently consumed programs, only 33 percent of registered SWF listeners marked ‘radio play’ (Stecker 2020, 177). According to historian Axel Schildt, the radio was a mere “background noise” to most people; the vast majority of listeners were occupied with other things while casually having the radio on, which is why even “difficult radio plays and political information programs

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that required concentration [received] undivided attention from a maximum of only two-thirds of listeners” (Schildt 1995, 228). This is why the widely held belief that radio “was the dominant medium of the early and mid-1950s” (Hodenberg 2006, 91) must be partially revised. What was true for music and ‘lighter’ programs cannot be directly applied to more ‘serious’ genres. For a better understanding, the place of the radio play within the broad field of radio production needs to be specified. Despite common claims about the “postwar bloom of radio play” (Prager 1960, 418), the genre represented a very small share of the programs.7 In 1956 and 1957, the two channels of SWF public radio, generally considered a “pioneer of the radio play” at the time (Wessels 1991), broadcast 135.5 hours of radio plays. While at first glance the number might seem high, it actually represents less than 1 percent of the programs, and even includes all reruns—the five hours of Through the Night alone were broadcast three times that year. Gustav Frank (2020, 146–47) adds that only 34 percent of the radio plays produced in their ‘heyday’ were literary adaptations, and an even smaller number were based on contemporary authors: “The widespread emphasis on the ‘literary radio play’ thus testifies to the efforts of those responsible for broadcasting, the critics of feature pages, and the authors themselves to stress an educational function in addition to its informational and infamously disreputable role as an ‘all-too-cheap permanent entertainer’” (ibid., 147). In short, the contemporary reputation was based on the impact of a few radio plays by prominent writers, which critics and later researchers focused on. At that time, SWF’s MW range included the present-day areas of Rhineland-Palatinate, the south of North Rhine-Westphalia, the southwest of Hesse and the west of Baden-Württemberg (Figure 3.5). However, the signal quality was poor in many places, and often strongly dependent on the weather; listeners living far from radio transmitters had to put up with noise or interference from other stations. In southwest Germany, for example, the signals of SWF and Voice of America overlapped. The quality of FM was much better, but it had a short range and not all listeners had suitable radios (Stecker 2020, 174). The listening habits largely depended on the time of day. Audience ratings rose sharply from 6 p.m. onward, with the later evening programs aimed primarily at academics (Schildt 1995, 226). The first broadcast and rerun of Through the Night were scheduled for 8:30 p.m. on SWF1 radio (MW) on Tuesdays and Fridays, and a few weeks later on SWF2 (FM) on Wednesdays and Saturdays, respectively, with each episode running for about an hour. It should be noted that in the 1950s, Saturday was still a workday; hence, except for two episodes of the rerun, Through the Night ran on workdays. Moreover, Christina Stecker (2020, 176) points at the environmental conditions: the radio play was first broadcast in summer and,

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Figure 3.5.  Coverage of SWF public radio in 1956. SWF 1956/57, Report (Geschäftsbericht), p. 56. © SWF, 1956/57.

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because of the long daylight in southern Germany, it can be assumed that it affected the attractiveness of the program. In July 1957, another rerun on MW also started at 8:30 p.m. In March of the same year, SWF1 broadcast only the first episode as a special feature, called The Diary of Jürgen Wilms in the documents of the SWR Historical Archives, but was announced as The Report of Jürgen Wilms in the television and radio listings magazine Hör Zu! in 1957. In contrast to the broadcasting time of the five-part radio play, the feature was scheduled for 8:45 p.m. and ended shortly before 10 p.m., which suggests that it might have been intended to address a slightly different target audience. The specifics of the physical radio infrastructure from broadcasting technology to the radio set at home had far-reaching consequences for the role of the radio as a medium of memory. The black box of radio reveals that broadcasting and reception technologies had little impact on programming decisions; however, they did influence the sociocultural practices of listening. The limited number of radio plays and the listening habits therefore cast doubt on the relevance of the radio for memory culture. Nevertheless, Manuela Gerlof argues that sound media played a major role in the transmission of collective memory, especially as spoken language in particular enabled “the integration, dissemination, and transmission of an enormous corpus of memory content from other media” (Gerlof 2010, 64). It remains questionable, however, whether broadcasters used this potential sufficiently, and, in turn, if the recipients made use of it. It is very likely that the effects of radio plays on memory culture unfold only if the recipient concentrates on the content. This is the case when researchers professionally deal with the subject, of course, but for many listeners, radio was then (and is today) no more than background noise. This also explains why neither of the five episodes of Through the Night nor the feature The Diary of Jürgen Wilms triggered any noteworthy reactions. In all likelihood, the reasons were not the content or stylistic devices of the radio play but the media carrier. In addition to the language, the music of the radio play still needs to be discussed, especially as it is a remarkable element of the original novel. The book contained several references to the musical background during the meeting in the Jockey Bar, but composer Hans-Martin Majewski decided not to use them. He omitted motifs from the Yiddish song Bei mir bist du scheen, for instance, which Jürgen Wilms recalls during the massacre (Frank 2020, 163). Listeners in the 1950s may have known this song well because an interpretation by the Andrews Sisters was very popular at the time (Nimmo 2007, 76; Badenoch 2008, 70). In April 1956, three months before the recording, Majewski began working on a jazz piece for the radio play. The very title of the composition, Jockey Bounce, makes clear that Majewski was primarily inspired by the bar’s atmosphere. After the radio production, he

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Figure 3.6.  Record containing the Jockey Bounce. Photo by the author.

intended to release the song on EP, but the label Metronom had no interest in a composition that was not being played by any radio station as light music (Majewski 1956, Letter to Hoffmann und Campe). Radio was the most important advertising channel for record labels at the time; music that was not regularly aired had little chance of being sold. Consequently, Majewski initially marketed sheet music until in 1957 he finally succeeded in releasing Jockey Bounce through the Bertelsmann record club (Figure 3.6), similar to the aforementioned book club by the same corporation: registered members received the record at a reduced price by mail. At about the same time, the EP was released by the Manhattan jazz label (Heck and Lang 2020a, 274). Majewski’s easy listening jazz, however, did not contain any direct references to Jürgen Wilms’s diary, hence its significance in terms of memory culture is negligible.

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The Visual Media The agency of images and their profound impact on the environment has been increasingly discussed since the end of the twentieth century. Their respective influence on memory culture is said to be equally wide, referred to as ‘prostheses’ of memory (Landsberg 2004). However, the individual carriers of memory are deeply interwoven and can hardly be separated. In the spirit of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999), television in particular is based on older forms of mediating the past such as photography, documentaries, and motion pictures; photographic and cinematic footage are often used on television to create the impression of authenticity, for example (Fischer, Th. 2004, 520). According to Horst Bredekamp, this kind of visual plurimediality is essential for the agency of images and the resulting formation of cultural memory far beyond television: “In shaping memory, visual media have played a predominant role. It was above all monuments, films, television series, and photographs through which they had a formative effect. They related to each other, permeated each other in motifs and techniques, and spread in numerically no longer comprehensible quantities through all conceivable means of reproduction, from posters to postage stamps” (Bredekamp 2004, 57). In the visual history of Through the Night, television photography, and to some extent cinema, play a significant role; and—talking with Bredekamp— the individual images also relate to each other. However, instead of focusing on the individual motifs and strategies of authentication or pondering intermediality, at this point I illuminate the technological aspects of the interrelationship, especially as the meaningful character of visual media is related to their technological qualities. The size, resolution, or placement of a screen has an influence on the ‘translation’ of the story (input) into mediated memories (output), for instance. In this context, the processes in the black boxes of broadcasters and production companies help us to understand how the depiction of the Orsha massacre could reach a mass audience. A hint that memory rests on visual ‘prostheses’ can already be found on the first pages of Jürgen Wilms’s fictional diary, namely in the descriptions of him taking photos of the small Polish town of Maciejowice, as well as other places he passes. Although photography is not mentioned in the radio play, it is again in the television adaptation, itself also being a visual medium. Peter Seibert calls it a “restoration” of Wilms’s “lost” pictures, although in the film—unlike the book—there is no direct indication that his photos were lost in the war or in captivity; on the contrary: “The television production reconstructs the pictures, it ‘corrects’ the text by returning to its ‘original’ state with pasted photographs” (Seibert 2001, 80). In the novel, Wilms adds a number and a comment to all photos in his diary. The images no longer exist, but based on the text, we can assume that the diarist intended to create

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an album of wartime images, with the photos intended to function as an archive that would visualize the war images chronologically and topographically in the future. Creating photo collections was common practice among Wehrmacht soldiers: about 10 percent carried their own photo camera (Jahn and Schmiegelt 2000, 25), mostly used to take pictures of their comrades, the occupied countries, and everyday life during the war. As only a few of this generation are still alive today, their photos are extremely interesting memory carriers; while few now preserve individual memories, their commercial value is increasing. Online stores, classifieds, and auction houses offer countless photos of former soldiers for sale, among them pictures from Maciejowice, Orsha, and other places on Wilms’s path. In the television adaptation, Wilms’s photographic practice is depicted in different ways. The scene in Maciejowice begins with an eighty-second shot in which the camera pans from left to right, and then back again. We see the market, the sky, the paved ground, as well as men with their hands up, faces to the wall, awaiting execution. Only after do we realize that the pan is meant to show Wilms’s gaze through his camera lens, searching for a suitable object. The camera hanging around his neck is—as far as can be seen—a Leica II, launched in 1932 and still one of the most popular models in its class well into the 1950s (Figure 3.7). Thanks to its light weight and robustness, the Leica was suited to daily wartime use. A few days after taking the pictures in Maciejowice, however, Wilms loses his camera: when taking pictures of the Jewish men recovering bodies of dead German soldiers at Brest-Litovsk, a Feldjäger (German military policeman) demands that the film be handed over; a soldier “with the golden HJ insignia, grabbed the camera from me, straps and all, flung it onto the ground and trampled on it” (TN 44). In the television adaptation, this scene is staged accordingly: in the foreground we see a young soldier treading down the Leica, in the background fresh graves. To compensate the loss, Wilms’s comrade Hapke lends him his camera: “a little Volkskamera. . . But only as a loan, get it?” (TN 45). The term Volkskamera (People’s camera) refers to a handy camera for small-format pictures—a large number of those small-format pictures from the war are accessible on the Internet today for reasonable prices. Later, however, the Hauptmann (captain) forbids taking pictures of the massacre: “The camera stays here. That’s all we need. And Hapke’s camera, at that. I’m not that fond of you. I don’t think Herr Reichsfuehrer’s SS would appreciate having his retaliatory measures immortalized. So, off you go—without your tools!” (TN 49). Wilms is thus not allowed to take pictures at the execution site but can only testify to the massacre verbally or in writing. The images of the massacre (as shown in the film) were photographically reproduced, however, as WDR public broadcasting provided the media with numerous stills from the scene; this way ads and reviews about the film in the illustrated press were

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Figure 3.7.  Ad of the Leica II camera, 1932. © Landesmuseum für Technik und Arbeit in Mannheim. Source: Europeana.com.

accompanied by images of the televisual execution. Even when Hans Scholz later commented on the television miniseries in the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel, such an image—Jews standing at the pit awaiting execution—illustrated the article (Figure 3.8). Just as the television adaptation ‘restores’ the photos that no longer exist in Wilms’s diary, the media printed images that Wilms had not been allowed to take by ‘himself.’ The images did not function as visual previews, however; in most cases, the stills from the execution scene accompanied subsequent reviews of the episode, therefore possibly acting as kind of trigger to remind readers of the images on television. In the following year, ten stills from the television adaptation appeared as prints in the WDR yearbook, among them five of the execution scene, including the image that had previously been published in the Tagesspiegel. Interestingly, the yearbook appeared almost simultaneously with the illustrated book Der gelbe Stern (The yellow star), in which numerous historical photos of similar executions were presented to the German public for the first time (Brink 1998, 147). Edited by Gerhard Schoenberner, Der gelbe Stern shows fifteen photos of executions of Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union, accompanied by sources and texts by the editor. Cornelia Brink considers the concept of the illustrated book problematic because the photos “provide an alibi for all those who had not been directly

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Figure 3.8.  Scan from Tagesspiegel, 29 May 1960, p. 5.

at the crime scene and murdered with their own hands” (ibid., 177), but the publication is nevertheless a pioneering achievement in postwar West Germany. The fictional stills from Through the Night, published in the press and the WDR Yearbook a few months earlier, circulated in the same public sphere as the documentary footage that Schoenberner had painstakingly compiled. The visual and tactile character of these publications, however, made it difficult to distinguish between documentation and fiction; both the stills from Through the Night in the WDR Yearbook and the photos in Der gelbe Stern circulated in printed form. Moreover, the square format, the high-quality paper, and the layout of both the WDR Yearbook and Schoenberner’s illustrated documentation have many similarities. Just like the first episode of Through the Night, the illustrated volume was met with a great response and reviewed multiple times. Nevertheless, Brink rightly emphasizes that “the media and, above all, legal discussions of Nazi crimes in the early 1960s reached only a small proportion of the West German population, and often enough met with resistance” (ibid., 147). Like photography, film was an important motif in Scholz’s novel, which is why the idea of a television adaptation of Through the Night seemed obvious. The men in the Jockey Bar are actors, commercial filmmakers, and film

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producers. Lepsius, a recent returnee from a POW camp, claims to have revised his former comrade’s diary into a manuscript or film synopsis, and his friends promise to find him employment as a consultant for war movies. Although these are rather incidental remarks, the allusions to cinema repeatedly appeared in the television adaptation, and even deepened in an interesting way: the only familiar face among the actors was Malte Jäger portraying Lepsius. During the Nazi era, Jäger had participated in the infamous propaganda movies Jud Süß (1940) and Legion Condor (1939), among others. “He brought it to a record-breaking six Vorbehaltsfilme [Nazi propaganda movies that are not supposed to be freely accessible] that are still not allowed to be shown today,” television critic Hans Schmid (2011) noted. In Through the Night, it is Jäger aka Lepsius, of all people, who—just released from ­captivity—does not yet know that his membership in the Legion Condor, a Nazi organization in the Spanish Civil War, is better kept quiet. The television production was preceded by several plans for a cinema adaptation. Shortly after the novel’s publication, the staff of the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house discussed the strategy for selling the film rights; a realistic possibility for a feature film production first appeared during the radio project. In fact, in the winter of 1956, Scholz met the director Max Ophüls, who showed interest in the novel. Although this meeting took place at SWF public broadcasting, an institution that produced both radio and television content, no one seriously considered a television adaptation of Through the Night at the time; in the mid-1950s, television as a still new medium was seen as a threat rather than an opportunity for literature. Due to financial risks, Ophüls’s idea for a feature film was eventually dropped and so never materialized. When the director of NWRV public broadcasting Hanns Hartmann finalized the license agreement for a television production of Through the Night in 1959, the situation on the media market had changed. This was the first year since the war in which the revenues of movie theaters declined (Müller-Benninghaus and Friedrichsen 2012, 179), and the following years confirmed it as a continuing trend. The most important reason was the growing popularity of television; in memory studies it was considered to be “the leading medium for the mediation of history” (Erll 2017, 158).8 However, this assumption requires contextualization. The potential of television for ­memory culture is primarily based on the fact that both public and private broadcasters have extensive physical archives; unlike cinema, television companies screen productions multiple times and also produce their own documentaries based on film clips and eyewitness accounts stored in their archives. It obviously took several decades to collect appropriate material; scholars such as Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Wulf Kansteiner, and Judith Keilbach thoroughly documented the practice for West German television history.

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In the early postwar period, television focused on topicality. Like never before, it gave its viewers the opportunity to participate in important events right at home, with sound and pictures. It included historical and political events such as the coronation of Elizabeth II in London in 1953, and the 1954 soccer World Cup. However, only very few events were actually broadcast live; the majority of programs consisted of previous recordings. The program was characterized by a wide range of entertainment, with regular quiz shows and games codifying the seriality of the new medium. At the same time, isolated signs in the late 1950s hinted at the fact that television would later make an important contribution to the way of dealing with the Nazi past: in 1955, ten years after the end of the war, German public television screened the first images on the subject (Classen 1999, 28), followed by Alain Resnais’s Auschwitz documentary Night and Fog in April 1957, and critical reports on the antisemitic riots in Cologne at the end of 1959. From October 1960 onwards, viewers could watch the fourteen-part documentary Das Dritte Reich, and reports on the Eichmann trial; in 1962, NDR public broadcasting produced a television version of Christian Geissler’s novel The Sins of the Fathers, directed by Egon Monk. Around 1960, then, a change occurred in television that, in retrospect, turned out to be one of those moments that—like writing, printing, and photography before—permanently altered the modes of cultural memory. As television became increasingly important in shaping public opinion, its political content increased. In 1960, when Through the Night first appeared on the screens, ARD was the sole national public broadcaster. Only 2,374 out of 116,617 minutes (1.7 percent of the total program) were devoted to the Nazi past (Classen 1999, 29 and 32), of which only one-tenth dealt with the persecution of Jews (ibid., 86). Accordingly, the scope of the first episode of Through the Night was wide, especially as it offered contemporary viewers unexpected and previously unseen images. In this context, the critic of the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel wrote with a certain skepticism about the television adaptation of Scholz’s novel: “You expected nothing from television, more than ever . . . But right from there, precisely from television, just came the hardest and most merciless of all war films to date” (Der Tagesspiegel, 24 March 1960).9 Through the Night suited the transitional period of competing television models in the 1950s and 1960s (Hißnauer 2020, 196–200). The miniseries (or at least its first episode) illustrated how television could be politically relevant and entertaining at the same time. The transition took shape parallel to sweeping changes in both supply and demand: in just one year between 1958 and 1959, shortly before Through the Night appeared on the screens, the number of registered television sets increased from about 2.5 million to 3.2 million (Mühl-Benninghaus and Friedrichsen 2012, 135).

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In other words, in 1959 every fourth household in West Germany had a television set.10 At the beginning of the 1960s, television signals could be received almost everywhere in West Germany (Schildt 1995, 270), although the number of viewers in large cities was greater than in rural areas, partly because of varying signal strength. Considering the rapid changes, Monique Miggelbrink (2018) understands television sets as actants of everyday life at home: the socio-technical network between viewers and their television sets was a place of meaning making. The act of watching television in the domestic environment therefore established an important part of memory culture in West Germany’s postwar period. The images that television sets of the time transported into private homes were comparatively blurred and small. In this sense, the reviewer of Die Welt (24 March 1960) described the first episode of Through the Night as an “inferno on a screen of forty-three centimeters,” equivalent to seventeen inches. Today, I can project the film on the wall and replay it as often as I like—a possibility the owners of those television sets naturally did not have. The technological developments of receivers at the turn of the 1960s illustrates the process of the “stabilization of objects” described in actor–network theory: technological achievements become everyday objects and thus “instruments of knowledge” (Akrich 1992, 221). Knowledge in this context, however, does not necessarily refer to knowledge of facts (know-what) or procedures (know-how), but to a social practice that defines how objects are used. This includes the operation of devices, but also systemic meanings that are ascribed to them (ibid., 222). Significantly, for example, the older ­television-set models Aladin and Fantom by Krefft—both had a screen size of only 33 cm, or 14 inches—still stood in countless living rooms in 1960. Only very few residents in West Germany had enough money and space to purchase higher-quality television sets in sizes of up to 61 cm, or 24.5 inches (Schildt 1995, 271). On small screens with ‘striped’ black-and-white images—common characteristics of television sets in the early 1960s—the action in the background was probably difficult to decipher. This raises the question of how much of the execution scene the viewers actually saw in the first place. The sources on the reception of Through the Night provide some information on the extent to which the audience could read the aforementioned label ‘Latvian People’s Army. In the service of the German Wehrmacht’ on the armbands of the executioners, especially as the words ‘Latvian People’s Army’ were embroidered in smaller letters than ‘In the service of the German Wehrmacht.’ The reviewer in Der Tag, for example, wrote about “Jews from Poland, Germany, massacred by Latvian auxiliary groups under SS supervision” (24 March 1960); the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger also noted that “the actual murderers were Latvians” (24 March 1960). Both reviewers had thus been able to read the entire inscription, while other viewers certainly overlooked

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that detail, causing outrage about the alleged participation of a German soldier in the execution, although he is actually ‘only’ standing next to the executioners (Viewer [R.B.] 1960, Letter to Hartmann; Viewer [F.L.] n.d., Letter to Umgelter; Infratest 1960, Viewers’ Survey, 5–7). The respective picture quality thus might have caused significant shifts in interpretation. These differences in turn suggest the agency of the television sets as micro-actors (Miggelbrink 2018, 141) taking center stage in the process of mediating and ‘translating’ history into historical images. Another example of how a look into the black box of film production can help in decoding aesthetic aspects of film is represented by the large-scale scene of the Battle of Brest-Litovsk: it includes numerous long shots with a great depth of focus, but the details in the background may have been barely discernible on a 17-inch, low-resolution screen in the West German living rooms of the early 1960s. According to Andreas Fickers (2012, 61), the rapid entry of television into everyday life in West Germany was a “conservative media revolution.” On the one hand, this development was only possible as an aftereffect of cinema, radio, and the illustrated press; on the other hand, the media turnaround of the early postwar period meant a retreat into domesticity. Whereas television sets were initially mainly available in pubs and bars (Schildt 1995, 266), from the mid-1950s onwards, the place of consumption increasingly shifted into living rooms (ibid., 273). Television evenings with family and neighbors enjoyed great popularity.11 This change had a serious impact on the other leisure media: among the Fernsehteilnehmer (television participants), as people who paid the public broadcasting fee were called at the time, the proportion of regular radio listeners fell by 20 percent, and of regular readers by 17 percent (Institut für Demoskopie 1958, Die Freizeit, 83). Interestingly, the latter did not apply to illustrated magazines (Schildt 1995, 281)—they profited from the rise of television by turning the new television stars into the heroes and heroines of their abundantly illustrated articles. Decisive for the reception of Through the Night, however, was the fact that in the age of “scarce channels” (Hodenberg 2012, 25) there was hardly any choice between different programs.12 In 1960, only one channel was available to viewers in West Germany; regional stations that had merged into the nationwide ARD public broadcasting offered programs from about 5 to 10 p.m. A second nationwide public broadcaster called ZDF began operations in 1963. Consequently, the television audience—unlike moviegoers or newspaper readers—was relatively homogeneous (Hißnauer 2020, 202), as the ‘scarce channels’ available only in the late afternoons and evenings were primarily chosen by the man in the family. This patriarchal usage pattern can also be discerned in the reactions to Through the Night: men complained that they were unable to watch it with their wives because of the brutal war

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images (Infratest 1960, Viewers’ Survey, 7); letters to director Fritz Umgelter contained similar feedback (Viewer [F.L.] n.d., Letter to Umgelter). As with every movie night, the announcer first appeared on screen to briefly introduce Through the Night to the audience. In light of the upcoming execution scene, he warned “the parents among the viewers” not to watch the film with children (Mittag, 26 March 1960). With Umgelter’s acclaimed television adaptation of the novel So weit die Füße tragen still in mind—a miniseries screened a year earlier—the format of the multipart “television novel” or “episodic work” (Abendpost, 23 March 1960) additionally drew the interest of the viewers. A journalist for the trade journal Funkkorrespondenz summarized the advantages of the new genre: The epic television movie is a beautiful invention. If it did not exist, it would have to be invented as soon as possible. To tell stories in pictures, to give time and conditions, everyday life, and atmosphere more complexion than a coherent dramaturgy; in short, to prefer the general to the particular—that offers the chance to get to the bottom of the normal, intense, friendly, and terrible life rather than through a condensed conflict. But we should not limit the concept to monumental works and ‘coming to terms with the past.’ Novels that can be cinematically ‘told’ in an evening and have no war or postwar references also deserve the interest of producers. (quoted in Hickethier 1980, 194)

Through the Night, together with So weit die Füße tragen, marks an important moment of change in the history of West German television series. It is true that numerous serial productions for television had already been released in the mid-1950s: Hißnauer (2019, 63) thus critically revises the repeatedly voiced assumption that So weit die Füße tragen was the first West German television miniseries. Hence the principle of seriality or, more generally speaking, of a format screened at regular intervals and based on continuity, was already familiar to viewers by the beginning of the 1960s (ibid., 204)— not only from television, of course, but also from newspapers and radio. Umgelter’s multipart television productions with the cinema-like quality of serialized feature films, however, did indeed have a new quality. Like the early feature film made for movie theaters, the new television format was shaped by adaptations of novels and stage plays before transitioning into exclusive scripts. Over time, the television miniseries established itself as a format in its own right, often addressing the ‘difficult past’—next to Through the Night, one might think of the popular US production Holocaust (NBC 1978) or the more recent German miniseries Generation War (ZDF 2013). As with the radio play, the episodic structure of the novel Through the Night already precast the production as a Fernsehroman (television novel). Hißnauer (2020, 204–8) rightly points out that television productions based on literature were not a novelty at the time, but the term ‘television novel’

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established itself—no doubt in reference to the Zeitungsroman (newspaper novel)—mainly in relation to Umgelter’s two miniseries So weit die Füße tragen and Through the Night. Looking back, Scholz stated that “these seven stories remained loosely bundled together and offered themselves to the stations that were about to produce miniseries” (Die Zeit, 3 June 1960). However, the designation of Through the Night as a (mini)series is not without problems. The individual episodes were broadcast on Tuesday evenings at twoweek intervals, hence more than two months passed between the screening of the first and the last episode. By contrast, later miniseries ran with much shorter intervals: Holocaust, for example, aired in West Germany on 22, 23, 25, and 26 January 1979. Like Through the Night, it aired on weekdays, Monday through Friday. As Saturday evenings, being the most popular slot on (West) German television, were and still are reserved for entertainment formats, ‘serious’ content was often shifted to other days. Even ZDF public broadcasting, when screening Generation War in 2013, maintained this pattern; although the first episode ran on a Sunday, the remaining two followed on Monday and Wednesday. To what extent then can the five episodes of Through the Night be regarded as one coherent television production rather than five independent ones? Telling five different stories, broadcast on five different evenings, loosely held together by an overarching frame story, the production is a borderline case—especially as there are arguments for and against the seriality, from narratological as well as from production and reception perspectives (Heck 2020). The five episodes were filmed together rather than individually, and they were advertised as a miniseries; but after they were aired, viewers compared them with each other. Furthermore, Simone Heck (ibid., 234) also identifies some visual motifs that are used repeatedly throughout the entire series. Between the stories told by the men in the Jockey Bar, there are— much like in the novel—only few connections; the serial character of the narrative is thus primarily carried by the frame story. Consequently, contemporary critics left a perplexing impression. In order to avoid designations such as ‘television novel’ or Mammutfilm (mammoth film), some sought alternatives. The daily newspaper Der Tag (24 March 1960) noted that it was “formally neither a feature film nor a television film, rather a picture arc.” I have mainly used ‘miniseries’ precisely because this term was hardly used in 1960; this way I do not have to choose between competing designations of the time. The financing and organization of the shooting of Through the Night could only be provided by a public broadcasting company. In contrast to the failed negotiations between the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house and selected profit-oriented production companies, money was no topic. After the partition of NWDR public broadcasting into NDR and WDR in 1956,

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the television programs were still subject to a joint North and West German Broadcasting Association (NWRV) until 1961; the production of Through the Night was coordinated by the Cologne editorial department, and is said to have cost about 2 million DM, making the eight-hour television production one of the most expensive programs in West Germany at the time (Telemann 1960; Koch 2002, 78). However, the production costs were only slightly higher than for a costly two-hour feature film (Telemann 1960). Accordingly, instead of financial risks, Hanns Hartmann had to consider the political consequences of the television adaptation of Through the Night. The filming took place at the Bavaria Studios near Munich. The shooting schedule was largely chronological, so the first episode was produced first and the fifth last. Filming began on 7 September 1959, just a few days after Fritz Umgelter and Reinhart Müller-Freienfels had submitted the finished script. Despite the chronological approach, however, the filming for the execution scene was done last, between 16 and 29 February 1960. Helmut Förnbacher (playing the SS man in the execution sequence) and four other actors were scheduled for the last four days of shooting (WDR n.d., Disposition Plan); the episode was aired only three weeks later. In addition to potential political concerns by Hartmann who pondered “not if, but how” to shoot the scene (Hartmann 1960a, Letter to Blachstein et al.), pragmatic reasons for the postponement are also conceivable; in the novel the execution takes place at the onset of winter, which is why it cannot be ruled out that the reason for the shooting schedule was simply the expected weather conditions, as the possibility of filming in natural snow was most likely in February. The Bavaria Studios was one of very few companies in West Germany capable of handling large productions as well as multiple projects at the same time. The experienced production manager Walter Pindter had already been responsible for the shooting of So weit die Füße tragen. Some of the Colognebased employees of NWRV also worked on both productions, including set designers, editors, and the production secretary (Pindter 1960, Letter to Hartmann). These continuities are also reflected in the final product of Through the Night: the personnel responsible for the props and buildings, for example Kurt Squarra and Alfred Bütow, presumably used the same freight cars in both miniseries. This could explain why the Cyrillic letters ‘CCCP’ can be read on the train wagons in both productions. Through the Night was produced as a 35 mm film, and it aired directly from the original copy. Certain formal features such as the use of long shots makes Through the Night a typical example for the “‘moviezation’ of television” at the turn of the 1960s (Hißnauer 2020, 202–3; 2019, 68). Heck, Lang, and Scherer (2020, 19–20) assume that Umgelter consciously rejected the ‘live ideology’ of television at the time, although this assertion is questionable from a temporal perspective as the majority of broadcasts were prerecorded, and

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Through the Night was certainly no exception. Moreover, the miniseries, shot on 35 mm film, could easily have been reworked into a feature film for the movie theaters, which was actually planned. For the first episode, the filmmakers used 3,104 meters of film (Umgelter n.d. b, Notes); with an overall duration of ninety-seven minutes, about five hundred additional meters of film must have been used but excluded from the final version. For the planned theatrical version, the frame story was supposed to be cut—similar to the radio adaptation The Diary of Jürgen Wilms, based on the first episode of the radio play. In order to maintain a film length of about ninety minutes for a feature film, however, other scenes would have had to be added. Unfortunately, details remain clouded as the Bavaria Studios do not archive (Hilscher 2017, Email to author). In any case, Hartmann’s successor Klaus von Bismarck did not continue the planning; the remaining balance of 11,548 DM was paid off and the film project terminated (Bavaria 1962, Invoice). How do we know how viewers reacted to the first episode of Through the Night? We have more than a hundred reviews and some letters from the audience, as well as a survey conducted by the Munich-based Infratest Institute, which probed the opinions of the audience on behalf of the broadcasting stations (Meyen 2001, 61). The survey started immediately after the series aired, and as most reviews did not appear until two days after the broadcasting date, the viewers answered free of their influence; the reviewers, in turn, did not learn about the survey results until after they had written their contributions. As a result, the two groups independently formed their opinions in the immediate aftermath of watching Through the Night. The Infratest reports at the time do not contain any information on the size or demographic composition of the sample. The only standardized question in the questionnaire asked to rate the film on a scale from –10 to +10. Using this data, Infratest calculated two types of a so-called ‘judgment index’: The ‘absolute index’ was calculated based on positive values only, while the ‘relative index’ included the negative values as well. In the case of Through the Night, the indices showed the results of +5 and +1, respectively; both values show that the audience was divided. Unlike many surveys of the time, Infratest did not use a standardized questionnaire but asked viewers to give spontaneous statements, which were then sorted into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ votes, and partially transcribed. This is a major advantage over standardized procedures, because, according to Ulrike Weckel (2019, 149), “in surveys via questionnaires, respondents only answer questions that others have previously identified as relevant.” It is therefore likely that the survey results on Through the Night cover a broad spectrum of contemporary reactions and opinions. The value of this source for media and memory history can hardly be overestimated; Wulf Kansteiner (2004, 576; 2017, 328), for instance, criticizes that statements about collective memory are usually based on media

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representations only, as, due to a lack of sources, there are few possibilities to draw a line between implicit and real audiences. The survey by Infratest helps to close this gap, at least partially. In addition to providing insight into the opinions of the viewers, Infratest also collected information on the viewing figures. The first episode of Through the Night is said to have achieved a ‘rate’ of 83 percent (explained below); it was subsequently referred to as a Straßenfeger (street sweeper) (Hißnauer 2020, 216; Hübner 1985), a term for highly successful television productions that ‘emptied’ the West German streets when aired.13 As there was no electronic means to calculate the figures at the time, they were determined via surveys and expanded by qualitative studies (Meyen 2001, 60). With 3.2  ­million television sets and an average household size of 3.9,14 the figure of 83 percent resulted in approximately 10.3 million viewers. However, because of the high price of television sets, it can be assumed that it would have mainly been smaller households with few children and without grandparents or subtenants—due to war damages a phenomenon extremely widespread in early postwar West German cities—that could afford a set. With the largest households (five people or more) taken out of the statistics, the result is an average household size of 3.1, and roughly 8.3 million viewers. Even this calculation has to be taken with a pinch of salt, as it is unlikely that entire families with small children all watched television on a Tuesday evening. The actual number therefore was probably somewhat smaller; by today’s standards, however, even an audience of about 7.5 million would be unusually high. Each of those calculations is only a rough estimate, not least because important information about the methodology of the data collection is missing; we know nothing about the exact wording of the questions, the composition of the sample, or the confidence interval and confidence level of the estimate. One solution is to determine the relative success of Through the Night, by comparing the viewing figures with the results of other Infratest examples using the same sample and method. The two completely forgotten West German television productions Schiff in Gottes Hand (Ship in God’s hands, 1959) and Einer von Sieben (One of seven, 1959), both dealing with World War II, achieved figures of 81 and 82 percent, respectively (Infratest 1960, Viewers’ Survey, 1), and So weit die Füße tragen even as much as 90 percent (Telemann 1959, 61). Considering those numbers, Through the Night seems to be a normal rather than an exceptional case. The groundbreaking documentary Das Dritte Reich only achieved viewing figures of about 58 percent; Frank Bösch (2009, 66) estimated 6 to 7 million viewers. His assumption of the documentary’s outstanding success must therefore be partially revised, as the comparison with viewing figures of other contemporary television productions suggests. In any case, it has to be kept in mind that in times

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of ‘scarce channels’ the viewers only had the choice between watching or not watching; the competition was not other broadcasting stations, but radio, magazines, and other leisure activities. Although Through the Night was only the second miniseries in West German television history, critics were not particularly forthcoming about the new format. Only Die Welt (24 March 1960) saw television as a medium of new possibilities; some criticized “problems with the ‘translation’ of the novel into film” (Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 24 March 1960). The majority of reviews of the first episode, however, were devoted to the depiction of war and the description of the massacre. According to Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann (2020, 2), non-film elements of television events, especially media responses, contribute significantly to shaping memory culture. In quantitative terms, the ‘resonance’ of the first episode of Through the Night was very large; with about 150 comments, reviews, and announcements, the television production was one of the most frequently addressed media events of its time. But in terms of agenda setting (Kligler-Vilenchik 2011), I would like to add another layer to Ebbrecht-Hartmann’s convincing argument. Unlike reviews of motion pictures, which recommend or advise against going to the movies, television reviews are after-the-fact commentaries hardly affecting the behavior of the viewers; by the time the review is published, the program has already been aired. The function of television reviews, therefore, is primarily to stimulate discussion, not to influence potential viewers. About half of the texts published after the first episode of Through the Night, however, consisted of more or less verbatim transcripts from official press releases; those play a marginal role in the debate about how to deal with Nazi crimes. The remaining reviews in both the national and local press, later reprinted in the WDR Yearbook, dealt in greater detail with the execution scene. At first glance, they confirm the great ‘resonance’ of the film; a closer look at the individual newspapers and magazines, however, quickly reveals why the miniseries did not become a political issue: the media echo was limited to the television columns on the last pages, either anonymous or merely signed with initials. This kind of agenda setting makes clear that it was ‘only’ a television production and not a socially relevant issue. Just as in the actor–network theory, the equipment and furnishing of the laboratory helps in shaping knowledge production, so too does the ‘furnishing,’ meaning the editorial composition of the newspaper has an effect on memory culture. If the same comments on the Orsha massacre had been placed elsewhere and signed by prominent critics, they might have triggered a broader discussion about the media’s treatment of Nazi crimes in postwar West Germany. With a fairly high degree of certainty, we can assume that Through the Night was also watched secretly in the GDR, at least in those regions where West German television could be received. The East German reception of

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Through the Night cannot have been a mass phenomenon, however, not only because watching West German television was illegal, but also because in 1960 the television was far less widespread in East Germany as compared to the West. The prices for television sets were prohibitively high, and the programming still had little to offer. For those reasons, East German officials did not launch regular controls of their citizens’ viewing habits until years later (Kuschel 2016, 47–48). Interestingly, on 21 March 1960, exactly one day before Through the Night was aired, the East German television broadcaster DFF started Der schwarze Kanal (The black channel)—a propaganda show that commented on current events and television programming in West Germany. It was certainly only a coincidence in time: although the first episode of Umgelter’s miniseries was undoubtedly one of the most commented upon media events in West Germany at the time, it went unmentioned in Der schwarze Kanal (DRA n.d.).

Conclusion: Infrastructures The idea that memory is dependent on material carriers goes back to Plato’s wax tablet metaphor. Jan Assmann examined different writing systems of ancient civilizations focusing on their significance for the establishment of cultural memory. What has been thoroughly researched for the ancient world, however, is less frequently addressed in research on more recent eras. While we no longer use wax tablets, the question of whether a film is shot on 35 mm or on reusable magnetic tape is of great importance to memory culture. Like any social practice, memory culture therefore needs an ‘infra-structure’ (the Latin word infrastructura means sub-structure; Schabacher 2019, 283). The scholar to draw attention to the connection between the infrastructural organization of a society and its symbolic order was Harold A. Innis. He laid the groundwork for Marshall McLuhan’s later theory that the material condition of the media shapes the message. For at least two generations of media and cultural academics, those ideas have been part of their basic education. It is all the more interesting that research on the impact of media infrastructures on memory culture has so far been a marginal phenomenon; memory studies are still dominated by hermeneutic approaches. The infrastructure of memory culture may not be roads, rails, or pipes, but it is the table in the local pub, the paper and the typewriter, the camera, the transmission tower, and the television set, tightly connected with their users. We can, of course, speak more broadly of an infrastructure of cultural production, as the very same objects influence cultural practices beyond collective memory. The connection between the history of memory and the history of media, however, requires special attention to the infrastructure of media technology.

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The black box of memory culture contains numerous actants whose impact helps to determine what is remembered and what is not. Access to paper, pencils, cameras, film reels, and so on was crucial for the creation of direct accounts of everyday life during the war, not written retrospectively but at the time. These objects were either sent to the soldiers by the army postal service or confiscated in the occupied territories. Scholz wrote the first notes on Through the Night during the war on notepaper from a French hotel—he had probably received the blank sheets by mail. The soldiers had their photos developed during home leave or used the equipment of local photo stores. The act of writing and photographing during the war was thus a practice of power—and not only in Foucault’s interpretation, according to which a gaze is an expression of power, but in a material and physical sense. While the perpetrators possessed paper or cameras, or confiscated them, the victims had far fewer possibilities to record their view for the future. Furthermore, material factors influence the reproduction of recorded memories. Together with the authors, editors, directors, producers, and other actors in the culture industry, typewriters, microphones, cameras, audio and film tapes, radio and television sets form a network that has significant impact on memory culture. It is recognized as infrastructure by its invisibility, standardization, and processuality (Schabacher 2013, 138). Book readers cannot know if the original manuscript was written by hand or typewriter; radio listeners are usually unaware of the location of the nearest transmitter; untrained television viewers do not recognize the type of film material on which a program was recorded. All this attests to the invisibility of the media infrastructure. We can only recognize standardization by the same length of the episodes of the feature novel, the radio play, or the television series. It not only affects the content of the individual oeuvre, but also its perception. The time intervals when reading a feature novel make the text reflect differently as compared to it being read in one go. Standardization also affects film and the resulting possibilities of greater (celluloid) or lesser (magnetic recording) depth of field. Processuality, in turn, is related to the courses of action during the production and reception of relevant content for memory culture; it can be inferred from editorial documents, scripts, and scheduling plans. Numerous objects used in the cultural sphere, especially in the mass media, further fulfill the basic criteria of the infrastructure theory formulated by Susan Leigh Star. Not only are they invisible, standardized, and procedural, but they are also (1) embedded, (2) learned, (3) linked to practice, and (4) transparent, which means that they only become visible when breaking down (Star 1999, 381). A media device can only fulfill its function in memory culture if it is embedded in a chain of other media devices; even a typewriter—to stay with the example discussed at length in this chapter—is of little use if the writer does not have access to publishers, printers, and

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distribution networks. When readers finally hold the finished book in their hands, the technology behind it is almost invisible. In order for the writing process to proceed quickly, the person writing the book must have learned the respective keyboard layout (Bowker and Star 1999, 35). Only a failing typewriter and the necessity to switch to another model, however, can reveal its infrastructural properties. The dynamics of the infrastructural network depend on external factors. These include natural conditions such as the distances between the locations where the media complex was produced, as well as the weather affecting production conditions. As Hans Scholz was not willing to travel to Cologne to transform the novel into a script for the miniseries, the station’s staff were able to work more freely. Due to a thaw visible during the shooting, the first episode of the television production could not fully convey the image of the icy East. Another factor affecting the infrastructure of memory culture is finances; in short, the ratio between labor and material costs on the one hand, and income from the sales of books, tickets, licenses, and such like on the other, must be efficient. As long as memory studies primarily focus on political or aesthetic discourse, the technological and pragmatic ‘frameworks of memory’ (Halbwachs 1992) remain understudied. The political orientations of the leading West German writers dealing with the Nazi past, for instance, have been thoroughly investigated; however, questions about the circulation of their books, which are fundamental for the reception of their ideas, often remain unanswered. It should be noted that memory ‘traveling’ from one media carrier to another is based to a considerable extent on the infrastructure of the culture industry. The circulation, the paper quality, the book price, the broadcasting range, the sound and image quality—it all contributes to the construction of memory culture. Books, newspapers, radios and television sets become actants interacting with human actors, producers, and recipients. In this context, a look into the black box of publishers and broadcasters helps to trace the path between input—here, the impression the massacre left on Scholz— and output—the media representations of that massacre. Accordingly, collective memory is a sociotechnical practice that would be inconceivable without the medial infrastructure.

Notes   1. For the term ‘difficult past,’ see Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991.   2. The idea of applying Latour’s concept of the black box to memory culture is based on the manuscript of the lecture “Z Latourem w Kielcach” (With Latour in Kielce) by the

Third Story: Media and Technologies  187 Polish anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (n.d.), in which she describes the research on her book Pod klątwą. Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego (Anathema. The social image of the Kielce pogrom). By reconstructing the social networks around the July 1946 pogrom and systematically examining all people, premises, objects, etc. that had led up to it, Tokarska-Bakir doubted the established narrative and the widespread belief that the pogrom had been sufficiently researched.   3. I quote the statements specifically referring to the Orsha massacre in the Prologue of this book.   4. The importance of war diaries for the construction of private memories of the war is illustrated by historian Konrad Jarausch in Broken Lives. How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century (2018). A large part of his sources are from the German Diary Archives (Deutsches Tagebucharchiv) in Emmendingen.   5. In the German original, the term Bahnhofsvorsteher (station master) is abbreviated to ‘Bhfvorsteher.’   6. According to Heer, Fiedler’s diary is a “sketch out of memory” written after the fact (Heer 2004, 87).   7. Calculation based on SWF 1957, 20–23.   8. Original emphasis.   9. Unless otherwise noted, the newspaper quotes originate from the WDR (1960) collection “Im Urteil der Presse: ‘Am grünen Stand der Spree.’” 10. The calculation is based on Mühl-Benninghaus and Friedrichsen 2012, 135; and Statistisches Bundesamt 1960, 226. 11. Comprehensive studies on the everyday practice of watching TV are available for the United States and France (Spigel 1992; Lévy 1998). For West Germany, they are part of Axel Schildt’s (1995) much broader studies on West German media. 12. With the term ‘scarce channels,’ von Hodenberg translates the concept of ‘television scarcity’ used by John Ellis (2000, 39–60). 13. Although the miniseries is often referred to as ‘Straßenfeger’ in academic literature as well as in journalistic texts, the term was not used by contemporary film critics. It first appeared around 1960 and started to be commonly used in 1962, when the first of the wildly popular Francis Durbridge productions aired. 14. Calculated on the basis of the Statistical Yearbook (Statistisches Bundesamt 1960).

Conclusion

Dead Ends in Memory Culture

8

In the Introduction to this book, I claimed that Through the Night has fallen into oblivion and is today only, if at all, known to specialists. The assumption is rooted in a series of discussions during colloquia, seminars, and ­conferences—in the vast majority of cases, the audience had never heard of Through the Night. The editors of the only extensive publication on the media complex to date confirm this assumption (Heck, Lang, and Scherer 2020, 11). A more or less directly stated claim to ‘rediscover’ a lost piece of West German media history is repeated in all recent work on the media complex. Ironically, however, more has been written on Through the Night than one might think. In 1985, Wolfgang Schuller (1986) 1 reviewed the novel for the journal Neue Deutsche Hefte on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary. The review of a book published decades earlier in one of Germany’s most renowned cultural magazines can be interpreted as a symbolic revaluation. Less than a decade later, Wilfried Barner recalled Hans Scholz’s novel in his seminal textbook on German literature (1994, 182–83), but with the exclusive focus on a divided Germany and the portrayal of Berlin during the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s. In line with the contemporary reading of the novel, Barner did not mention the execution scene. A few years later, television historian Knut Hickethier (1998) referred to the miniseries in his overview of the history of German television and—in contrast to Barner— justified it with the extraordinary depiction of the massacre, reproducing the tenor of contemporary television critics. In 2001, a journal for Germanlanguage teachers published a long essay on the first part of the miniseries,

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in which the media scholar Peter Seibert, a former PhD student of Helmut Kreuzer, one of the first critics of the novel, didactically prepared the visual dimension of the execution scene. Television critic Hans Schmid (2011) published an extensive and extremely informative review in the popular online magazine Telepolis on the occasion of the DVD release. Dominik Graf, a popular German director and actor, published an extensive essay on the topic in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in April 2013, investigating not only the fate of the television miniseries but also the later ‘disappearance’ of the actors involved. That same year, scholar Eckehard Dworok published an essay on the didactic potential of Through the Night bearing the telling title “Who Still Knows It? The Diary of Jürgen Wilms.” In the summer of 2015, Stefan Scherer offered a seminar on the media complex at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, followed by the aforementioned extensive collective volume in 2020. Finally, for the sixtieth anniversary of the first broadcast of Through the Night, I recalled the miniseries on a German website on contemporary history, Zeitgeschichte Online (Saryusz-Wolska 2020). This list is by no means ‘complete’ and does not include all examples of alleged ‘rediscoveries’ of Through the Night; it can therefore be claimed, with a fairly high degree of certainty, that it has been present on the margins of German memory culture for at least thirty years. Time and again, at least the novel and the television miniseries have expanded into standard works of academic literature and journals, national newspapers, and professional websites. Is it possible, then, that Through the Night was not ‘forgotten’ after all, but merely unknown to some of the scholars and authors whom I and the other ‘discoverers’ had met? The fact that Through the Night never completely disappeared from the (West) German media landscape is evidenced by the long afterlife of the media complex. The first publication of the book and the premiere of the miniseries marked only the beginning of its ‘travels’ through the mediated public; reviews, new editions, and multiple broadcasts followed. Although the first edition of Through the Night was printed in a run of only 3,600 copies, approximately 200,000 copies have been sold to date, including the Hoffmann und Campe as well as licensed editions. The German National Library carries ten editions by Hoffmann und Campe alone, and an additional eleven from other renowned publishers such as Fischer, DTV, and even the Rowohlt publishing house, which originally rejected the manuscript. These editions are probably still on thousands of German bookshelves today; I have also seen them in hotel lobbies, more decoration than reading material, and on bookcrossing stands. Last but not least, there are also four translations into English, Swedish, French, and Dutch. The novel therefore obviously met public demand, even if it did not attract academic attention. Only after the readers’ interest had waned did researchers gradually start to ‘discover’ the book. The last paper edition of Through the Night to date was published in

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2013 by Thiele Verlag in Mainz, but it has since been withdrawn due to licensing problems. Between 2018 and 2020, the Thiele Verlag edition was available as an e-book, and further editions are in preparation. ARD public broadcasting included the television production into its anniversary DVD series Große Geschichten (Great stories) in 2011, preceded by three reruns on television. The first was in 1966, when German television finally responded to the publisher’s repeated requests. Ten years later, the regional public broadcaster WDR aired the program; the press book introduced the miniseries saying that “numerous letters requesting the repetition of the five-episode production Through the Night have persuaded WDF to use it for the start of the ‘Wish of the Week’” (Brünler 1975, WDF-Extra). The subsequent screening in 1981 had a commemorative character, honoring the passing of director Fritz Umgelter (DPA 1982). For the next thirty years until 2011, the television production was only accessible through the WDR archives, but it was still not entirely unknown: in addition to Knut Hickethier who mentioned it multiple times in his groundbreaking work on the history of German television, in 2002 media scholar Lars Koch published an essay on Through the Night in the often-cited anthology Geschichte im Film (History in film). The DVD has been reissued twice since its initial release, most recently in 2019, and today all episodes can be watched in full length and in high definition through various streaming services. Used copies of the book can easily be found at low prices; and the English version is available free of charge in the Internet Archive. The feature novel, originally printed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is accessible at large German libraries, both as paper copies and on microfilm, in addition to the digital newspaper archive. Only the history of the radio production remains inconspicuous, as it was last aired in July 1957, but thanks to a compact disc included with the DVD edition it can be heard outside the archive of SWR public radio. Probably the most obvious explanation for Through the Night ‘traveling’ through (West) German memory culture is that the media complex did not fall into oblivion for over half a century after its original success but was shifted into the storage memory—a notion by Aleida Assmann to describe memory that is invisible because ‘stored’ in rarely used cultural texts, images, or practices (Assmann 2011, 119–35.). For some years now, however, Through the Night has gradually been shifting from storage into functional memory— another notion by Assmann that refers to memory that is visible and used to support collective identities (ibid.). The location of Through the Night away from active, cultural memory can be seen in the absence of corresponding commemorative events or actions, such as its inclusion in curricula and public discussions. Not a single street or other public place in Germany is dedicated to Hans Scholz, for instance, and neither the scenes nor dialogues from

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his book ever entered everyday language. At the same time, however, the novel and its productions have enjoyed increasing interest in recent years. To stay with the spatial metaphor related to the ‘traveling’ memories, Through the Night initially reached a dead end in memory culture but it is now slowly moving back out onto main street. The almost ostentatious absence in the debates and curricula of the 1960s to 1980s of this once so successful and much discussed media complex also suggests that it is a form of forgetting or—following the title of Guy Beiner’s (2018) book Forgetful Remembrance—a form of ‘forgetful memory.’ Paradoxically, in certain situations, memory actually facilitates forgetting, as Aleida Assmann (2016, 16) points out, in addition to her reflections on storage and functional memory: forgetting is easier when it is not a final but a reversible process. In this context, Assmann coins the term the “waiting room of history” (ibid., 38). After lingering in a dead end of memory culture or the ‘waiting room of history’ for some time, Through the Night now returns into functional memory. Beiner’s (2018, 69) concept also provides for this motion: forgetting can in fact precede remembering. In the case of Through the Night, the media complex was not publicly addressed for several decades until the Neue Deutsche Hefte honored the thirtieth anniversary of its first publication; the novel and television adaptation slowly made their way into academic textbooks, and finally ARD public broadcasting published a DVD. While canonical works may be mentioned and reissued more often, the majority of ‘completely forgotten’ (ibid., 28) authors can only dream of this kind of public presence. According to German literature scholar Stefan Scherer (2020, 112), the recurring interest in Through the Night is caused by the execution scene. With reference to my own project, I can only confirm this assumption; Knut Hickethier, Lars Koch, Eckehard Dworok, and Chrstian Adam also address the images of the massacre in their publications. The depiction of the Holocaust in Through the Night is undeniably the focal point outside academia as well. The DVD booklet of 2013, for instance, contains a letter to the editors, originally printed in the West German tabloid Bild am Sonntag on 3 April 1960, stating that “my parents probably sometimes told me about the ‘before,’ but it was only through this film that I really became aware of what the Germans were doing to the innocent Jews” (Auerwerk 1960). Although Dominik Graf ’s abovementioned essay for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung offers an overview of all episodes of the television production, the publishers chose a large still from the execution scene as illustration—the very same still the Tagesspiegel had once used to illustrate Scholz’s article (1960c) after the last episode. Regardless of its position outside the mainstream of memory culture, Through the Night certainly set standards for future visualizations of mass executions.

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Paths into the Dead End Memory scholars agree that every form of cultural appropriation of the past as well as every kind of adaptation of cultural texts contribute to cultural memory (Rigney 2012, 52–53). “What is culturally remembered,” writes Astrid Erll (2011a, 141), “usually refers not so much to what one might cautiously call the ‘original’ or the ‘actual’ events, but instead to a palimpsestic structure of existent media representations.” There are two noteworthy explanations for the long-term ‘survival’ of cultural memory, once it has been shaped. Pierre Nora (2002) calls it the ‘history of history’ or history of the second degree (histoire au second degree), revealing itself in realms of memory (lieux de mémoire); Nora focuses on the transformation of history into identity-relevant public discourses such as texts, images, and rituals. Ann Rigney developed the concept of ‘afterlife,’ enabled by intense remediations: productions, adaptations, quotations, and paraphrases ensure that certain works and motifs remain in active cultural memory. The notion of ‘afterlife’ is linked to early memory studies, dating back to both its origins in psycho­analysis (Sigmund Freud) and philosophy of culture (Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin). The ‘afterlife’ thus amounts—in analogy to Nora—to a ‘memory of memory.’ These explanations prove very helpful in capturing cultural memories that continue to be of discursive relevance, but less in explaining processes of remaining outside cultural memory. Through the Night was not further ‘processed’ after its initial success; the media complex did not generate further productions or remakes. On the contrary, the new editions of the book and the reruns on television initially went largely unnoticed. Thus, there is a lack of source material in terms of memory studies. Also, the metaphors of ‘storage memory,’ the ‘waiting room of history,’ and the ‘dead end of memory culture’ are mere inventory tools that cannot explain the path of the media complex through memory culture. In order to grasp Through the Night ‘traveling’ into this mnemonic dead end, other explanatory models are necessary, and the ‘inside’ of memory culture has to be entered, instead of remaining on the surface of a mediated public sphere. In this case the microhistorical approach provides insight into the fundamental processes of ‘non-memory.’ How could Through the Night and its depiction of the Orsha massacre receive such little attention over so many years? What happened in the black box of memory culture? Who and/or what steered Through the Night through its paths? These questions alone reveal the importance of social actions and material conditions that keep cultural memory in motion—or stop it. The publication history of Scholz’s Through the Night has been shaped by actors who were partly in favor and partly against the novel’s release. While the poet Wolfgang Weyrauch, then working for the Rowohlt publishing house,

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rejected the manuscript, and Otto Görner, editor of Hoffmann und Campe, demanded to cut the execution scene, editor Harriet Wegener defended the text and only proposed minor edits. Why Weyrauch rejected the manuscript is unknown, but he probably argued similarly to Joachim Kaiser (1956), whom Weyrauch knew from the literary circle Gruppe 47, annoyed by the casual tone of the overarching frame story and the loose merge of serious and light-hearted themes. The former NSDAP official Görner (1954a, Letter to Scholz), however, specifically sought to prevent the publication of the massacre sequence, which he found “embarrassing.” The fact that the account could be released in this form was equally to Scholz’s and Wegener’s credit, the former for processing his impressions from Orsha, the latter for asserting herself in an internal power struggle at the publishing house. Generally, the two adaptations of Through the Night would not have appeared were it not for the people who engaged in the process of production. For the radio play, Gert Westphal, Scholz’s later friend, took on this role; for the television production, it was director Hanns Hartmann. Interestingly, no direct opponents of the television adaptation are known. It was only after it had been aired that the new artistic director of WDR public broadcasting, Klaus von Bismarck, rejected reruns of the miniseries as well as a feature film project; the reasons for his decision can no longer be determined. However, it was the winter of 1960/61 that marked the beginning of Through the Night’s ‘traveling’ into a dead end of memory culture. The book continued to be available, and the miniseries was even aired again in 1966, but now other events concerning the confrontation with the recent Nazi past overshadowed the sequence with the Orsha massacre. Neither the new editions of the book nor the rerun on television triggered any significant reactions, as far as I can determine. The actions of Hartmann and Wegener also illustrate the way in which the rules of sayability were negotiated. Hartmann prepared the board of NWRV for the execution scene in a letter he sent shortly before the production was aired. It can be interpreted as political intervention which, however, had no immediate effect. Wegener, in turn, expressed reservations about expecting readers to accept the drastic passages only ten years after the end of the war—this, too, was nothing less than a negotiation of the rules of memory culture in order to ‘move’ collective memory. The intensification of the Vergangenheitsbewältigung at the turn of the 1960s, as stated by many scholars (e.g., Kittel 1993; Berghoff 1998; Frei 2002; Reichel 2010), must have been escorted by countless comparable negotiations. However, a thorough analysis of these subliminal processes—micro-movements of cultural ­memory—has not yet been conducted. Moritz Baßler sees literary critic Joachim Kaiser as chiefly responsible for the non-inclusion of Through the Night in the German literary canon.

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The unsparing review by the member of the highly influential Gruppe 47 may indeed have led to the novel’s rejection in intellectual circles. For Stefan Scherer, the politicization of literature was the main reason: “The polemical farewell to the Adenauer era, now consistently stigmatized as an era of ‘restoration,’ made Scholz’s bestseller even go unnoticed in contributions to the cultural history of the 1950s” (Scherer 2020, 111). I argue, however, that the absence of Through the Night from West German literary history has also been caused by the status of its author. The novel as well as the extracted story Schkola (1958) was Scholz’s only fiction. His subsequent book, also published by Hoffmann und Campe in 1960, was a collection of essays about Berlin as a divided city: Berlin, jetzt freue dich (Berlin, now be happy) (Scholz 1960b). Scholz remained faithful to the genre of location-based essays and travelogues until the end of his writing career; in addition, he wrote feature articles and reviews for the Berlin-based newspaper Tagesspiegel. Over the course of his career, Scholz established himself as a publicist focusing primarily on the cultural history of Berlin, rather than as a fiction writer. Consequently, he was denied the place of a significant author in (West) German literary history. Whether the television production of Through the Night would have taken a different path in German memory culture had Hartmann not been voted out of his post as artistic director of WDR in the fall of 1960 is a matter of speculation. Perhaps, with the completion of the motion picture, the history of the media complex would have taken a different course. Perhaps Hartmann would have advocated much earlier for a rerun of the miniseries on television. Just as Scholz’s writing career had an impact on the novel’s rather uneventful afterlife, Fritz Umgelter probably played a similar role for the television adaptation. After directing both So weit die Füße tragen and Through the Night between 1959 and 1960, Umgelter turned to ‘lighter’ topics; when asked about his motivation to make television, he replied: “For people from all walks of life. I want to get a profile of all social groups in front of the television at the same time” (“Soweit die Füße tragen” 1981). Consequently, Umgelter did not have a reputation as a specialist for difficult topics. There is also some doubt whether Through the Night was indeed the bestseller that contemporary media considered it to be. As I calculated in Chapter  3, about 40,000 copies had been sold by the end of 1958, plus the circulation of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung issues containing the feature novel. The remaining approximately 160,000 copies are distributed among later editions and span over more than five decades.2 By contrast, the bestsellers of the 1950s—mainly shallow novels dealing with the war—sold millions of copies, some of them were additionally preprinted in high-circulation illustrated magazines. However, circulation figures do not always play a decisive role when it comes to the inclusion of a fiction novel into the literary canon. For example, the well-known trilogy by Wolfgang Koeppen

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abovementioned trilogy had a circulation of only 6,000 to 12,000 copies by 1960 (Estermann 1990, 48), and yet they are mentioned in every textbook on West German postwar literary history. Scholz’s novel is much more difficult to locate; it is not a popular war novel about heroic soldiers, but nor is it a critical or sophisticated book. In many respects, it is an example beyond established categorizations (Baßler 2020); consequently, Through the Night has rarely been considered in studies in either field. When the first edition of the book was published in September 1955, it was still too early for a broad public debate on Nazi crimes. At that time, there was no common language for this discussion, not to mention political blockades. The few reviewers mentioning the depiction of the Orsha massacre had obvious difficulties in finding the right words to describe what they had read. Furthermore, the book had almost certainly not been read in its entirety by all critics: many reviews are strikingly similar, sometimes repeating entire phrases from promotional texts by the publisher, who had deliberately directed the attention to the ‘unproblematic’ motifs of the Berlin nightlife. Referring to current debates would have been possible in new editions, but in the 1960s and 1970s there was no incentive for reviews on new editions of an old book. The fact that the description of the Orsha massacre had gone almost unnoticed until recently was thus, at least in part, caused by the rules of the book market. The material conditions of the radio play and the television miniseries raise similar questions. Due to a lack of data, the number of listeners cannot even be estimated; on the summer evenings of August 1956 and July 1957, listening to a radio play was probably not the most attractive leisure activity. Thanks to a survey by Infratest, the number of viewers of the television production’s first episode can at least roughly be estimated at about 7.5 million. The viewers reacted emotionally to the images of the massacre, but they gave different reasons: while the majority of reviewers seemed shocked, the anonymous audience tended to express outrage. During the 1960s, television became increasingly politicized, and as a result it was gradually perceived as an independent player in important social debates. After Through the Night was aired, other television events such as the thirteen-part documentary Das Dritte Reich, the coverage from the Eichmann trial, and Egon Monk’s Anfrage (Inquiry) attracted attention; by then, the execution scene from Umgelter’s miniseries had ceased to be part of the conversation. In fact, the emotional impact of the first episode wore off just a few weeks after it had aired, even while the miniseries still continued. And as popular as television was in 1960s West Germany, its memory was shortlived. Unlike theatrical films, which are usually screened in multiple theaters over weeks or months, and unlike today’s television productions and their presence through streaming, reruns, or DVD editions, television p ­ roductions

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of the postwar period were punctual events, overshadowed by new televised events in a relatively short time. How can the actors of the story of Through the Night be ‘reunited’ with non-human actants, to quote Bruno Latour (2005, 11–12)? Cultural memory does not ‘move’ by itself but is—again following Latour—‘set in motion.’ For this purpose, the actors must possess a corresponding infrastructure or a material substructure: the room and the table at which memory talks are conducted; the paper and the pen for writing down war experiences; the typewriter and ink ribbon for transforming the notes into a typescript. As telephone calls between West Berlin and West Germany were expensive, Scholz wrote long letters to his editors, and in urgent cases they sent telegrams. The network of broadcasting stations ‘assembled’ (ibid., 22) the technical equipment and the employees who could operate it—not to forget the listeners and viewers who gathered in front of their (often low-quality) radio and television sets in order to listen to and watch the productions. Our memory culture today is all the more dependent on the functioning infrastructure of digital media. In this context, barriers within the memory culture become visible. While some could not afford new books or consumer electronics, others lived in sparsely populated areas without bookstores or radio and television ­reception—the reason for the non-presence of Through the Night in East Germany. Smuggling a book from West Berlin in the mid-1950s was not yet a logistical problem, but the price of 15.60 DM in Western currency was simply unaffordable for most citizens in communist countries. And the divided city of Berlin was far outside SWF’s broadcasting area; furthermore in 1960, television in East Germany was still in its infancy, so very few East Berliners owned a television set to receive Western signals in the first place. Given these barriers, the reception of Through the Night in East Germany was very marginal, and a political ban not even necessary. How can the infrastructure of memory culture be studied? If respective sources are available, documents that are usually of little interest for hermeneutically working scholars can be very useful: contracts, travel expense reports, hotel reservations, personnel records, notices in trade journals, correspondence with technicians, lists of voucher copies, press releases, and book or film announcements. Such sources can facilitate empirically based statements about production processes, advertising measures, signal strengths, or screen resolutions. Furthermore, these inconspicuous documents also reveal the importance of financial factors; Hans Scholz (1955c, Letter to Hoffmann und Campe), for example, admitted that an open bill at his tailor motivated him to write. A comparison of travel histories shows who might have spent time with whom, when, where, and for how long. In this way I learned that Scholz must have met Max Ophüls in Baden-Baden in February 1956,

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although no correspondence between the two has survived. The production documents also reveal that the set designers employed by NWRV public broadcasting began working on Through the Night immediately after the final shots of So weit die Füße tragen. This explains, for instance, the provenance of Soviet freight cars in the adaptation of the novel. Of course, it does little to change the symbolic significance of this requisite which suggests that the Soviets were complicit in the massacre; however, the information obtained helps us to understand where such images originated.

The ‘Emergence’ of the Massacre As Scherer, Lang, and Heck rightly claim, the growing interest in Through the Night should be seen in the context of change in the cultural memory of the Holocaust. In recent years, it has opened up memories beyond the previously dominant topoi of concentration and extermination camps. The Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trial in 1947 and 1948 received virtually no attention in the press (Earl 2010, 17), and it was not until the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial ten years later that parts of the West German public became aware of the mass executions. However, the image of the extermination of Jewish women, men, children, and old people in the Soviet Union did not enter the (West) German cultural memory until the debates about the so-called Wehrmacht Exhibitions at the turn of the twenty-first century, which triggered a commemoration of the victims of the ‘Holocaust by bullets.’ The facts about the participation of the Wehrmacht in those crimes caused outrage and dismay, especially during the first exhibition, but were increasingly registered, as evidenced by the 2017 exhibition of the Berlin museum Topography of Terror (Mass Shootings: The Holocaust from the Baltic to the Black Sea 1941–44), which received considerably more social acceptance than the two Wehrmacht exhibitions had roughly twenty years earlier. The research on the mass executions accelerated due mainly to two factors: the end of the Cold War around 1989 and the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. The former resulted in the opening of East Central European archives, the latter in the political inclusion of countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia as part of Europe; as a result, their stories became part of the European memory culture as well (Assmann 2012). The results of the research, such as Christopher Browning’s groundbreaking study Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), are now communicated through non-academic channels: Uwe Timm explicitly refers to Browning’s book in his autobiographical novel In my Brother’s Shadow (2005, orig. 2003); and Stefan Ruzowitzky’s semi-documentary Radical Evil (2013) is based on Browning’s work. Beyond Europe,

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institutions that are specifically focused on the history of the Holocaust, such as Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, also now shift some focus toward the Holocaust by bullets. In the transnational Holocaust memory, however, memorial initiatives to the 1.5 million victims of the Holocaust by bullets still have low visibility (Klei and Stoll 2019). Unlike commemorations of the ghettos, concentration camps, and death camps, survivors did not create master narratives that could have left a lasting mark on the image of mass executions (Vice 2019, 89). There are no books on the mass executions of Jews that would have had a comparable resonance to the literature by Primo Levi, Ruth Klüger, or Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Besides literature, the memory of the Holocaust by bullets is also scarce in film, theater, and the visual arts. This is significant insofar as in memory studies cultural discourse is considered a seismograph, giving insight into societal changes in dealing with the past. The significance of academic publications and academically curated exhibitions relates to the professionalized part of memory culture; the small number of novels, plays, and art projects dealing with the mass executions, however, is an important sign that the Holocaust by bullets has not yet penetrated the core of the European memory culture. Alexandra Klei and Katrin Stoll (2019, 10) argue that the crime scenes are invisible, especially from a German perspective, as they are located “somewhere in the East.” I do not want to contradict because it helps to explain the emotional reactions of the audience to Through the Night, outraged by the fact that geographically and historically distant events now filtered through the television screen into their supposedly ‘safe’ living rooms. In my opinion, however, Klei and Stoll’s assumption must be extended by an essential aspect. The mass executions of the Jews are not very visible even where they actually happened: in Eastern Europe. There are three main reasons for this invisibility. First, very few Jews survived the executions; Jews who could not flee in time were usually imprisoned and then murdered. Only in a few exceptional cases did the victims manage to escape the executions, hence only a few people were able to give testimony from the victims’ perspective. In her study on the survivors of the executions, Barbara Engelking identified only ninety-one testimionies of such survivors worldwide (Engelking 2022). Second, the small number of escapees often did not have sufficient cultural, social, or economic capital to communicate their experiences publicly after the war. The few who dared to take this step wrote in East (Central) European languages such as Yiddish, Polish, Ukrainian, or Russian, which is why their testimonies have only attracted limited international attention. The short story Ponary-Baza (Ponary Base) by Polish writer Józef Mackiewicz about the mass executions in the Lithuanian village of Ponary in the summer of 1941, or the poem Ja eto videl! (I saw it!) by the Russian lyricist Ilya Selvinsky about the executions

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in the Crimea in December 1941, are two such examples (Bolecki 2007; Schreyer 2013; Toker 2013; Roskies 2013). Third, in the Soviet Union—and to a large extent also in today’s Russia and Belarus—the victims are generally commemorated as ‘Soviet citizens.’ In Soviet historical propaganda, it hardly played a role if people had been murdered by the Nazis as Jews or were other victims of the war (Brumlik and Sauerland 2010, 17; Walke 2010). The wellknown film Come and See (1985) by Elem Klimov, for example, is about Soviet partisans brutally murdered by the Germans. The Soviet production does not reveal that the fight against the partisans often served as a pretext for the extermination of the Jews (Heer 1996). In the absence of master narratives about the Holocaust by bullets, recent research and commemorative initiatives have drawn on sources that were previously hidden. Roma Sendyka and Erica Lehrer, for instance, presented the impressive Kraków exhibition Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust (2018–19) with works by local artists from the war and early postwar period; it helps to infer the reaction of the population to the mass executions of their Jewish fellow citizens, characterized above all by collectively looking away. An important exception to the memory of the Holocaust by bullets is the Babyn Yar massacre of 29 and 30 September 1941. On the highest Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, members of Einsatzgruppe C murdered approximately 34,000 Jews in the ravine near Kiev. Following initial reports, circulating in Yiddish during the war (Lekht 2013, 18–41), the Ukrainian writer Anatoly Kuznetsov described the massacre in his book Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (1966), in which he also interwove the memoirs of survivor Dina Proničeva. Barely wounded, she dug herself out of the dirt after nightfall, and fled. Fifteen years after Kuznetsov’s book, D.M. Thomas published his novel The White Hotel (1981), in which the story of one of Sigmund Freud’s patients leads to Babyn Yar. Because the perspective of his protagonist strongly resembles Kuznetsov’s account of Proničeva’s testimony, Thomas was accused of plagiarism. The British writer did not deny this inspiration, however, and his novel eventually sparked a long-lasting debate about the limits of fiction (Vice 2000, 38–66). The motif of the liberation of corpses, transferred to the description of the Trachimbrod massacre, also appears in Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestseller Everything is Illuminated (2002) and in its less successful movie adaptation (2005). Finally, Kuznetsov’s book and Proničeva’s testimony were also important inspirations for Katja Petrovskaja (2014), who “set a literary monument to the victims of Babyn Yar” with her collection Maybe Esther (Davies 2021, 24). The image of the massacre derived from Proničeva’s memoirs is therefore an example of an extremely straightforward ‘traveling’ of cultural memory, in which the respective stages are relatively easy to trace. However, Babyn Yar became an international icon of Nazi atrocities only after the broadcast of the television miniseries Holocaust, in which an SS man

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with the name Erik Dorf observes the murder of several thousand Jewish men and women from a hill above the ravine, remarking on the lack of efficiency in the killing procedure. Finally, Jonathan Littell built clear references to this scene into his much-discussed novel The Kindly Ones (orig. 2006), in which the fictional SS man Maximilian Aue reports on Babyn Yar: The Ukrainian ‘packers’ dragged their charges to these piles and forced them to lie down over them or next to them; the men from the firing squad then advanced and passed along the rows of people lying down almost naked, shooting each one with a submachine [gun] bullet in the neck; there were three firing squads in all. [In] between the executions, some officers inspected the bodies and finished them off with a pistol. To one side, on a hill overlooking the scene, stood groups of officers from the SS and the Wehrmacht. (Littell 2009, 126)

If Kuznetsov, Thomas, Foer, and to some extent Petrovskaja consistently tell the story from the victim’s perspective, or more precisely, from the perspective of Dina Proničeva, Chomsky’s and Littell’s popular works depict the Babyn Yar massacre from the perpetrators’ perspective; standing on a hill, they watch from above as the victims, gripped, climb into the pits and are shot (Cazenave 2010). Those still alive are killed with ‘mercy shots.’ A similar, if less coherent, picture of the mass executions emerges from isolated interrogation transcripts of members of the Einsatzkommandos. The few men who commented on the mass executions at all generally claimed to have only watched as other, unnamed perpetrators, carried out the murders. Hans Walkhoff of the 3. Polizei Reservebatallion, for example, testified that “shortly before the shooting ended, we as police reservists had to come to the pit and watch the mess there” (Walkhoff 1962, Interrogation, 1176). Most of the literary and cinematic examples mentioned above represent non-German cultures—with the exception of Petrovskaja’s book, though she did not grow up in Germany either. In German postwar literature, mass executions were usually only briefly alluded to. Even in Peter Bamm’s novel The Invisible Flag (orig. 1952), the reference to the executions carried out by ‘the others’ is terse at best: “The others followed slowly in our wake and had begun its murderous activities. In a separate part of the G.P.U. prison next door to us, all the Jewish inhabitants of Sevastopol were collected and put to death” (Bamm 1956, 98). This way, Bamm reconfirms the difference between the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht, in which his protagonist and alter ego served as a medic, and the criminal SS. Two years later, Erich Maria Remarque’s A Time to Live and a Time to Die (orig. 1954) was published without the original passages about executions, which fell victim to the internal censorship of the publishing house. Considering these and other cases of only brief, marginal references to German

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war crimes, accompanied by a voluminous rhetoric of justification and relativization, Norman Ächtler speaks of an ‘emergence’ of perpetrators in West German literature of the 1950s (Ächtler 2014); this sporadic ‘emergence’ is a still-occurring “upward movement” (Gumbrecht 2013, 31) of memory. In the aforementioned narrative, Uwe Timm (2005) briefly ponders whether his brother, a member of the SS division Totenkopf, was involved in the Babyn Yar massacre. In Petrovskaja’s Maybe Esther, the focus is on (non-)memory rather than on the historical event itself. In Giulio Riccarelli’s film Labyrinth of Lies (2014), dedicated to the investigations prior to the Auschwitz trials in the early 1960s, only a minor character is introduced as a former member of the Reserve-Polizeibataillon 101; linking this incidental information with the fact that it is the battalion Browning once investigated is left to the viewers. A novel or feature film dedicated to the mass execution of Jews during World War II is still missing in German-language culture. Simultaneously, the image of ‘excessive perpetrator’ (Exzesstäter) became popular. They were ‘the others,’ as can be seen in the denazification surveys, for instance. Even those who admitted active membership in Nazi organizations made assurances “that they had not participated in any ‘excesses’” (Leßau 2020, 258). Consequently, ‘excessive perpetrators’ embodied a perfect projection screen for the ‘radical evil’ in literature and film. In Böll’s Where Were You Adam? (orig. 1951), the SS man orders a Jewish woman named Ilona to sing, and then shoots her in the middle of the song. Hans Hellmut Kirst introduced power-obsessed SS men in his novel The Lieutenant Must Be Mad (orig. 1954); director Paul May even intensified the excessive character in the highly successful film adaptation (08/15, 1954). In movies and on television, images of excessive perpetrators turning into perverted murderers in the face of the brutality on the Eastern Front are remedialized to the present, including the miniseries Generation War (2013), directed by Philipp Kadelbach, in which a psychopathic SS man murders innocent villagers in occupied Ukraine. These common images, however, have little to do with historical reality; not without reason, Browning called his book Ordinary Men. Numerous sources prove that in the occupied East European countries, not only high-ranking SS men and convinced Nazis, but also police officers, members of the Wehrmacht, and occasionally local helpers were involved in the mass executions—completely ‘ordinary’ men. How can Through the Night be located within the ‘emergence’ of mass executions and excessive perpetrators? Hans Scholz provided one of the most detailed descriptions of the Holocaust by bullets in world literature, and probably the longest passage of this kind in German literature. The fact that the description of the Orsha massacre could appear as early as 1955—long before Kuznetsov’s book—gives Scholz’s novel additional distinctiveness. Whether it is a remediation of the isolated cultural references to the Holocaust by bullets

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that existed at the time, however, is questionable. Hans Scholz repeatedly claimed not to be a reader of contemporary literature and to have based the depiction of the massacre solely on his recollections. There is nothing in the novel or in Scholz’s estate to suggest that he drew on Böll, Bamm, Kirst, or Remarque. It is also difficult to prove the pre-medializing effect of the execution scene on later images of this kind. There is no evidence in the extensive literature on Holocaust, The White Hotel, or The Kindly Ones that the authors had read or seen Through the Night; and given the vanishingly small presence of the media complex abroad, it seems rather unlikely. Translations of the novel sold poorly, and the radio play and television production never aired outside West Germany. Notwithstanding the fact that a causal connection between Through the Night and later depictions of mass executions cannot be proven, similar images ‘traveled’ through culture and contributed to the construction of a memory of the Holocaust in which defenseless victims are exposed to psychopathic perpetrators. The comparison of the most popular titles further shows that Wilms’s perspective corresponds to the perpetrator’s point of view, although he stages himself as an uninvolved witness. Like Erik Dorf in Holocaust and Maximilian Aue in The Kindly Ones, he observes the murders from a safe distance; while in the novel he stands below the crime scene, in the film he looks into the pit from an elevated point. The figure of the demonic SS man, added by Umgelter, silently gives instructions to those carrying out the executions, using only gestures. As in Green’s miniseries and Littell’s novel, but unlike the books by Thomas or Foer, in Through the Night we learn little about the victims. In the novel and the radio play, they are unnamed Jews; in the television adaptation, the victims include the brother and sister with whom Wilms shares his food ration in Góra Kalwaria. In all versions, the victims are mute, passive, and defenseless. There is probably also no direct connection between the image of a psychopathic SS man staged by Umgelter and later embodiments of this figure. All those images of the individual excessive perpetrators, already traceable in the early legal action against Nazi crimes, belong to the same discourse that split German society into millions of harmless blind followers and very few guilty perpetrators. It reveals the specificity of ‘traveling’ memory as well as the principle of pre- and remediation: in memory culture, certain motifs circulate independently of demonstrable references to one another. Despite loose connections, iconic representations of Babyn Yar cast a long shadow over Through the Night. Academic research increasingly signals that the scenes from Holocaust and The Kindly Ones provide a point of reference for the latest readings of Jürgen Wilms’s diary. Moritz Baßler (2020, 33), for instance, writes about a “Babyn Yar-like massacre of Jews” in Through the Night. The traveling memory of the mass execution thus closes a circle, in that the

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now-clichéd descriptions of the massacre near Kiev seem to have become the standard for the modes of representation of mass executions. Furthermore, it is worth taking a closer look not only at ‘emerged’ but also at ‘submerged’ motifs. In the second story of the novel, which is only fourteen pages long, Hesselbarth talks about a Russian partisan, previously described as a Jew in the original manuscript. Hesselbarth meets her in Orsha in July 1941; their paths cross again during the retreat in January 1943, when he discovers her on a vehicle of the 177th Jäger-Division (177th Infantry Division). “‘Partisans?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ replied the sergeant. ‘We’re taking them to be shot’” (TN 78). Hasselbarth still tries to warn the girl and wants to allow her to escape, but she decides to stay with her group. “From the darkening woods nearby came the sound of many shots” (TN 79). What is recounted in these pages is not a battle, but an execution, obviously also a war crime committed by a Wehrmacht unit. Not a single review or letter to the editor contains a hint to this passage. It is as if it did not exist in the book. It was cut from the radio play, and in the television adaptation Umgelter integrated the story into the diary of Jürgen Wilms: the protagonist sees a girl in Orsha after meeting her earlier in Poland; he advises her to flee, but she goes to the pit with her family and is shot there with the other Jews. The execution of partisans does not appear in the television version of Through the Night. Unlike the mass executions coordinated by the Einsatzgruppen, the murders of partisans were usually a matter for the Wehrmacht (Heer 1996). For decades, those executions were considered legitimate warfare and were part of the repertoire of the heroic remembrance of the Eastern Front. It was only after the so-called Wehrmacht exhibitions that the executions of partisans started to be classified as crimes, a fact that contributed to the strong reactions of the visitors. In the former Soviet republics, the brave struggle of the partisans is still part of the collective memory. The story of the partisan in Through the Night thus neither fits into (West) German memory narratives, as it points directly to the Wehrmacht as an organization of perpetrators, nor can it be reconciled with Soviet memory patterns, especially as the partisans are portrayed as defenseless Jewish victims instead of fighting Soviet heroines. The removal of the originally Jewish partisan from the manuscript and later from the radio play and television scripts is a vivid example of ‘submerging’ uncomfortable facts. The ‘cooperative’ silence of readers and reviewers additionally helped to conceal it. This way, the fate of Jews among the partisans was relegated to the margins of both West and East European cultural memory. Due to a lack of proper approaches, it was long impossible to analytically examine the memory of perpetration; only recently has this changed, in the course of the so-called perpetrator turn (Knittel and Goldberg 2020). In context with the debate about the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

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in Berlin, Reinhart Koselleck called for a stronger focus on “negative memory” and an obligation to “remember the deeds themselves and thus also the perpetrators” (Koselleck 2002, 28). The historian in no way talked about a heroization of the perpetrators, but rather advocated a full-fledged confrontation with their crimes. That requires, however, that the boundaries between the categories of perpetrators, victims, bystanders, witnesses, and helpers are shifted or softened. How is the fictional Wehrmacht soldier Jürgen Wilms to be described, who ‘only’ watches the massacre and yet expresses feelings of guilt? In which category is Hesselbarth, who claims that he wanted to help the partisan? In the late 2010s, two books revealed new research perspectives on those questions. Michael Rothberg proposed the concept of the ‘implicated subject’ (2019), neither an alternative to the perpetrator nor a hypernym. Given the variety of possible positions both in real history and conveyed through cultural texts, Rothberg’s concept of a subject that was somehow ‘implicated’ in genocide facilitates the opportunity for a broader and more nuanced discussion. In her book Reckonings (2018), Mary Fulbrook again discusses the consequences of the fact that ‘coming to terms’ with perpetration necessarily happened in a society in which millions of men were perpetrators themselves; in short, they judged in their own terms. Fulbrook’s main argument is that this fact produced numerous pseudo-measures, from dropped investigations to lenient sentences or outright acquittals. In combination with numerous public debates about the society’s need to come to terms with the past, these pseudo-measures enabled West Germany to distinguish itself internationally as a country that successfully dealt with its criminal legacy. Without going into more detail about Fulbrook’s account here, I would like to point out that her arguments can be used beyond the discussions about the legal reappraisal of the past as well. Virtually all those engaged in the cultural sector of early West Germany were ‘implicated subjects’; equally ‘implicated’ was their audience. Most of the adult postwar population had their own war experiences, especially those men returning from the Eastern Front who had been direct perpetrators, confidants, blind followers, or spectators. What did writing on one’s own behalf mean for the cultural memory of World War II? Especially regarding the commemoration of mass executions and the cruel occupation of Eastern Europe, this question has not yet been sufficiently answered.

The Subcutaneous Memory What does not ‘emerge’ in cultural memory is not necessarily forgotten. Aleida Assmann describes it with her concepts of storage memory and ‘custo-

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dial forgetting’ (Verwahrensvergessen). But how do we know what to look for in the ‘waiting room of history’ or the ‘dead end of memory culture,’ as I call it, to emphasize the principle of ‘traveling’? What happens before the threshold into the public is crossed? In the chapters of this book I have spoken of ‘subcutaneous memory.’ Now, coming to its end, I would like to explain this concept in more detail. ‘Subcutaneous’ means ‘below the skin’ (in Latin cutaneous is the adjective form of cutis – the skin). It is part of the medical vocabulary, and may be familiar to people from visits to their doctor, as many drugs are administered through subcutaneous injections: not too deep, past the large blood vessels, and therefore not too painful. ‘Subcutaneous memory’ involves forms of memory that are completely or almost invisible to the public. They are kept ‘below’ the surface of the public sphere. Accordingly, subcutaneous memory emerges primarily from ‘behind the scenes’ of memory culture; examining unpublished sources might reveal a discourse that had been overlooked. When Harriet Wegener told the author that “most people do not like it when Hitler’s executions of Jews are served up again and again,” she expressed what was not said publicly at the time: she knew which executions it was about, but thought it would be better kept quiet. Due to the subliminal character of subcutaneous memory, intimate conversations are probably the most common medium of mediation. The German POWs intercepted by the British and US intelligence services did not know they were being recorded (Neitzel and Welzer 2011). They spoke openly about their war experiences, including the mass executions. Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl claim that the Holocaust was an open secret, partly because in Eastern Europe many of the mass executions turned into a “mass public spectacle” that was subsequently reported “among acquaintances, in German ministries and offices, as well as in private” (Bajohr and Pohl 2006, 128). Hanne Leßau also provides evidence that even after the war many Germans talked about their support for National Socialism, although they rarely admitted to having personally participated in the crimes. Knowledge of the war crimes was, in fact, widespread in German postwar society (Leßau 2020, 11). Leßau’s sources include letters, which were very common in the postwar period because the war-related migrations had separated many families and friends (ibid., 126). Countless encounters at the Stammtisch (regulars’ table at the local bar) also created intimate conversational situations (Kühne 2006). The evening in the Jockey Bar described by Scholz is basically nothing more than a luxury version of a regulars’ table conversation over a dinner with champagne and duck in an upscale ambience. As the readers often emphasized how the author had hit Berlin’s ‘jargon’ well, we may also assume that his descriptions of the general tone of such encounters were close to reality. Likewise, the

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thousands of investigations against Nazi perpetrators in West Germany, most of which were dropped, must certainly have been a conversation topic among employees in police departments, criminal investigation offices, and public prosecutors’ offices. Their exact tenor, however, is pure speculation. It suggests that although subcutaneous memory is based on informal mediation, it still requires some sort of archiving for it to be transmitted beyond the conversational situation. The POWs described by Neitzel and Welzer were wiretapped, and the resulting recordings were logged; the communication examined by Leßau was principally in written form and thus entered the archives; Scholz wrote a deluxe Stammtisch-novel based on his conversations with acquaintances from the postwar West Berlin art scene; but we know nothing of presumed chats about the investigations against Nazi perpetrators because they have not been handed down. Notwithstanding the examples given here, subcutaneous memory is not a phenomenon limited to West German perpetrator memory after World War II. Especially in nondemocratic societies, work on recollections of the ‘difficult past’ is often forced ‘underground.’ In the People’s Republic of Poland, for example, the fighters of the Home Army—the largest underground military movement with over 400,000 members—were not publicly commemorated during the first postwar decade, as the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party focused on the merit of communist fighters. The former members of the Home Army thus exchanged information in private, and they did so cautiously in case less trustworthy people overheard these conversations. In cultural texts, the memory of the Home Army was conveyed between the lines—for example, in Andrzej Wajda’s film Kanał (Sewer 1957), telling the story of the fighters in the Warsaw Uprising without explicitly mentioning that it had been organized by the Home Army. As this was part of the general but not publicly articulated knowledge in the 1950s, the director could rely on his audience’s knowledge to understand the film as intended. In this context, Polish academic literature makes a distinction between official and non-official memory (Szacka 2006). The opposition is based on locating memory within or outside of the political discourse, but it is insufficient in terms of the mechanisms of its construction and circulation. Furthermore, the separation between official and unofficial memory is problematic for democratic societies as, despite the reduced regulation of public memory, some topics are rarely present in the mediated public but are still frequently discussed in private. The subcutaneous memory occasionally penetrates the public through its representations; searching it requires meticulous examinations of cultural texts and images in order to identify ‘ruptures,’ ‘contradictions,’ and ‘blanks.’ They include brief hints, small signs hidden between the lines, or barely uttered assertions. In Through the Night, such signals are located primarily in

Conclusion 207

the overarching frame story. Unlike Wilms, who describes the Orsha massacre in detail in his diary, and unlike Hesselbarth, who speaks openly about the murder of the partisans, the other men at the table prefer allusions and half-sentences. Talking about Wilms, one of them says: “[No partisans,] not in the Home Guard or in a prisoner-of-war detachment – nothing like that” (TN 15). It is supposed to mean that Wilms did not belong to any unit that committed crimes. Apparently, everyone at the table knows what it means; the comment does not need any further explanation. The English translator, however, had difficulties with this passage, which is why I corrected it above (phrase in square brackets). In the English edition we read “Not a partisan” (TN 15), which does not meet the German wording “Nix Partisaneneinsatz” (AGSS 27), because the person speaking means that Wilms was not engaged in ‘operations’ against partisans, not that he was not a partisan himself. At the same time, Scholz addresses his contemporary readers with a wink, because they, too, have an idea of what kind of ‘operation’ is referred to. However, the female and American translator, Elisabeth Abbott, could not have known what the author had in mind. What is the difference between subcutaneous and communicative memory? Both are transmitted through informal communication, usually orally, and can be represented in cultural texts. However, communicative memory is a form of generational memory: representatives of older generations share their memories with younger people. This form of memory presupposes that the older group has knowledge that is first to be transmitted to their younger audience. The emerging narrative is characterized by a “textual coherence” so it can be further transmitted (Assmann, J. 2011, 4–6). The background of subcutaneous memory is different, as it is tied to the autobiographical memory of the participants of the conversation. Here, ‘knowers’ exchange information with ‘knowers.’ As both sides belong to the same mnemonic community, there is no need for a detailed or coherent exchange. A small sign, a hint, a story begun but not finished is sufficient, because both sides know what is being talked about anyway. The weak coherence of subcutaneous memory has two important consequences: first, it cannot effectively ‘travel’ like other modes of memory, as it lacks the fixed narrative structure necessary; second, it rather emerges on an affective rather than on a discursive level. The result is that subcutaneous memory remains largely invisible in memory culture. The tie between subcutaneous memory and the mnemonic community in Through the Night can be illustrated by the motif of Latvian units in Orsha. In the 1950s, when the novel was published, Latvian collaboration was not yet a topic in the West German public; it was not until the 1970s that the media started to report on it (Knop 1995). And yet, the claim that the Orsha Jews were murdered by Latvians and not by Germans did not cause any surprised

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reaction. Beyond question, it was a ‘convenient’ representation, because it identified non-Germans as perpetrators; more interesting, however, is why the blame was particularly assigned to Latvian units. It can be assumed that Wehrmacht soldiers, both on leave and returning home, told of Latvian involvement in the mass executions. Their complicity, apparently, was not a secret, which is why the presence of Latvian shooters in Through the Night was not met with any suspicion, even though they in fact never participated in the execution in Orsha. Instead, the authors of the media complex tapped into the subcutaneously circulating knowledge about the mass murders and their fellow perpetrators. Regina Schilling’s award-winning documentary Kulenkampffs Schuhe (2018) provides a paradigmatic example of the media representation of subcutaneous memory. The director shows how popular quiz show hosts of postwar West German television used to allude to war experiences of their generation. As a little girl she had concentrated only on the game shows; watching them again as an adult she notices how the show master HansJoachim Kulenkampff, for instance, during a question involving vodka, says that “the only time I do not regret having been in Russia.” “What has Kulenkampff just said?” asks Schilling off-screen, rewinding the scene and showing it again in slow motion. She researches Kulenkampff’s wartime biography and concludes that those remarks were directed at viewers like her father, as if it was about creating a mnemonic community between the famous show master and his male audience. Obviously, the adult males in front of the television easily decoded the remarks, while they remained opaque to uninitiated viewers. The subliminal and fragmentary character of subcutaneous memory recalls Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s interpretation of latency. Distancing himself from the original psychoanalytic understanding of the term, he uses it to describe the ‘mood’ of early postwar West Germany. The past, he argues, is present in the present, even if it cannot be grasped or touched: “We are unable to say where, exactly, our certainty of the presence comes from, nor do we know where, precisely, what is latent is located now” (Gumbrecht 2013, 23). The ‘mood’ resembles a “sense that somebody (or something) is there,” but this can hardly be articulated. From this state of latency described by Gumbrecht, Aleida Assmann (2016, 16) derives her concept of ‘custodial forgetting,’ which also seems to be a form of subcutaneous memory. It differs from ‘implicit’ or ‘non-declarative’ memory, which in principle travels “unconsciously” (Erll 2011a, 86), because it has a conscious component. Assmann writes of “covering up” as a technique of custodial forgetting, whereby “the problem or incriminated event is merely removed from communication. Everyone still knows what it is about; no one has forgotten” (Assmann 2016, 22).

Conclusion 209

The silence in the reviews about the execution scene in Scholz’s novel can therefore be interpreted as a sign of complicity. Uwe Timm ponders why his brother concealed the mass executions in his otherwise informative diary, and concludes: “The killing of civilians is normal, everyday work, not even worth mentioning” (Timm 2005, 84). Silence need not be a sign of trauma or strong affect, as it is often interpreted in memory studies. Probably the most common situation in which people remain silent or speak in half-sentences is—as mundane as it may sound—when they have nothing or little to say. Perhaps the majority of the reviewers of Through the Night hardly commented on the Orsha massacre simply because it neither astonished nor outraged them. Perhaps it was not worth commenting on as most middle-aged men knew perfectly well what was being talked about, either from their own experience or from hearsay, such as the fictitious round in the Jockey Bar. What no one had previously processed in literary form was now presented by the debutant Scholz, albeit possibly somewhat naively. Joachim Kaiser and Helmut Kreuzer—the only reviewers who commented critically and in detail on Scholz’s account of the events at Orsha—already represented a younger generation. They had no experience of being a soldier, and were not part of the mnemonic community. When Kreuzer (1957, 58) complains about Scholz describing the “murder of the Jews” over “champagne and jokes,” and Kaiser (1956, 540) criticizes the writer for having his protagonists talk about the “Nazi state” in a “nightclub,” they criticize precisely what is at the core of subcutaneous memory: informal communication about the past, which is incomplete and fragmentary because those in the group have similar memories from similar experiences. As outsiders to this ‘community,’ the two critics saw the novel from a different perspective than the majority of reviewers. Obviously, subcutaneous memory requires a certain distance in order to get rid of its self-evidence and become visible. In this interpretation, the intense reactions following the broadcast of the television miniseries signify two things. First, the five-year gap between the novel and its film adaptation exposed much of what had previously not been considered worth mentioning; second, the filmmakers went ‘too far’ with their twenty-two-minute sequence of the massacre. The difference between the reception of the novel and the television adaptation marks the discursive development concerning Nazi crimes in the second half of the 1950s. The Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial in 1958, and the formation of the Central Office of the Land Judicial Authorities for Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg the same year, reframed the debate; at the same time, a younger generation without war experiences now also watched television, representing a new mnemonic community. They no longer could, nor wanted, to communicate silently about the past war, as it was no longer possible to ignore the drastic images being aired into their living rooms. But no one questioned the

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historical massacre itself; the viewers’ emotional statements primarily referred to the visualization and imagery, not to the historical facts. Subcutaneous memory is in many ways speculative, as we are analyzing something that is only partially tangible. In summary, we are talking about a phenomenon that emerges within closed mnemonic communities and therefore remains almost invisible in public discourse. One can hardly write about subcutaneous memory in any other way than with questions and subjunctive sentences. The analysis of subcutaneous memory remains an important desideratum that should be answered through micro-, perhaps even nano-historical approaches. In the history of Through the Night, traces of this subcutaneous memory are certainly detectable, as a corresponding form of remembrance of the Holocaust by bullets apparently already existed in 1950s and 1960s West Germany.

Notes 1. Although the review was written in 1985, it appeared in the first issue of Neue Deutsche Hefte in 1986. 2. The figures are based on data from the Hoffmann und Campe Archive.

References and Sources

All references in the text that contain a title in italics (e.g., Scholz 1960, Speech; Wegener 1956, Letter to Scholz) refer to unpublished sources, as listed below. The abbreviation TN in the text (e.g., TN 52) refers to the English edition of Hans Scholz’s 1959 novel Through the Night = Scholz, Hans. 1959. Through the Night. Trans. Elisabeth Abbott. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. The abbreviation AGSS in the text (e.g., AGSS 27) refers to the 1955 German edition of Hans Scholz’s novel Am grünen Strand der Spree = Scholz, Hans. 1955. Am grünen Strand der Spree. So gut wie ein Roman. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. Letters written by individual readers and viewers have been anonymized for privacy protection. Archives of the Academy of Arts Berlin = Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin Archives of the Hoffmann and Campe Publishing House = Hoffmann und Campe Archiv Central Office (Central Office of the Land Judicial Authorities for Investigation of National Socialist Crimes [Federal Archives Ludwigsburg]) = (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustitz­ver­ waltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen [Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg]) Federal Archives Berlin = Bundesarchiv Berlin Federal Archives Koblenz = Bundesarchiv Koblenz German Broadcasting Archives = Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv German Diary Archives = Deutsches Tagebucharchiv German Literature Archives Marbach = Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach Historical Archives SWR Baden-Baden = SWR Historisches Archiv Baden-Baden Historical Archives WDR = Historisches Archiv WDR Military Archive Federal Archives Freiburg = Militärarchiv Bundesarchiv Freiburg State Archives Berlin = Landesarchiv Berlin State Archives Munich = Staatsarchiv München

212  •  References and Sources

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236  •  References and Sources ——. n.d. Letter to Gert Westphal. Gert Westphal Estate. Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. Oršanskoja Gorodskaja Komisija. 1944. Report, 20 September. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. RG-06.025*03/504. Personnel file Fritz Umgelter. n.d. Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg. Pers 6/166967. Personnel file Manfred Häberlen. n.d. Bundesarchiv Berlin. R2/115010. Personnel file Otto Görner. n.d. Bundesarchiv Berlin. R9361-1/19752. P.G. 1960. Letter to Hans Scholz, 9 April. Archiv der Akademie der Künste. Hans Scholz Archiv 303. Pindter, Walter. 1960. Letter to Hanns Hartmann, 18 February. Historisches Archiv WDR. Sign. 4107. Reader A. 1956. Letter to Hans Scholz, 1 July. Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Hans Scholz Archiv 217. Reader B. 1956. Letter to Hans Scholz, 20 May. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 26. Reader C. 1956. Letter to Hans Scholz, 24 July. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 26. Reader D. 1956. Letter to Hans Scholz, 1 October. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 26. Rittermann, Hans. 1955. Manuscrpit for Berlin branch of NWDR, 28 December. Archiv der Akademie der Künste. Hans Scholz Archiv 7. Rohde-Liebenau, Alix. 1956. Letter to Hans Scholz, 2 May. Archiv der Akademie der Künste. Hans Scholz Archiv 344. Rohwerder, Max. 1941/42. Diary. World War II. Deutsches Tagebucharchiv. Reg. 14 1/I, 4. Rothstein, Gerhard. 1957. Letter to Hans Scholz, 15 February. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 352. Scholz, Hans. 1941. Jazz für Schloss Pörnitz [Manuscript]. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 20. ——. 1953. Märkische Rübchen und Kastanien [Manuscript]. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 1. ——. 1955a. Letter to Hoffmann und Campe, 5 May. Hoffmann und Campe Archiv. Am grünen Strand der Spree, Box 1. ——. 1955b. Letter to Hoffmann und Campe, 14 May. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 938. ——. 1955c. Letter to Hoffmann und Campe, 5 December. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 938. ——. 1956a. Letter to SWF, 20 March. SWR Historisches Archiv Baden-Baden. Sign. P 4499. ——. 1956b. Letter to Hoffmann und Campe, 5 May. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 939. ——. 1956c. Letter to Hoffmann und Campe, 23 May. Hoffmann und Campe Archiv. Am grünen Strand der Spree, Box 1. ——. 1956d. Letter to Harriet Wegener, 28 May. Hoffmann und Campe Archiv. Am grünen Strand der Spree, Box 1. ——. 1956e. Letter to Hoffmann and Campe, 10 June. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 739. ——. 1956f. Letter to Wolf Jobst Siedler, 18 December. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 768. ——. 1957. Letter to the Diplomatic Mission of Israel, 4 March. Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hans Scholz Archiv 768.

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238  •  References and Sources Viewer [F.L.]. n.d. Letter to Fritz Umgelter. Archiv der Akademie der Künste. Fritz Umgelter Archiv 282. Viewer [R.B.]. 1960. Letter to Hanns Hartmann, 27 March. Historisches Archiv WDR. Sign. 5720. Vries, Axel de. 1960. Interrogation, 5 April. Zentrale Stelle. B 162/3275, 15–17. Wachtendonk, Walter. 1958. Interrogation, 25 September. Staatsarchiv München. 32970/2, 287–97. Walkhoff, Hans. 1962. Interrogation, 15 October. Zentrale Stelle. B 162/3280, 1175–79. WDR. 1962. Letter to Hoffmann und Campe, 19 April. Historisches Archiv WDR. Sign. 13691. ——. n.d. Disposition Plan for “Am grünen Strand der Spree”. Historisches Archiv WDR. n. sign. Wegener, Harriet. 1954. Letter to Hans Scholz, 6 May. Hoffmann und Campe Archiv. Am grünen Strand der Spree, Box 1. ——. 1955. Letter to Hans Scholz, 25 May. Archiv der Akademie der Künste. Hans Scholz Archiv 938. ——. 1956. Letter to Hans Scholz, 28 May. Hoffmann und Campe Archiv. Am grünen Strand der Spree, Box 1. ——. 1958. Letter to Hans Scholz, 2 June. Archiv der Akademie der Künste. Hans Scholz Archiv 940. Wehmeier, Gustav. 1962. Interrogation, 12 February. Zentrale Stelle. B1 62/3276, 464–65. Weischedel, Wilhelm. 1956. Letter to Hans Scholz, 2 September. Archiv der Akademie der Künste. Hans Scholz Archiv 467. Westphal, Gert. 1978. Rückblick auf meine Arbeit vor 20 Jahren [Retrospect at my work 20 years ago]. Archiv der Akademie der Künste. Hans Scholz Archiv 475. Weyrauch, Wolfgang. 1953. Letter to Hans Scholz, 10 October. Archiv der Akademie der Künste. Hans Scholz Archiv 809. Wiechert, Albert. 1962. Interrogation, 7 February. Zentrale Stelle. B162/3276, 448–552. Wild, Felicitas. 1960. Letter to Hans Scholz, 11 January. Archiv der Akademie der Künste. Hans Scholz Archiv 503. Yahad-In Unum. 2011. Interview 546B, Belarus trip 11, 15–29 October.

Filmography

08/15, directed by Paul May (1954–55, Federal Republic of Germany). Am grünen Strand der Spree, directed by Fritz Umgelter (1960, Federal Republic of Germany, TV miniseries). Anfrage, directed by Egon Monk (1962, Federal Republic of Germany, TV). Berlin Alexanderplatz, directed by Phil Jutzi (1931, Germany). Come and See (Idi i smotri), directed by Elem Klimov (1985, USSR). Das Dritte Reich, directed by Heinz Huber, Arthur Müller, and Gerd Ruge (1960–61, Federal Republic of Germany, TV). Death Mills, directed by Hanuš Burger and Billy Wilder (1945, USA). The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by George Stevens (1959, USA). Einer von Sieben, directed by John Olden (1959, Federal Republic of Germany, TV). Everything is Illuminated, directed by Liev Schreiber (2005, USA). Generation War (Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter), directed by Philipp Kadelbach (2013, Federal Republic of Germany, TV miniseries). Germany, Year Zero (Germania anno zero), directed by Roberto Rossellini (1948, Italy, France, East Germany). Holocaust, directed by Gerald Green (1978, USA, TV miniseries). Ich weiß, wofür ich lebe, directed by Paul Verhoeven (1955, Federal Republic of Germany). Jew Suss (Jud Süß), directed by Veit Harlan (1940, Germany). Kanał, directed by Andrzej Wajda (1957, Poland). Korczak und seine Kinder, directed N.N. (1961, Federal Republic of Germany). Kulenkampffs Schuhe, directed by Regina Schilling (2018, Federal Republic of Germany). Labyrinth of Lies (Im Labyrinth des Schweigens), directed by Giulio Ricciarelli (2014, Federal Republic of Germany). Legion Condor, directed by Carl Ritter (1939, Germany). Lola Montez, directed by Max Ophüls (1956, Federal Republic of Germany). Love 47 (Liebe 47), directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner (1949, West Germany). Majdanek – Cemetry of Europe (Majdanek – Cmentarzysko Europy), directed by Aleksander Ford (1944, Poland and USSR). Marriage in the Shadows (Ehe im Schatten), directed by Kurt Maetzig (1947, East Germany). Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard), directed by Alain Resnais (1956, France). Radical Evil (Das radikal böse), directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (2013, Germany and Austria). Roses for the Prosecutor (Rosen für den Staatsanwalt), directed by Wolfgang Staudte (1959, Federal Republic of Germany). Run Lola Run (Lola rennt), directed by Tom Tykwer (1998, Federal Republic of Germany). The Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks (1932, USA).

240 • Filmography Schiff in Gottes Hand, directed by N.N. (1959, Federal Republic of Germany). So weit die Füße tragen, directed by Fritz Umgelter (1959, Federal Republic of Germany, TV miniseries). Somewhere in Berlin (Irgendwo in Berlin), directed by Gerhard Lamprecht (1946, East Germany). Stalingrad, directed Gustav Burmester (1963, Federal Republic of Germany, 1963). Stars (Sterne), directed by Konrad Wolf (1959, German Democratic Republic).

Index

Abbott, Elisabeth, 49, 158, 207 Ächtler, Norman, 4, 23n6, 45, 48, 104–5, 142n24, 201 Actor-Network Theory, 145–46, 148, 154, 176, 183 adaptation, xxx, 1–2, 4, 12, 15–20, 22, 27, 39, 54, 56, 58–59, 63, 65–69, 72–73, 75, 78–79, 112, 114, 117–18, 122, 126, 132, 137–40, 147, 151, 153, 163, 165–66, 170–75, 178, 180–81, 191–94, 197, 199, 201–3, 209 Adenauer, Konrad, 13, 23n7, 37, 53, 194 Adorno, Theodor W., 13, 18, 94, 96, 109, 138, 150 affect, 15–16, 20–21, 26, 66, 68, 73, 75–78, 83–84, 93, 95, 102–5, 111–12, 115, 117, 127, 132, 135–36, 139–40, 141n3, 145–46, 148–49, 168, 183, 185–86, 207, 209 afterlife, 12, 17, 66, 154, 189, 192, 194 Andrew Sisters, 129, 131, 168 Assmann, Aleida, 10, 15, 21, 93, 137, 141n18, 143–45, 190–91, 204, 208 Assmann, Jan, 15, 143–45, 154, 184 audience, 5, 11–12, 15–17, 25, 64, 66, 72, 103, 112, 123, 125, 129, 132, 134, 136–37, 160, 163, 166, 168, 170, 176–78, 181–82, 188, 195, 198, 204, 206–8 listeners, 7, 9, 17, 57, 76, 112, 115, 117, 140, 165–66, 168, 177, 185, 195–96 readership, 4, 7–10, 18, 22, 35, 37–38, 41–42, 45, 49–50, 53, 73, 76, 78, 81–82, 85–89, 93, 95, 97, 99, 103–6, 108, 110–11, 114, 137, 139–40,

153–54, 158–63, 172, 177, 185–86, 189, 193, 202–3, 205, 207 viewers, 7–9, 11–13, 17, 22, 27, 60–61, 64–66, 72–73, 74n22, 76, 78–79, 119, 126, 130–32, 134–38, 140, 175–79, 181–83, 185, 195–96, 201, 208, 210 Aue, Maximilian, 200, 202 authentication, 77–79, 88, 95, 98, 112, 120, 131, 134, 170 Babyn Yar, 199–202 Baden-Baden, 54–58, 62, 70, 107, 112–13, 129, 166, 196 Bamm, Peter, 157, 200, 202 Baßler, Moritz, 51, 99, 138, 193, 202 Bavaria Studios, 67, 180–81 Benn, Gottfried, 44–45, 55, 74n11 Berlin, xv, 2, 8, 16, 18, 30–35, 40–50, 52, 55, 57, 61, 66–71, 73, 73n2, 73n7, 74n20, 81, 88, 103, 105–8, 111, 117, 123–24, 131, 134, 141n19, 142n21, 150–52, 158–61, 163–65, 172, 175, 188, 194–97, 204–6 East Berlin, 48–49, 105, 158–59, 196 West Berlin, 2, 32–35, 40–44, 46–47, 55, 66, 69, 71, 81, 103, 108, 131, 150, 158, 196, 206 Bischoff, Friedrich, 54, 58 Bismarck von, Klaus, 67, 181, 193 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 47, 58, 112 Böll, Heinrich, 13, 48, 53, 89, 122, 138, 141n8, 142n21, 162 Bourdieu, Pierre, 25, 45, 60, 71 Bowker, Geoffrey C., 147, 186 Brest-Litovsk, 39, 81, 84, 87, 89, 94, 114–15, 120–22, 171, 177

242 • Index Celan, Paul, 51, 96 Cold War, 37, 41, 67–68, 92, 125, 197 Cologne, 57, 60, 63, 70, 175, 180, 186 Daves, Joan, 49, 70, 158 Dresden, 54, 156 Durkheim, Émile, 25 Eich, Günter, 113 Eichmann, Adolf, 14, 16, 67, 175, 195 Eick, Paul, xviii–xix, xxi–xxiii Einsatzgrupppe, xvii, xix, xxxin9, 33–34, 100, 109, 197, 199, 203, 209 Einsatzkommando, xx–xxii, xxiv–xxvii, xxxiin10, 2, 14, 59, 94, 98, 100–2, 130, 149, 200 Erll, Astrid, 3, 10–12, 15, 27, 77, 80, 118, 126, 144, 174, 192, 208 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 199–200, 202 Fontane, Theodor, 34, 44, 47–48 Fontane Prize, xxx, 17, 44–48, 50, 52, 59, 73, 107–8, 156–58 Frank, Anne, 138 Frankfurt, 14, 43, 52, 126, 150 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, xxx, 1, 5, 26, 43, 52–54, 57, 62, 69, 73, 100, 107–10, 132–33, 135, 137–38, 147, 160–63, 165, 189–91, 194 Friedensburg, Ferdinand, 46 Frisch, Max, 162 Galinski, Heinz, 35, 111 Garwolin, 81, 90–92, 114, 120 Giddens, Anthony, 20, 24–26, 42, 45, 71–72 Globke, Hans, 23n7 Gomel, xxiii Góra Kalwaria, 81, 90, 94, 114, 119–20, 123–24, 129, 202 Görner, Otto, 37, 41–42, 70, 74n8, 193 Green, Gerhard, 126 Grigoleit, Kurt, 59 Gruppe 47, 35, 50–51, 54, 71, 81, 109–10, 193–94 Häberlen, Manfred, 55–56, 112, 165 Halbwachs, Maurice, 9, 12, 15, 148, 186 Hamburg, 18, 35–36, 41–42, 55, 57, 82, 160 Hartmann, Hanns, 59–61, 63–64, 66–70,

72, 78, 117, 121, 136–37, 174, 177, 180–81, 193–94 Herrmann, Paul, 33, 35–36, 41, 46, 87 Hesse, Hermann, 48 Heuss, Theodor, 46, 104 Hitler, Adolf, 29–31, 33, 49, 52, 60, 82, 136–37, 205 Hitler Youth, 54, 61–62, 70 Holocaust by bullets, 3, 23n4, 197–98, 201, 210 Horkheimer, Max, 47, 109 Horn von, Krafft Killisch, 32 infrastructure, xxiv, 125, 145–47, 150–51, 154, 160, 168, 184–86, 196 Innis, Harold A., 144–46, 152, 184 Jäger. Malte, 174 Jahn, Peter, xxxi, 153, 171 Kaiser, Joachim, 35, 50–52, 54, 70–71, 74n16, 109–11, 140, 163, 193, 209 Kasperskij, A.F., xxiv, xxvii Každan (Accountant), xvii Keun, Irmgard, 48 Kirst, Hans Hellmut, 157, 162, 201–2 Kirst, Willi, xx–xxiii, xxv–xxvi, xxviii, xxx, 153 Klüger, Ruth, 89, 110, 198 Koch, Thilo, xviii, 46, 69–71 Koeppen, Wolfgang, 48, 53, 194 Konsalik, Heinz, 157 Korn, Karl, 43, 47, 51–54, 62, 69–71, 73, 74n15, 107–8 Kreuzer, Helmut, 51, 109–11, 119, 139–40, 163, 189, 209 Krüger, Ruth, 119 Kulenkampf, Hans-Joachim, 208 Latour, Bruno, 21, 145–47, 186n2, 196 Lenz, Siegfried, 37, 157 Lourié, Felicitas, 31, 68, 103, 106, 111 Luft, Friedrich, 43–44, 46–47, 51, 58, 69–71, 107 Maciejowice, 81, 86, 88–90, 92, 94, 114, 118–19, 170–71 Majewski, Hans-Martin, 58, 114, 168–69 Massumi, Brian, 77–78, 84, 93, 139, 141n3

Index 243 McLuhan, Marshall, 144–45, 149, 184 media complex, 3, 5, 13–16, 18, 20–21, 24–25, 57, 59, 66, 68, 72, 75–79, 112, 128, 132, 139–40, 145, 147, 164, 186, 188–92, 194, 202, 208 mediatization, 146, 152 memory, xxii, xxxi, 3–17, 19, 21–22, 25–27, 51, 68, 71, 75–77, 80–81, 83, 87, 93, 96, 100, 104–5, 110, 112, 118, 124, 131–32, 137–40, 143–52, 154, 168–71, 174–76, 181, 183–86, 186n2, 187n6, 189–99, 201–10 communicative memory, 149, 152, 207 cultural memory, xxii, 3, 10–13, 15, 17, 21–22, 27, 71, 93, 139, 143–47, 152, 154, 170, 175, 184, 190, 192–93, 196–97, 199, 203–4 traveling memory, 12, 27, 77, 100, 202 subcutaneous memory, 9, 71, 149–50, 204–10 microhistory, 6, 9–11, 18, 21, 24, 192 Mogilev, xv, xxiv, xxvii, xxxiin10, 130 Monk, Egon, 65, 175, 195 Moses, Dirk, 34, 51, 69, 74n13 Müller-Freienfels, Reinhart, 62–63, 180 Müller-Freienfels, Richard, 62–63

plurimediality, 3–6, 16–17, 21, 27, 170 Podehl, Peter, 58–59 Poliakov, Léon, 73n6 premediation, 15 production, 1–4, 7, 9–10, 13, 17–20, 24, 26–28, 38, 42, 54–65, 67–69, 72–73, 73n5, 78, 84, 91, 112, 114–15, 117–18, 125–26, 128, 134, 137, 146–47, 151, 154, 159, 163, 165–66, 168, 170, 174, 177–80, 182–86, 187n13, 190–97, 199, 202 Proničeva, Dina, 199–20 Remarque, Erich Maria, 37, 48, 103, 122, 141n8, 200, 202 remediation, 15–16, 101, 116, 126, 145, 148, 154, 170, 192, 201–2 reception, 1, 6, 9–11, 16–20, 24, 26–27, 45–46, 49, 68–69, 72, 76, 78, 105, 112, 116–17, 132, 137–38, 143, 146, 160–63, 168, 176–77, 179, 183, 185–86, 196, 209 RIAS, 43, 46, 70 Rohde-Liebenau, Alix, 46, 106 Ronkin, Chain-Jankel’, xv

Ophüls, Max, 58–59, 174, 196 Orsha, xv–xxx, xxxinn1–2, xxxin9, 1–3, 5–6, 10–12, 14, 18–20, 28–30, 32–33, 35, 37–41, 44–45, 49, 52, 56–57, 68, 75–77, 79–81, 83–85, 88, 90, 92, 94, 97–98, 100–2, 104–5, 108, 114–15, 120, 122–24, 131–32, 140, 141n12, 141n14, 145, 147–48, 150–54, 160–61, 163, 170–71, 183, 187n3, 192–93, 195, 201, 203, 207–9

Scholz, Hans, xxx–xxxi, 1–2, 4, 8, 12–13, 17–19, 28–59, 61, 63, 66–72, 73n2, 73n5, 74n11, 78–89, 91–92, 94–101, 103–8, 110–17, 119, 121–24, 126, 128–29, 131–32, 136, 138–40, 141n17, 141n19, 147–52, 154–59, 162–63, 165, 172–75, 179, 185–86, 188, 190–96, 201–2, 205–7, 209 Schwab-Felisch, Hans, 43–44, 46–47, 51, 53, 69–70, 106 Schwarzkopf, Ottilie, 60–61 Seghers, Anna, 48 Skakun A., xviii, xxv–xxvi, xxviii Spreewald, 32, 103 Star, Susan Leigh, 146–47, 185–86 Stark, Walter, 40–41, 44, 103 Staudte, Wolfgang, 138 structuration, 20, 26, 68 SWF, xxx, 1–2, 39, 54–58, 70, 73, 112–13, 165–68, 174, 187n7, 196

Pindter, Walter, 59, 70, 180 Plievier, Theodor, 16, 55, 141n8

Tagesspiegel, 34, 46, 71, 107, 111, 133, 172–73, 175, 191, 194

Nanohistory, 6, 210 National Socialism, xx, xxxin6, 14, 18, 49, 52–53, 60–61, 64, 81, 137, 205, 209 Nevent du Mont, Jürgen, 62 NDR, 74n18, 175, 179 NWDR, 60, 74n18, 107, 179 NWRV, ix, 1–2, 59, 63–65, 117–18, 120, 122–26, 128–30, 180, 193, 197

244 • Index Tergit, Gabriele, 43, 46, 67, 69–70 Tiburtius, Joachim, 44–45, 50 Timm, Uwe, 153, 197, 201, 209 trials, xix–xxi, xxiii, xxvi, xxviii, xxx, xxxin3, 8, 14, 16, 18, 33–34, 60, 66–67, 69, 72, 100, 132–33, 137–38, 175, 195, 197, 201, 209 Auschwitz Trials, 14, 201 Nazi Trials, 8, 14 Nuremberg Trials, 33–34, 61, 197 Munich Trials, xx Ulm Trials, 18, 66, 69, 72, 132–33, 137–38 Umgelter, Fritz, 1, 4, 8, 17, 19, 59, 61–63, 67, 70, 74n20, 79, 117–32, 134, 136, 140, 147, 151, 164, 177–81, 184, 190, 194–95, 202–3 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 3, 8–9, 13–14, 18, 20, 24–26, 34–35, 56, 67–69, 72, 73n1, 96, 135, 140, 193

Warburg, Aby, 77, 192 Warsaw, 86, 93–94, 119, 206 WDR, 18, 65–68, 70, 74n18, 74n21, 136, 142n23, 142nn27–28, 171–73, 179–80, 183, 187n9, 190, 193–94 Wegener, Harriet, 35–39, 41–42, 44, 49, 57, 64, 68–70, 82, 85, 87, 103, 136, 158, 193, 205 Wehrmacht, xv, xxi–xxiii, xxviii, xxxin3, xxxinn8–9, 3–4, 12, 28, 31, 33–34, 37, 51–52, 62–63, 66–67, 70, 73n4, 74n25, 82–83, 89, 91, 94, 98–100, 104, 106–7, 115, 119, 123, 128–30, 132, 134, 136, 150–51, 164, 171, 176, 197, 200–1, 203–4, 208 Westphal, Gert, 1, 4, 54–58, 70, 74n16, 112–16, 122, 131, 147, 151, 166, 193 Weyrauch, Wolfgang, 35, 80–81, 192–93