The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 9780691222554, 0691058199, 0691058202

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The Miracle Years

The Miracle Years A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WEST GERMANY, 1949 - 1 9 6 8

EDITED BY HANNA SCHISSLER

PRINCETON

UNIVERSITY

PRINCETON

A N D OXFORD

PRESS

Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The miracle years : a cultural history of West Germany, 1949-1968 / edited by Hanna Schissler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-05819-9 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-691-05820-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Germany (West)—Social life and customs. 2. Germany (West)—Ethnic relations. 3. Racism—Germany (West) 4. Germany (West)—Cultural policy. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Psychological aspects. I. Schissler, Hanna. DD258.7 .M57 2001 943.087—dc21 00-039974

This book has been composed in Times Roman The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (1997) (Permanence of Paper) www.pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10

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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (Pbk.)

TO MY MOTHER AND TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

W H O

N E V E R

T H E

R E C E N T

M I S L E D G E R M A N

M E

A B O U T

P A S T

CONTENTS

PREFACE INTRODUCTION

Writing about 1950s West Germany Hanna Schissler

XI

3

PART ONE: THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST, NEW BEGINNINGS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL MEMORY

17

Introduction

19

CHAPTER ONE

The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany's "Crisis Years" and West German National Identity Elizabeth Heineman

21

CHAPTER TWO

Survivors of Totalitarianism: Returning POWs and the Reconstruction of Masculine Citizenship in West Germany, 1945 -1955 Frank Biess

57

CHAPTER THREE

Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s Robert G. Moeller

83

CHAPTER FOUR

Mission to Happiness: The Cohort of 1949 and the Making of East and West Germans Dorothee Wierling

110

PART TWO: STIGMA: "OTHERS" IN THE SHAPING OF WEST GERMANY

127

Introduction

129

CHAPTER FIVE

An Uneasy Existence: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945 Juliane Wetzel

CHAPTER SIX

Heimat in Turmoil: African-American GIs in 1950s West Germany Maria Hohn

131 145

Vlll

CONTENTS

CHAPTER SEVEN

Of German Mothers and "Negermischlingskinder": Race, Sex, and the Postwar Nation Heide Fehrenbach

164

CHAPTER EIGHT

Guest Workers and Policy on Guest Workers in the Federal Republic: From the Beginning of Recruitment in 1955 until its Halt in 1973 Ulrich Herbert and Karin Hunn

CHAPTER NINE

187

The Ever-Present Other: Communism in the Making of West Germany

219

PART THREE: THE PRESENCE OF THE ABSENT

233

Introduction

235

Eric D. Weitz

CHAPTER TEN

"Normalization" in the West: Traces of Memory Leading Back into the 1950s Lutz Niethammer

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Film in the 1950s: Passing Images of Guilt and Responsibility Frank Stern

237

266

CHAPTER TWELVE

Memory and Commerce, Gender and Restoration: Wolfgang Staudte's Roses for the State Prosecutor (1959) and West German Film in the 1950s Richard McCormick

281

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Creating a Cocoon of Public Acquiescence: The Author-Reader Relationship in Postwar German Literature

301

PART FOUR: THE EMERGENCE OF CIVIL SOCIETY, MODERNITY'S CLAIMS AND LIMITS

321

Introduction

323

Frank Trommler

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Recasting Bourgeois Germany VolkerR. Berghahn

326

CONTENTS

IX

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

From Starvation to Excess? Trends in the Consumer Society from the 1940s to the 1970s Arnold Sywottek

341

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"Normalization" as Project: Some Thoughts on Gender Relations in West Germany during the 1950s Hanna Schissler

359

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Cold War Angst: The Case of West-German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons

376

PART FIVE: THE AMBIGUITY OF AMERICAN INFLUENCES, POPULAR CULTURE AND THE BREAKING OF "HIGH CULTURE'S" HEGEMONY

409

Introduction

411

Michael Geyer

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A New, "Western" Hero? Reconstructing German Masculinity in the 1950s Uta G. Poiger

412

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Establishing Cultural Democracy: Youth, "Americanization," and the Irresistible Rise of Popular Culture Kaspar Maase

428

CHAPTER TWENTY

The "Miracle" of the Political-Culture Shift: Democratization Between Americanization and Conservative Reintegration Diethelm Prowe

EPILOGUE

Rebels in Search of a Cause Hanna Schissler

451

459

SELECTED READINGS

469

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

479

INDEX

487

PREFACE

as history. It does so ten years after the unification of the two Germanys at a time when the primary focus of research is East German history and one is tempted to turn the "successful" West German model into an everlasting present. The view that the authors of this volume take is influenced by the events of the last ten years. Our common assumption has been that the history of West Germany deserves to be given its due attention from a fresh angle and that it is not only the history of East Germany that needs to be rewritten. This volume also explores aspects of West German history that frequently have been veiled by the assumption of the dull and dormant 1950s. The chapters show that the decade was far from dormant and that our assumptions about this time need to be revised accordingly. After decades of strong emphasis on the political developments in the Federal Republic, on the denazification process (or the failure of denazification), on questions of democratic development and political and social stability, this book puts forward approaches in cultural history, exploring issues of "race," gender, memory, popular culture, modernity, the emergence of civil society, resistance, literature, and film.

THIS BOOK EXPLORES WEST GERMANY

The origins of this book go back to a conference held at the University of Minnesota in 1996. I wish to thank Ruth-Ellen Joeres, Rick McCormick, and Jack Zipes, who helped me organize that conference. The support of friends and colleagues at the University of Minnesota has been a wonderful experience for me. My heartfelt gratitude goes first and foremost to my friend Eric Weitz. Not only was his constructive criticism indispensable, but he helped in ways that go far beyond the call of duty among colleagues. A nonnative speaker is at an everlasting disadvantage when it comes to writing and editing in the second language. Without Eric, who not only edited my own texts and put them into readable English but did the same for a number of other chapters that also needed a native speaker's expertise, this book would never have made it into print. I also thank Linda SchulteSasse and Marion Kaplan, who helped with the editing of individual chapters. My editor at Princeton University Press, Brigitta van Rheinberg, has been a light of encouragement and a source of moral support. It has been a pleasure and an inspiration to work with her. Mary Nolan and Atina Grossmann took it upon themselves to read the entire manuscript carefully. They made many valuable comments, from which the book profited greatly. Special thanks go to both of them. Lastly, I wish to thank my research assistant, Susanne Myrth, who helped me in the final, hectic phase of putting together this book as well as Alison Johnson, who has done a superb job of copy editing. New York, October 1999 Hanna Schissler

The Miracle Years

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Writing About 1950s West Germany HANNA SCHISSLER

about 1950s West Germany?1 The weekly Spiegel first spoke of the economic miracle in 1950.2 How people actually felt was an entirely different story: In 1951, 80 percent of the population considered 1945-48 to be the worst years of their lives, followed by the period 1949-51. People had a much better opinion even of the war years.3 Indeed, the West German economy experienced an unprecedented growth during the long 1950s,4 but so did the rest of Western Europe and the highly industrialized countries of North America. Since German cities lay in ruins, the effect of rebuilding the country was particularly striking. In retrospect, it becomes clear that the West German "miracle" was just a special case of what Eric Hobsbawm has called the "golden years" of economic growth, wealth, and well-being of people in Western industrialized countries.5 There are surprises and unexpected developments in history, but there are few miracles in our day and age. The "economic miracle" is a label attached to the 1950s in retrospect, in all likelihood at first by foreign observers of the rapid economic growth in West Germany. It is the thankless task of historians to deconstruct what once seemed miraculous. WHAT WAS SO MIRACULOUS

HlSTORIOGRAPHICAL REMARKS

Scholarship on West German history after 1945 has long been preoccupied with denazification; the chances for democracy after twelve years of National Socialist rule; economic development and the Marshall Plan; influences of the occupation powers, particularly the American impact on political as well as economic developments; the division of Germany; the history of institutions (churches, political parties, unions); and ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, socialism). Only fairly recently has historical scholarship begun to focus on such topics as popular culture, issues of gender and minorities, consumer society, filmic and literary representations of the German past, and the politics of remembrance. These more recent approaches are commonly associated with a new cultural history that stresses the deconstruction of previously established narratives and explores agency rather than structures and institutions. This book fits into these trends. It is about generations, women and men, class and "race."6 It deals with victims and perpetrators, surviving Jews, women of the rubble, "soldiers' brides," GIs, "Negermischlingskinder" (German children fathered by black occupation soldiers), returning POWs, Communists, Halbstarke

4

INTRODUCTION

(young toughs), and Gastarbeiter (foreign laborers). It explores memory, life stories, "high" and "low" culture, film and literature, and American influences via popular culture. This book looks at readers, authors, and viewers. It examines adaptation processes of elites, explores consumption, and investigates the legacy of the past, its repression and the return of the repressed. It delves into questions of silence and explores ways of expression. It deals with refusal and collusion, with angst of nuclear war and the new beginnings of a civil society. It explores new forms of inequality and the demands of modern industrial society. It describes developments mainly in West Germany, but also in East Germany. It examines actual developments and analyzes forms of representation. On the other hand, there are two things that this book cannot achieve. It cannot replace a conventional textbook on Germany after 1945, which means it cannot provide an overview of the general course of historical developments, and unfortunately, it also cannot be consistently comparative on East and West German topics because the state of scholarship does not yet allow for such comparisons. This collection contains the research of scholars who teach German history, film, and literature in the United States, Germany, or Israel. A considerable number of the contributors have taught outside the country of their birth and education. In more than one way, this has an impact on the intellectual perspectives represented in this volume. While the cross-fertilization of research on German and Central European history across the Atlantic continues to be vivid and fruitful, the "Atlantic divide" clearly plays a role in the ways in which we all approach our topics and conduct our scholarship. The differing perspectives in Germany and in the United States on problems of German history are sometimes quite impressive (without being clearly determined within a national framework, to be sure). A problem looks quite different when you swirl around its middle or when you look at it from some distance and see others immersed in it, struggling to keep their heads above water. The social and academic environment in which we do our research and ask our questions is part of our specific position. It might be commonplace to state that looking at German history from a distance is different from taking a careful look at close range, but the implications clearly are not—particularly if it comes to the most recent German history. Currently, historians in Germany are preoccupied with the questions of what the two German dictatorships, the Nazi and the Communist past, might have in common and what consequences should be drawn from the legacies of those "two German pasts." This debate is thoroughly overdetermined by West German intellectual paradigms. What this preoccupation actually achieves is to create a rapidly growing body of research on the history of the GDR, some of it quite remarkable in the depth and originality of its approach.7 While this is a logical result of the newly opened archives and the dramatic shift in perspective after 1989, its side effect is to move interest away from the history of West Germany. The events of 1989 threw East Germans into the postmodern condition with a vigor that can hardly be topped. In West Germany the great transformation of 1989 validated the road taken since 1949, more than even Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic and an ardent promotor of integration with the West, could have expected

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in his wildest dreams. Not too many historians, though, are willing to acknowledge that West Germany itself has become history and that after 1989 a multiplicity of German histories need to be considered. Reexamining the German past under the auspices of two dictatorial trajectories, Nazism and Communism, automatically validates West Germany and makes western Germans into judges and eastern Germans into the object of what westerners have embraced since the 1960s: a better "coming to terms with the past," as the stereotypical formula goes. The absorption of East Germany validates the modernist superiority of the West German model (meaning its Westernization, Americanization, democratization) and inflates the model out of proportion. It nourishes illusions about the possibility of renewed West German master narratives, be they West Germany as a success story or the model of Westernization as the necessary (if not inevitable) consequence of the Nazi past and now, in fact, of two German pasts. The hegemonic structures of this (West German) reexamination of the two dictatorial German pasts in the service of the assimilation of the ex-GDR clearly stand in the way of a thorough reexamination of West Germany as history.8 It actually tends to make the West German past into an everlasting present. This book attempts to reexamine West Germany as history. The postmodern condition in writing recent German history, with the loss of center, is a given, whether we like it or not. That is also the reason why a renewed national history of a (re-)unified Germany does not have much of a chance. The fragmentations of life worlds of groups of people, especially of East and West Germans, of women and men, of those who have work and those who do not, of different generations, and of the growing numbers of minorities in Germany, are just too prominent and claim recognition. They are not easily subsumed under a common national history. American historians of German history have always had a particular take on German history, inspired in the second half of this century by the circumstances of the Second World War. The approach toward German history in the United States has been in many ways more open to the influences of social history and other "liberal" approaches. This had to do with the eminent role that German refugee historians—many of whom were German Jews—played in establishing German history in the United States.9 In recent years, historians of German history in the United States have been exposed much more than their colleagues in Germany to postmodernism and claims of identity politics. In their scholarship and their teaching, they must compete not only with other Europeanists, but also with the growing number of Asianists and Africanists. Western Civilization courses increasingly give way to world history courses, as the United States delves into exploring also its non-European legacies. The assertiveness of women as well as of minorities in American academia has strongly influenced the development of new topics beyond the predominance of national narratives. The specific position of the authors of this volume as German historians in the United States, as American or Israeli historians of Germany, as German historians in East or in West Germany, or as wanderers between the academic worlds facilitates the acknowledgment of perspective and positionality, of the need to rewrite not only the East German past, but the West German one as well. Our actual frame

INTRODUCTION

of reference is what determines our view of the past. This situation influences the questions we asked in this volume and informs our cultural history approach. This volume embraces the challenge "to find ways of presenting and making sense of the interacting multiplicity of stories."10

WRITING ABOUT ONE'S OWN TIME

Most of the authors who contributed to this volume have their own personal experiences of what it was like to grow up in 1950s West Germany. They have images, impressions, and personal recollections. A number of the authors experienced the end of the war. Others were born in postwar Germany. Some, although they were born in Germany, are too young to remember what it was like in the 1950s. Others grew up in the United States, sometimes with very personal ties to the German past. While the intellectual detachment in the writing of history that was the ideal of previous generations of historians no longer is an agreed-upon norm, "the present as history" nevertheless raises particular issues that might not play a role when we research historical times that lie further back. Beyond the specificity of generational experiences and memory, there are, according to Eric Hobsbawm, two issues that play a role: the ways in which our views change over the course of our own life span and how we can escape or keep at bay in our historical judgment the general assumptions of the times in which we live.11 Remembering is not an innocent act. Our own past is not easily accessible. The stories that we tell are woven into an interpretative and intercommunicative structure.12 Memory is shaped according to our (changing) needs to place ourselves in the present. It establishes relationships with others and with ourselves. Personal histories frequently, in one way or another, determine the subject of one's research. This is nowhere more relevant, and perhaps also more visible, than when we write about the time we experienced as children. Whatever we choose to research has some, however veiled, connection to our own lived lives.13 While the connection to our own lived lives is clear in theory (having been discussed on a more abstract level by Jiirgen Habermas as Erkenntnisinteresse), it is more difficult to determine how it might play out in the concrete scenario of our work. The connection might be loose and superficial, or it might be consciously reflected upon (or "worked through," as Germans call this activity) by the author. In any case, the chapters of this book are anchored in more than the thorough research of our sources.14 The authors of this volume, all professional historians or film or literary scholars, are perfectly well aware of the particular problems that writing about one's own time poses for scholars. We all wrote "history" in this volume, and yet our personal narratives shaped our history writing in one way or another. Thus the question arises what connection personal narratives have to "history" or how they become "history." Since who we are and where we come from influences our scholarship and the kinds of questions we ask, I decided to confront the question of writing about one's own time head-on, to think about my own memories and to solicit some personal

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recollections, memories, and images of the 1950s from those authors who would have such recollections (and were willing to share them). Many complied and sent me spontaneous e-mail messages. In addition, two of the authors in this volume have already published essays that draw on their own personal memories.15 Another author used her recollections in the chapter that she wrote for this book. 16 1 was surprised and moved by the openness of my coauthors' responses to my questions, which images, impressions, and events they remember from the 1950s. They produced an amazing wealth of "memory material" that enabled me to include more than the usual survey of recent scholarship in this introduction.17 "Polling" the authors of this volume certainly does not generate a comprehensive picture of personal histories and memories of the 1950s, nor even a representative one. What it does do, though, is something else: Our own impressions and images address our connectedness to the research that we present in this volume, and they give the reader an impression of the wide range of experiences that we bring to this volume's topics. It needs to be noted that professional historians and literary scholars probably filter their "spontanous" memories even more than others because they have a keen awareness of the weight of memory as well as of its constructedness. They know what is "important" in retrospect and in all likelihood shape their recollections accordingly, if in an unconscious manner. Four topics crystallized in our recollections and imaginations: the hardship of the postwar years and the (early) 1950s, the rigidity and paternalistic nature of social relations, the impact of the encounter with Americans, and the veiled presence of the German past. Elizabeth Heineman, one of those too young to remember the period, started out researching 1950s Germany with two assumptions: the 1950s as "the aftermath" and the similarity of the Federal Republic with 1950s America, which produced "the full-fledged, pre-feminist, bourgeois cage" for women. In pursuing her research, she eventually came to realize that the 1950s in Germany were not just "the aftermath" and that "the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s was not American suburbia."18 Rick McCormick came to take an interest in the 1950s through the nostalgia for that decade during the 1980s, when he spent a year as a Fulbright scholar in Berlin and hung out at Cafe Nierentisch in Berlin-Kreuzberg. For him the 1950s "were the Dark Ages, nothing but Heimatfilme and reaction." The Fassbinder trilogy {Maria Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss), as well as some documentaries on the 1950s, gave him "more knowledge about the various things that got repressed in the 50s—i.e., that it was not quite so conservative and conformist as everyone said, even if that was the dominant tendency."19 The experiences of those of us who grew up in postwar Germany were more immediate. Playing in ruins was not only common but exciting and occurred frequently in spite of parents' strict admonitions. One could build hideouts, and the danger of collapsing ruins only increased the thrill. One also could catch tadpoles in bomb craters. Arnold Sy wottek recalls an occasion when he and his father ate a whole loaf of fresh bread all at once. He remembers the shortage of housing for a refugee family, when three people shared one little room in the attic, a condition that lasted until 1951. The toilet was across the yard and did not have running

8

INTRODUCTION

water. Taking a bath was a luxury in those times. Children bathed once a month in the laundry room, in the same water that an adult had used beforehand. (Heating water for individual baths was out of the question because heating materials were scarce and expensive.)20 Such conditions improved slightly in the early to mid1950s, when the children bathed once a week, all together in the same bathtub. It took a long time until housing conditions improved. Well into the 1950s, children had to share their rooms, sometimes with each other, sometimes with a grandparent. To get "a room of one's own," as Virginia Woolf asserted in another context, even if in size it was only six square meters, became a memorable event. If the situation in West Germany was rough in the early years after the war and well into the 1950s, conditions in East Germany were even harder and the difficult conditions lasted longer. In some realms, improvements came only in the 1970s when the socialist state started to invest in consumer goods and build the welfare state. In other areas, housing especially, positive changes had to await unification. Authors recall social relations as hierarchical and paternalistic. A kind of threatening authoritarianism pervaded West German society, at least when it came to socializing "unruly" children. It is interesting to note in this context that Americans in the 1950s were also very concerned with social control and conformity.21 While I cannot explore the reasons for the pervasive rigidity of social relations during the 1950s in general, I nevertheless can point to the specificity of the German situation. Authority in Germany asserted itself every where in the 1950s in an exaggerated manner, particularly because male authority had been thoroughly undermined by the end of Nazism and the circumstances of the lost war. Some of the most troubling ruptures of postwar society played out in the relations between (male) adults and children.22 A policeman scolded Diethelm Prowe and his friend on the playground because they had committed the sin of standing on the seesaw with their dirty shoes. The policeman asked for their parents' names, a common threat toward children in those years. "When he found out that we were fatherless, he said that our unruly behavior resulted from the fact that we were not raised by a father in an orderly manner," recalls Prowe.23 Authoritarianism, though, was limited neither to Konrad Adenauer, the patriarchal first chancellor of the Federal Republic, nor to harsh and threatening adults. Prowe continues: "We boys were very authoritarian as well. I clearly remember a conversation in the schoolyard, where we asked what might be the best government. We all agreed that a bad dictator like Hitler was disastrous, but better than democracy would be a good, strong-willed autocrat."24 Stigmatizing and marking others had not disappeared with the Third Reich, neither had antisemitism for that matter. Frank Stern, who perpetually disappointed his math teacher because he was not another Einstein, testifies to this.25 Old, as well as new, social divisions played out in the supposedly leveled class society of the 1950s. As Prowe writes: We were extremely suspicious of the "trash" who had lived on the other side of the street since the end of the war. These were families who had been bombed-out when the old part of Bonn had been completely destroyed and burned down in 1944. With these peo-

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pie we had no contact whatsoever. The kids were "Strassenjungen" and the adults "Pack schlagt sich, Pack vertragt sich." It was a neatly divided class society on the same street. My classmates and I all were afraid of the Halbstarken (young toughs), who were loitering at street corners, playing with knives, smoking, and screaming at passers-by—also a piece of class society.26 I remember the Mischehen, the mixed marriages (between Catholics and Protestants), which were talked about a lot in the 1950s. These mixed marriages could not work, so I heard, because the marriage partners were too different and eventually the differences would prevail. Denomination also determined with whom one was supposed to or not supposed to play in the streets. What were the public and political events that some of us remembered or that had an impact on us? There was the East German uprising of 1953, the 1954 world soccer championship in Bern, aptly described in Friedrich Christian Delius's novella, Der Sonntag, an dem ich Weltmeister wurde,21 the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the return of the last POWs from the Soviet Union in 1956, then certainly the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Sp/ege/-affair in 1962, and the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The banning of the West German Communist party (KPD) in 1956 marked a caesura for Kaspar Maase because of his parents' involvement in the party. To this day, Maase wonders what he might be able to contribute to his generation's experience, because as a child of Communist parents, his recollections are "extremely unrepresentative." A positive attitude toward, or an identification with, Communism was indeed the exception rather than the rule. I remember that Communists and Nazis were bad and a threat of some kind (the two collapsed into totalitarianism), but I could neither fathom the reasons nor the extent of that threat as a child. Communists as well as Nazis were the big others in my childhood, but they definitely lacked flesh and blood. One of my brothers later told me that he thought that Russians were green animals to be avoided at all costs. In those times every form of critique in West Germany was countered and discredited with a scathing "Why don't you go over there (nach driiben gehen) if you don't like it here?" Then there was the emergence of the consumer society: the first family car was a memorable event, as was the first transistor radio, the first refrigerator, or the first Vespa (motor scooter). Needless to say that the first family car was usually a VW Beetle, either Standard or Export. It was "naturally" the fathers or other male members of the family who would drive this new family acquisition, as Pro we notes: "Driving mothers did not exist, that would have seemed unnatural to us as well as probably to the mothers themselves, this in spite of the fact that my mother had owned an Opel during the 1920s."28 The derogatory remark "Frau am Steuer" (woman behind the steering wheel) was widely heard during my childhood and youth. Cars in general were objects of desire, and nothing marked the ascent of the West German economy better than the exploding motorization of the population. The boys would collect and exchange picture cards of car models; the girls would collect and exchange glossy pictures of little people and animals (Glanzbilder). All of us found America highly attractive: care packages would occasionally ar-

10

INTRODUCTION

rive at my parents' home. I did not know what they were; I only knew that when such a package arrived, the whole family gathered around it and as it was opened, my mother and my aunt would start to cry. In my family, these packages came from a woman in Iowa with whom my mother corresponded in her rudimentary English and exchanged family photos until this benefactor whom we had never met died in the 1980s. Later on we would also send care packages for "the brothers and sisters" in East Germany or, as it was called, "the zone." Since we lived close to the military base in Baumholder, I had direct exposure to Americans. The GIs would give us children rides in their jeeps, and sometimes the GIs were black. We had never seen a black person before. After some time, the families of the American soldiers moved to the base. The visual gap between us German children and the American kids whom I could observe through a high fence could not have been greater: The American kids had colorful clothes, and the girls wore cute dresses, while we dressed in gray sweaters, skirts, and pants that were not particularly well-fitting. Everybody in my generation remembers the unspeakable waistband (Leibchen) and garters that were supposed to keep our knitted stockings in place. I managed to make contact across the fence with two neatly dressed girls with curly hair. (They put in curlers to make their hair curly at age six, which I found as worldly as I found it flabbergasting.) I do not know how we spoke with each other, but communicate we did. They even managed to get me into the compound to play until my mother forbade further contact. For fear of what? Contagion with consumerism? Americanism? But perhaps she just wanted to protect me from being exposed to an infinitely more comfortable life (and premature forms of female vanity), a life for which we could not have hoped at that time. I will never forget how these girls would step on a chair in their kitchen and take handfuls of candy out of a glass that their mother had put up on the cupboard. It seemed the most natural thing on earth to eat candy by the handful, and I was invited to do the same. How much did we know about the recent German past? That certainly differed, and here is where contentious memories are most prevalent. The knowledge in families of survivors of the Holocaust was of a different sort than the common vague stirrings with which most of us grew up. Frank Stern at first thought that he did, after all, have something in common with his classmates because they would also speak about "the camps." But when they started to tell stories of how their fathers and uncles had returned from the camps, he blurted out that nobody returns from the camps and encountered considerable hostility from his teacher for this remark. His mother then briefly explained to him that there were "their camps and our camps." It took him a while to understand that "our camps really were their camps, and that the POW camps were something quite different."29 For most, the past had an uncomfortable, secretive presence, as for Maria Hohn, who remembers her childhood: This Hitler guy lurked in the picture, but it was completely unclear to me what he was all about. I thought of him as a huge, important person because people referred to the Hitlerzeit (the Hitler period). Or they would say, "Unter Hitler hatte es das nicht gegeben"

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("this would not have happened under Hitler"). People often would mention that Hitler had also done good stuff, especially in the beginning. You know, the usual, the trains, the Autobahn, the Arbeitsdienst (Labor Service). . . . It was not clear to me where the Jews came from.... Who were Jews? . . . I had never met one, they seemed like some sort of people from another world.30

But the adults would on occasion talk about Jews: "Even after what Hitler did to the Jews, they still have not learned!"31 And then there were the jokes that dealt with the recent mass extermination of Jews, particularly the one about how many Jews would fit in a VW Beetle. The answer: at least one hundred, in the ashtray. Did we laugh at such jokes? Yes, we did. The fact that children in Israel also told each other this joke does not make it any better.32 It was the kind of laughter that has many layers of discomfort.33 To do something that required particular endurance, or to laugh bis zur Vergasung (until one was gassed), was a quite common expression in 1950s and 1960s West Germany (and beyond, I am afraid). That is how the unspeakable pervaded the present and how the collective unconscious asserted itself for those who were born after 1945 or were small children at the end of the war. We also saw in school pictures of concentration camps and dead bodies, which no one helped us to understand because they supposedly "spoke for themselves." Maria Hohn claims that she understood about the genocide that Germans had committed when she heard the joke about the Jews in a VW Beetle. I actually doubt that things become that clear in the spur of a moment. People know and don't know, both at the same time. Knowledge—especially of complex issues—is a process, not an enlightening flash that instantaneously illuminates us. This is also why so much in the debates on how much people knew or did not know is so twisted and wrong in many ways. Uneasy references to the past were ubiquitous in any case. To attempt to discipline youths by referring to Hitler's work camps was as common as to hurl at an "enemy" on the schoolyard, "They forgot to gas you." References on the other hand could also take the form that I remember from angry conversations between my parents: "They are again everywhere." I did not know who "they" were, but I clearly got a sense that something serious had happened and that this "something" caused anger and sometimes despair in my parents. "They" in my case were the "German Christians," those who went along with the Nazi regime, while my parents who had been members of the oppositional Confessing Church, did not. During the 1950s they did not witness the new Christian beginning for which they had hoped, but instead what many in West Germany came to call "restoration." It could thus happen that many of my generation, the one labeled in retrospect "the 1968 generation," discovered in the 1960s and turned with youthful aggression against their elders what the latter, in fact, already knew: that the members of my generation belonged to the people of perpetrators; that someone in their vicinity, perhaps even their own father or grandfather, was a murderer. As Michael Geyer has put it: "There was never any doubt that the past was with us. The silence about it had less to do with fathers and mothers than with sons and daughters. The silence was my own. And this is strange in view of what the books say because at

12

INTRODUCTION

that point I am supposed to have rebelled in order to find out what I already knew."34 That serious dealings with the past only started after 1968 is a convenient myth. What Michael Geyer and Miriam Hansen have called "the certainty and self-righteousness of this rebellion" (of the 1968 generation)35 also upset Diethelm Prowe, who had emigrated to the United States in 1957 and then returned to West Germany as a student in the mid-1960s. I found it very disturbing how harshly the students attacked their parents' generation. I found it very arrogant—as if they could know for sure that they would have done the right thing in their place. Their own violence-glorifying slogans, in turn, were quite reminiscent of the violent generation of young Nazis in the 30s. I found it especially astounding how in 1965-66, the students in Berlin saw certain students from Berkeley and Stanford, some of whom I knew personally, as peace-bringing prophets. The (negative) fixation of the members of the 1968 generation on their parents' generation and their sometimes tragic psychosocial attachment to that which they tried so hard to overcome has been described as telescoping, a term coined by Heinz Kohut. Telescoping means that the parents' experience and fate has been pushed into the next generation. According to this interpretation, members of the 1968 generation have taken over the task of interpreting their parents' lives. As Heinz Bude describes it, "Issues which for reasons of shame, despair or guilt the parents find insupportable are devolved onto the child." The child is thus caught in an "identificatory trap" and "becomes the guarantor for a secret world of the parent. In the end, the child protects the parents' real history by making that history its own, albeit in a concealed fashion."36 Even in their rebellious struggle to free themselves, the 1968ers in West Germany showed the attachment and deep connectedness with the deeds of their parents' generation and with their fate. This book is organized around specific topics that break through time lines as well as through categories. Thus issues of gender, minorities, memory, or East German developments are not isolated, but rather integrated into the five sections. The topic of the first section is the weight of the Nazi past, attempts at new beginnings. The section deals with how memories of the war and the postwar period were shaped around issues of gender and how a new (West) German sense of national identity emerged from women's and men's experiences. It describes the shaping of a new generation of Germans and their growing into being East and West Germans. Mechanisms of dealing with "others" are the topic of the second section: the few surviving Jews who stayed in Germany faced particular problems and African-American GIs who had German girlfriends faced discrimination from Germans as well as from their white American compatriots. The children who came from such connections posed a particular test to the willingness and ability of the German state to integrate minorities. Anticommunism became a major force of integration for West Germany. Issues of memory are again addressed in section three, which focuses on silence and the return of the repressed in the everyday lives of ordinary people, in films, and in the producers and readers of literature. Section

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four deals with West Germany's modernity, the emergence of a consumer society, the project of "normalizing" relations between women and men in a modern industrialized society, the opposition to rearmament and nuclear weapons, and the emergence of a civil society in West Germany. Finally, in the last section, the victory of popular culture over high culture and the multiple adaptations of American influences are discussed. The introductions to the sections will point out connections between the individual chapters. An epilogue on 1968 concludes the volume.

NOTES

1. I wish to thank Eric Weitz, Marion Kaplan, Ute Daniel, and Dorothee Wierling for their helpful criticism. I also gained some valuable insights from a lively discussion in Roger Chickering's ongoing seminar, where I presented the thoughts developed in this introduction in the spring of 1999; Waltraut Schelkle's and Christine von Oertzen's comments were particularly helpful. Eva Schissler, Rita Bashaw, and Jeff Schutts encouraged me to stick with the personal tone that characterizes this introduction. Above all, I am indebted to Eric Weitz and Marion Kaplan for their invaluable help in editing that makes the text more readable. 2. Spiegel 1950, nos. 4, 5. See Christoph KleBmann, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation: Deutsche Geschichte 1955-1970 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale fur Politische Bildung, 1988), 63, n. 6. 3. See Lutz Niethammer's and Michael Geyer's chapters in this volume; here Michael Geyer, 383. 4. Werner Abelshauser, Die langen Funfziger Jahre: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft derBundesrepublik Deutschland 1949-66 (Dusseldorf: Schwann, 1987). 5. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), chapter 9. 6. I am critical of the use of the term "race" in current scholarship, particularly in the United States. The use of the term itself displays—against all intentions—a racist mindset. But since its use is so widespread, it is hard to avoid altogether. I follow Gerda Lerner's suggestion and place it in quotation marks. See her preface to Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and particularly Marion Berghahn's long-overlooked taking issue with the use of the term "race" in her German-Jewish Refugees in England: The Ambiguities of Assimilation (London: Macmillan, 1984), 9-11. 7. See, for example, Alf Liidtke and Peter Becker, eds., Akten, Eingaben, Schaufenster: Die DDR und ihre Texte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997); Harmut Kaelble et al., eds., Sozialgeschichte der DDR (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994), or Dorothee Wierling's forthcoming study on the cohort of 1949. 8. Norbert Frei, "Treibhaus des Westens: Neue Literatur zur 'Adenauer-Zeit,'" Neue Politische Literatur 43 (1998): 278-88. 9. See Volker Berghahn, "Deutschlandbilder 1945-1965: Angloamerikanische Historiker und moderne deutsche Geschichte," in Ernst Schulin, ed., Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg 1945-1965 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), 239-72; Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States After 1933 (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1991). 10. Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch, "The Future of the German Past: Transatlantic Reflections for the 1990s," Central European History 22 (1989): 229-59, here 245. 11. Eric Hobsbawm, "The Present as History," in idem, On History (New York: New Press, 1997), 228-40; see also Michael Kammen, "Personal Identity and the Historian's Vocation," in

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idem, In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3-74. 12. Exemplary in this regard is Carolyn Kay Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 13. Historian Jonathan Spence has observed that each of his books "was written in response to a certain moment in my life. I don't know which was changing what. I am never the same after a book." Quoted in Kammen, "Personal Identity," 11. 14. Lewis O. Mink, "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist," Critical Inquiry 7, no. 4 (1981): 777-90; Steedman, Landscape, 132. 15. Michael Geyer and Miriam Hansen, "German-Jewish Memory and National Consciousness," in Geoffrey Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 173-90; Frank Stern, "Gebrochene Wahlverwandtschaften: Uber eine jiidische Nachkriegskindheit in Deutschland," Sendetext, Siiddeutscher Rundfunk, December 1997. Translations from the German are mine. 16. See Dorothee Wierling's chapter in this volume. 17. There are a number of good reviews on recent and not so recent scholarship: Robert Moeller gives a useful review in his "Introduction: Writing the History of West Germany," in idem, West Germany Under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 1—30. See also Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, "Deutsche Zeitgeschichte nach 1945," Vierteljahrsheftefur Zeitgeschichte 41 (1993): 1-29; Paul Erker, "Zeitgeschichte als Sozialgeschichte," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19 (1993): 202-38; Wolfgang Benz, "Deutsche Geschichte nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Probleme und Tendenzen zeitgeschichtlicher Forschung in der Bundesrepublik," Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fur deutsche Geschichte 16 (1987): 398-420; Christoph KleBmann, "Ein stolzes Schiff undkrachzendeMowen: Die Geschichte der Bundesrepublik und ihre Kritiker," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985): 476-94; most recently, Norbert Frei, "Treibhaus des Westens." 18. Elizabeth Heineman in an e-mail message to the author, 8 October 1998. 19. Rick McCormick in an e-mail message to the author, 24 September 1998. See also Frank Stern, "Wahlverwandtschaften," 54: "Those years were more complicated than those who only remember Heimatfdme and conservative Kitsch, wish to acknowledge. The 1950s were the German decade of nonconcurrence (Ungleichzeitigkeit)." 20. Arnold Sywottek in a letter to the author, 28 September 1998. 21. See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 22. See Dorothee Wierling's chapter in this volume. 23. Diethelm Prowe in an e-mail message to the author, 30 September 1998. 24. Ibid. 25. For Frank Stern, growing up Jewish in postwar West Germany meant "either ignoring or living out those tough (knallharte) contradictions" of a society that in discussing its antisemitism would talk immediately about Germans' deplorable hostility toward foreigners, of the disastrous images of foreigners in German culture. "That is well intentioned and yet so awfully wrong. The problem of the others with us was precisely that we were not foreigners, that instead we belonged in innumerable ways," Frank Stern, "Gebrochene Wahlverwandtschaften." 26. Diethelm Prowe's e-mail account. 27. Friedrich Christian Delius, Der Sonntag, an dem ich Weltmeister wurde (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1994). 28. Diethelm Prowe's e-mail account. 29. Frank Stern, "Gebrochene Wahlverwandtschaften." 30. Maria Hohn's e-mail message to the author, 1 October 1998.

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31. This remark pertained to the bar scene in Baumholder, where it was supposedly mainly Jewish owners who brought striptease and prostitution to Germany. 32. I owe this information to Dorothee Wierling. 33. See also Frau Kaufmann's guilt-ridden recollection in Lutz Niethammer's chapter of how they, as ten- or eleven-year-old girls, laughed about what supposedly happened to Jews "over there in the woods, 259." 34. Michael Geyer's personal recollection in Michael Geyer and Miriam Hansen, "GermanJewish Memory and National Consciousness," 179. 35. Ibid., 176. 36. Heinz Bude, "The German Kriegskinder: Origins and Impact of the Generation of 1968," in Mark Roseman, Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 290-305, here 302; Heinz Bude, "Die Achtundsechziger-Generation im Familienroman der Bundesrepublik," in Helmut Konig, Wolfgang Kuhlmann, and Klaus Schwabe, eds., Vertuschte Vergangenheit (Munich: Beck, 1997), 297; see also Bude's Das Altern einer Generation: Die Jahrgange 1938-1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), especially 37-102, and his case studies.

P A R T

O N E

The Weight of the Past, New Beginnings, and the Construction of National Memory

Introduction THIS SECTION ADDRESSES the impact of war and destruction on Germans' concrete life worlds as well as their projections for the future. Elizabeth Heineman depicts how the experiences of women at the end of the Second World War and in the postwar period were universalized and constructed into the national imagery of the new West Germany. The mass rape of German women in the East by Soviet troops was turned into a powerful image of German victimhood and served to distract attention from the multiple victims of German occupation, including those who had suffered mass extermination. The "rape" of Germany by the Allied forces became a common metaphor in postwar politics, even though a veil of silence, especially in the East, descended upon women's real experiences of violation. At the same time, the "woman of the rubble" became a national icon, a symbol of devotion to reconstruction and, with their passing, a symbol of Germany's rising like a "phoenix from the ashes." But the real women who had cleaned the debris faced various kinds of discrimination within the new West German state. Heineman addresses yet a third range of women's experiences that were used as political significations: women who engaged in relations with members of the occupation forces were charged with stabbing the German people in the back. By locating "moral decay" in the actions of postwar women, leading members of German society also deflected attention from the very real crimes of the Third Reich. In commenting upon the "women historians' debate," Heineman carries her investigation of the appropriation of women's postwar experiences into the 1980s.

The new West German state faced multiple problems of integration, not the least of which was how returning POWs were to be woven into the fabric of West German society and politics. Frank Biess focuses on the reconstruction of masculinity by exploring the ways in which West German society dealt with returning POWs from the Soviet Union. He shows how POWs' camp experiences were equated with those of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and extermination. The POWs became "victims of totalitarianism." This move blurred differences among the POWs, particularly those between ordinary soldiers and former SS men. By turning them all into victims, who then qualified for the special amnesty for late returners, they were saved from denazification procedures and enabled to make restitution claims. "Victims of totalitarianism" were transformed to "survivors of totalitarianism," whose supposed Christian and "timeless German" values had empowered them to resist the dehumanizing experiences of the camps. According to prevailing sentiment, they came back to become breadwinner fathers and husbands, not soldiers. This represents departure from previous ideals of masculinity and, ultimately, a far more successful mode of integration than that pursued by the Weimar Republic after World War I. Elizabeth Heineman portrays the universalization of women's experiences for West Germans' self-definition in the 1950s, and Frank Biess elaborates on the mul-

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T O P A R T O N E

tiple uses of POWs from the Soviet Union for the (re-)constructing of West German masculinity and citizenship. Robert G. Moeller shows how West Germany anchored its sense of achievement in the ways in which it dealt with the victims of war and destruction—the German victims. Moeller starts with Adorno's critique of Germans' failure to "come to terms" with the Nazi past and shows that remembering selectively is not equivalent to forgetting. In fact, Germans remembered a great deal: they remembered the war crimes committed on the Eastern front—that is, the crimes committed against Germans. These memories played a pivotal role in West Germans' self-definition. Implicitly as well as explicitly, the fate of expellees and POWs in Soviet captivity was weighed against—indeed, made equivalent to—the destiny of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. All sorts of organizations documented in fine detail the expulsion of Germans from East Central Europe. Numerous individuals wrote biographies and memoirs depicting the frightful experiences of the German expellees. The laments of the expellees and their advocates were heard and, accordingly, had a large impact on West German politics. In contrast, the victims of German atrocities and extermination policies were not given a voice during the 1950s. While Jewish victims remained for the most part objects—of reconciliation policies and restitution payments—homosexuals, Jehovah's witnesses, Sinti and Roma, or foreign laborers who had been forced to work in Germany went completely unacknowledged. Only much later were survivors of the Holocaust and other victims of German occupation granted a hearing by a broader public and by politicians—a development that occupies us right to the present with the question of restitution for foreign laborers and the involvement of renowned domestic as well as foreign banks in hoarding Nazi gold. Dorothee Wierling shows how the experiences of living through the Third Reich and the Second World War deeply shaped the founding generation of East and West Germany but played out in different ways. The parents of a defeated Germany invested great hopes in their children, who were to carry their parents' aspirations and their projections for the future. Endowed with a "mission to happiness," the children were supposed to make up by their sheer existence for their parents' sufferings during the war. But the life worlds of the children also diverged significantly after 1949, the year in which the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic were founded. Wierling describes the similarities and differences through an investigation of the emotional and power relations within the family, especially the roles of women and men within it. She shows how Germans, possessed of a common legacy, were made into East and West Germans, who developed quite different ways of dealing with the challenges of life. While focusing on the 1950s, she carries her analysis to the different meanings of "1968." In that tumultuous year, young West Germans ventured on a cultural revolution that, among other things, cleared the way to address the past in an unprecedented manner. Young East Germans largely kept silent in the face of the violent repression of the Prague Spring. The contrasting experiences marked the definite parting of the two German societies. When the Berlin Wall opened in 1989, Germans faced the socialization into different life worlds and, for East Germans, the loss of a future that had been advocated for forty years.

C H A P T E R

O N E

The Hour of the Woman MEMORIES OF GERMANY'S "CRISIS YEARS' AND WEST GERMAN NATIONAL IDENTITY ELIZABETH

HEINEMAN

IN A MID-1980S interview, an elderly West Berlin woman recalled a conversation whose contours would have been familiar to many in the Federal Republic.1 As the woman explained, she had once attended a talk in which a young historian had accused her and members of her generation of not having confronted the Nazi past more aggressively, starting right in 1945, at the end of the war. I asked him, "When were you born?" [He replied,] "1946." I said, "You know, only someone who didn't experience those times can utter such nonsense." I mean, after '45 no one thought about confronting the past. Everyone thought about getting something on the stove so they could get their children something to eat, about rebuilding, clearing away the rubble... . But this is what one is told today, and strangely enough it's all from people who didn't live through those times.2

By now, the exchange seems commonplace. A member of the younger generation, horrified by what he knows about the Nazi era and suspicious about his elders' relative quiet on the subject, accuses his seniors of not having seriously confronted their past. The older German resents the younger man's moralizing tone and his focus on the Nazi years at the expense of the traumatic period immediately following. The older woman, however, does not simply propose a generational history. In casting her generation's understanding of the past, she universalizes on the basis of stereotypically female experiences. "Everybody" was trying to get something on the stove to feed their children; "everybody" was clearing away the rubble. These are references to the activities of women, yet they have come to stand for the experience of the entire wartime generation—at least, that portion that had not experienced persecution at the hands of the Nazi regime. This chapter will explore the universalization, in West German collective memory, of aspects of the stereotypically female experience of Germany at the end of the war and during the immediate postwar years. It will further examine the effects of this universalization on West German national identity and on the status of women in the Federal Republic. In doing so, it will explore the relationship among the "counter memories" of a subordinate group, the "public" and "popular" memories of a dominant culture, national identity, and gender.

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Memories of three "moments" in German women's history of 1943-48 were central to the development of a West German national identity. First were memories of female victimhood during the latter part of the war, which were generalized into stories of German victimhood. Second were images of women's efforts to rebuild a devastated landscape and people. The "woman of the rubble" (Triimmerfrau), who cleaned away the rubble from Germany's bombed cities, lay the groundwork for the Federal Republic's founding myth of the "phoenix rising from the ashes"—a myth that did not inquire too deeply into the origin of the ashes. Finally, there were recollections of female sexual promiscuity. With this history of sexual disorder generalized to describe a much broader moral decay, Germans found the opportunity to view the military occupation—and not the Nazi period—as Germany's moral nadir.3 These three "moments" told at least three different stories, and as they were transformed in memory, they continued to serve different functions. They did not describe a straightforward, uncomplicated West German national identity. Instead, they functioned within, and helped to shape, varying strands of this emerging identity. The Cold War, the economic miracle, the effort to achieve national and cultural sovereignty from the Western powers (especially the United States), and the need to explain the Federal Republic's relationship to the Nazi past informed the development of West German national identity in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Yet memories of women's experiences from 1943 to 1948 served all these facets of the emerging West German national identity. Appropriating the female experience for the nation might seem surprising in the aftermath of a highly militarized society such as Nazi Germany. Yet a popular identification with selected aspects of women's experience is in some respects not surprising. First, it is worth recalling the environment in which most Germans began to think of the Nazi era, and their part in it, retrospectively. These were the "crisis years" of 1943-48, framed by the defeat at Stalingrad (which marked the beginning of Germany's military collapse) and the currency reform of June 1948 (which symbolized the beginning of the recovery in the Western occupation zones). During this period of prolonged crisis, Germans experienced death, dislocation, hunger, and uncertainty about the future, and women's role in the community's survival was unusually visible. In fact, these years came to be known as the "hour of the women."4 Women's prominence did not signal the beginning of a new, sexually equitable order.5 It did, however, provide potent images for popular representations of the recent past. Second, Germany's total defeat and the discrediting of the ideology for which the war was fought made the largely male military experience problematic. This did not serve to discredit men or their leading role in society; it did not even serve to discredit individual men's military activities or the military as an institution. Given the prior importance of military imagery in national symbolism, however, it did create a certain representational vacuum.6 New symbols, often drawing from prototypically female experiences, would help to fill this vacuum. The universalization of women's experience, to be sure, represented only one aspect of a competition among ways of understanding Germany's recent past.

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This competition coincided with the founding of the Federal Republic and the young state's struggle to develop a uniquely West German identity. The specter of Germany's recent past made the development of a legitimate national identity difficult. At the same time, the need to reject certain aspects of the past—however problematic in terms of West Germans' ability to "come to terms with" or "work through" the crimes of the Nazi era—created something of an open playing field, a discursive space in which diverse narratives of German experience could compete for a role in shaping a new national identity.7 Refugees and evacuees from the eastern portions of the old Reich, Christians, those who had been adversely affected by denazification, those who considered themselves victims of Communism, veterans, former prisoners of war, women—all offered histories that claimed both to explain their unique situations and to represent in some way a characteristically German experience.8 At the same time, some Germans' experiences were, correctly or not, understood a priori to have been exceptional and thus not particularly useful (or even desirable) in understanding the history of "ordinary Germans." Jews and other racial or religious persecutees (except those who could claim victimization as Christians), Communists, Germans who had been persecuted as asocials, and Nazi activists—none seemed to represent the "average German." Few wanted to identify with members of these groups, and members of many of these groups would have resisted having their identity claimed by the larger population of Germans. Oral histories attest to the ways nonpersecuted and nonactivist Germans recall a past of "ordinary Germans" that excludes the experience of the persecuted and the activists, who numbered in the millions. In focusing on the nonpersecuted majority, I do not intend to universalize that group's history and thus further marginalize the experience of outsiders to Nazi society, many of whom did not live to recount their experiences. Rather, I intend to draw on those strands of experience that became part of the dominant collective memories of postwar West Germany—a society that included few members of racial and religious groups persecuted by the Nazis and that continued to marginalize members of most targeted political and social groups.9 During the formative years of a new West German state and society, some narratives of the past became marginal and others dominant; those that were assimilated into dominant discourses were transformed in the process. In focusing on the universalization of memories of women's experience of the "crisis years," I am not arguing that the development of West German identity was essentially a process of feminization; other stories linking past and present were too significant for the matter to have been so simple. I do hold, however, that the evolution of West German national identity cannot be fully comprehended without understanding the appropriation of women's history for the nation as a whole. In addition to incorporating many voices, the relationship between memory and national identity was hammered out in diverse locations: in "public" or "official" memory, articulated in such locations as monuments and official anniversary speeches; in "popular" memory, reflected in artifacts like novels, films, and magazines; and in "counter" memories of groups not well represented by the dominant

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culture.10 Yet public, popular, and counter memories constantly challenged and revised each other. Memories of stereotypically female experiences, which might initially have comprised women's "counter memories," became the "popular memories" of West Germany as a whole. In some cases, they even entered the "official memory" of the West German state. This process profoundly affected the development of a West German national identity. It also played a role in West German women's apparent inability to develop a group identity, based on their experiences during the crisis years of 1942-48, that could serve as a springboard to improved status.11 In seeking links among gender, national identity, and social memory, I employ an eclectic collection of sources.12 Studies of one sort of social memory typically examine a range of themes within a well-defined, internally consistent source base: monuments for examining public memory, for example, or interviews among members of a subpopulation for exploring counter memory. Because my aim is to analyze the relationships among various forms of social memory, I focus on a limited number of themes through a wide variety of genres. In the pages that follow, counter memory may be revealed via oral histories, dominant popular memory via best-selling novels or widely circulating magazines, and public memory through commemorative speeches. In order to focus the investigation, however, I examine only references to the three stereotypically female experiences listed at the outset of this essay: victimization, rebuilding, and sexual disorder. Neither West German social memories nor the group and national identities they helped to shape were static. Decades after the initial consolidation of a West German national identity in the 1950s, memories of women's experiences of the crisis years would be revisited, now as part of the process of forging a feminist identity. Thus although this essay focuses mainly on the late 1940s and 1950s, when memories of women's experiences of 1943-48 were initially universalized, it then turns the clock forward to the feminist challenge to this universalization in the 1980s—and to the implications of newly recast memories for West Germany and for West German women's collective identity. Women's own narratives of the war rarely begin with 1 September 1939. Instead, the recollections of the large majority of German women who were politically and racially acceptable to the regime typically open with their husbands' or fathers' departures. They get going in earnest with the invasion of the Soviet Union, with its attendant casualties, and the air war against Germany.13 In general, women's narratives emphasize their sufferings and losses and downplay their contributions to and rewards from the Nazi regime. The notion that ordinary Germans were innocent victims of forces beyond their control was a familiar motif in postwar representations of the Third Reich and was hardly unique to women. Before considering this theme in post war retellings of the Nazi period, however, it is worth examining the ways it simultaneously distorted an understanding of the impact of Nazi rule and reflected significant aspects of women's wartime experience. German women were not, collectively, simply passive victims of a ruthless regime and a terrible war. Aside from larger questions about women's role in the

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2 5

Figure 1.1: "You help too!" Although working conditions were hard during the war, women could feel pride and adventure through their part in the war effort. Courtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives, Poster Collection.

Nazi state, it is worth noting some of the advantages German women enjoyed with the outbreak of war. A generous system of family allowances allowed hundreds of thousands of working wives to give up their jobs; the war introduced war booty to the consumer economy; women found opportunities for travel, adventure, and a role in realizing the Nazi party's aims; and Germany's early successes allowed women as well as men to feel pride in their country's military prowess (see figure

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1.1).14 The war was begun with an intent to win, and German women stood to gain much by being on the victorious side. Furthermore, insofar as tales of wartime suffering appear as evidence that German "bystanders" were among the victims of the Nazi regime, they distract attention away from the tremendous support German men and women lent the regime before it began the war—or, more precisely, before it began to lose the war.15 Finally, reminders of the suffering of "Germans" rarely force the listener to understand that suffering in relation to other traumas caused, facilitated, or at least tolerated by the very people who, by losing the war, eventually experienced pain of their own. To the contrary, stories of the suffering of "Germans" tend to displace reminders of the hundreds of thousands of (German) Jews, Communists, and Socialists forced to emigrate before the war; (German) "asocial" and disabled people killed in the euthanasia program or sterilized against their wills; and (German) criminals and political opponents who withstood torture and spent years in prisons or concentration camps, often to die there. They draw attention away from the millions of Poles evicted from their homes and villages in order to "Germanize" Eastern lands; the tens of millions of Europeans killed in Germany's aggressive war or imported into the Reich as slave labor, the tens of millions who died in German concentration and prisoner-of-war camps, and the hundreds of millions of weakened, displaced, and traumatized survivors of all of these aspects of the war. Women's retellings of their war experiences usually omit such points, something that has raised a few eyebrows among women's historians.16 But such narratives are rarely intentionally disingenuous. Instead, they are self-centered reflections on events that demand a broader perspective. Women's recollections of the war focus on the events that most deeply affected their own lives: bombing raids, evacuation, widowhood, flight from the East, and rape.17 Whatever the shortcomings of typical "German women's" reflections, those reflections became the basis for important strands of postwar West German thought. And German women's war stories are indeed dramatic tales, leaving little doubt that their tellers suffered genuine traumas. Of Germany's prewar population of eighty million, twenty million were removed for military or related service during the war, half of them before the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The cities hit by bombs and evacuation orders in the second half of the war were thus inhabited mainly by women, children, and the elderly. Night after night women woke to the sound of sirens, dressed their children, grabbed their belongings, and ran to the nearest cellar or bunker. After the "all clear" was sounded, and if no damage had been done, they returned home to soothe their children to sleep and salvage what was left of the night for themselves. Germany's city women, even if they and their homes were untouched by bombs, lived the second half of the war with little sleep and shattered nerves. Millions of German women, however, did lose their homes, members of their families, or their own lives. In a week-long raid on Hamburg in the summer of 1943, to take an extreme example, 40,000-100,000 died; fifty-five to sixty percent of the city was destroyed, leaving 750,000 homeless. By the end of the war, fourteen million Germans had lost their homes, and perhaps 600,000 their lives,

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to air raids. Those who emerged from the bomb shelters to find that their apartments had been hit set about extinguishing the fires, rescuing their remaining belongings and, if possible, making at least a portion of their apartments livable. If their apartments were uninhabitable, they might move in with relatives, but conditions would be cramped and tense. If they had no relatives or friends with extra rooms but worked in the city, they were assigned rooms with strangers who had rarely volunteered this living space. Beginning in 1943, ten million people, mainly women and children, were evacuated from Germany cities. But sex did not qualify an adult for evacuation; rather, nonemployed status or responsibility for small children did. Employed women without children remained in the endangered cities; so did employed mothers unless their children were very small.19 Women who had seen their men off to war now remained in dangerous places themselves as they sent their children into unknown parts. Or they accompanied their children, leaving familiar networks behind and knowing that if their apartments were now hit, they would be unable to salvage any of their property. The story of the Darmstadt family F. illustrates the cumulative effects of the separation of marriage partners, bombing raids, homelessness, and evacuation. In 1939, Herr F. was drafted, leaving his wife with their two children, three-year-old Gisela and one-year-old Willy. Frau F. worked as a letter carrier; her mother, who lived nearby, watched the children after the day care center closed. In the last years of the war, Frau F. and her children spent many nights in air raid shelters. On the night of 11-12 September 1944, their shelter was hit. They ran to another, from which they also soon had to flee. Willy's clothes caught fire; as Frau F. beat out the flames, Gisela disappeared. She was never found. With burn wounds, Frau F. and Willy made their way the next morning to Frau F.'s sister-inlaw, who, like Frau F, her mother, and two-thirds of Darmstadt's population, had been left homeless by the previous night's raid. The extended family had been able to save only a few linens and two suitcases full of clothing. The group spent the next three days in the open air and the nights in an air raid shelter. Then Frau F. took Willy and her mother to relatives in the countryside; Frau F. returned, as required by law, to her post in Darmstadt. She and her sister-in-law were assigned a room in an apartment with several other bombed-out families. With Herr F. at war, Gisela presumably dead, and Willy and Frau F.'s mother in evacuation, Frau F. lived out the remainder of the war in Darmstadt.20 Despite Frau F.'s trials, she was spared two central chapters in many women's wartime experience: flight from the East and rape. The 4.5 million Germans who fled during the last months of the war and the chaotic period before official transports began in 1946 belonged mainly to female-headed families.21 For many, this was not their first move: they had gone to the East in order to "Germanize" Polish territory (thus forcing Poles onto their own refugee trail a few years earlier), or they had been evacuated to the East, out of the range of British and American bombers. More, however, were leaving their lifelong homes, indeed, the homes their families had inhabited for generations. With as many possessions as they could carry, they traveled by bicycle, horse-drawn cart, and foot. They faced roads

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blocked for military use, crippled railroads, and, as long as the war continued, bombings. As they progressed westward, they arrived in badly damaged cities that already had sizable homeless populations. Their treks often lasted weeks. Germans fleeing westward wanted to be in territory conquered by the Western Allies rather than by the Soviet Union. Germans could reasonably expect a harsher payback from the Soviets than from the Western Allies. Germans' recent conduct in the East, however, was only one of many factors contributing to women's fears of the coming Soviet conquest. German stereotypes of semihuman peoples of the East had a centuries-long history, and the Nazi party had made portrayals of "Red Hordes," "Tartars," "Huns," and "Asiatics" part of its racial and political vocabulary. As the war drew to a close, the Nazi leadership urged Germans to fight to the last breath by depicting Soviet brutalities, and specifically rape.22 As the first refugees brought news of slaughter and rape to the West, they confirmed other Germans' worst fears about the Red Army. Estimates of the numbers of Soviet rapes range widely, from the tens of thousands to two million. Whatever the precise numbers, rape was a common experience for women in eastern parts of the old Reich, and fear of rape was universal.23 Confronted with the conquering armies, German women were left largely to their own devices. When German men were present, they were rarely able to help, and they often seemed all too willing to trade women's safety for their own.24 Women's immediate reactions to rape varied widely. Some seem to have experienced rape as one problem among many: it was a horrible episode, but so were many other events of those months.25 For others, rape was an earth-shattering experience. The fact that rape was often accompanied by shooting—either of the victim, of others with her, or simply reckless shooting into the air—meant that women had to fear rape as a mortal danger, and not "just" as a painful and traumatic episode. Some families reacted with disgust even as women returned tattered and bleeding; others felt but could not express their sympathy.26 Where internal injuries, sexually transmitted disease, or pregnancy resulted, women's feelings of lasting damage were confirmed.27 Bombings, flight, and rape: although these constituted only a portion of German women's wartime experience, they came to define the "home front." Women's demographic majority in the civilian population meant that these were largely female experiences, and during and immediately after the war, they were typically described as such (figure 1.2).28 Reminders that the enemy was harming "innocent women and children" were, if nothing else, effective wartime propaganda. As Germans gained distance from these experiences after the war, however, such episodes of victimhood came to represent the wartime sufferings of a population of unspecified gender. In essence, they came to represent a German victimhood at the hands of Allied bombers, Soviet ground troops, and the Nazi party, which was increasingly portrayed as an alien element that had inflicted a terrible war upon an unwilling people. To be sure, German men had their tales of woe as well, usually focusing on the Eastern front or on Soviet prison camps.29 Given the international fury at the destruction wrought by the German military, such narratives often expressed the de-

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Figure 1.2: "Two Russian Soldiers Harass a Girl," 1945. The interaction is clearly a gendered one. Courtesy of the Ullstein Bilderdienst. sire to separate the teller from the collective. Aggressive war aims and inhumane actions taken "in the name of the German people" might have been criminal and brutal, but an individual veteran could point out that he had been an unwilling draftee. Or he could insist that he had been a member of a legitimate collective: a professional Wehrmacht, distinct from the SS and innocent of wartime atrocities. The mythology of the professional soldier had tangible ramifications for the development of the Federal Republic, helping, for example, to justify pensions for veterans and West German participation in NATO. Despite the larger significance of popular memories of male experience, however, the gendered nature of the original experience was not obscured. Even popular memories of an admittedly huge collective—the German military—remained just that: representations of the military. The disproportionately feminine civilian experience and the almost exclusively female rape experience, by contrast, seem to have allowed Germans to consider their nation as a whole an innocent victim of war.30 Germans could remind themselves that not only Jews but also Germans, a category that implicitly excluded German Jews, had suffered wartime atrocities like the firebombing of Dresden.

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The adult population of Dresden had been mainly female at the time of the bombings, but this no longer seemed so significant. Visual culture played a part in this transition, as the lunar urban landscapes were endlessly photographed both for their historic value and for their striking aesthetic quality. In this genre of photography, the inanimate victims of the bombings—the buildings—became the subject. Viewers who recalled that these buildings were once full of people could easily forget such details as those people's demographic profile.31 In fact, they were striking in part because of their very sterility: they were, at least on the surface, utterly devoid of life. Even representations of earlier moments, however—the years of the bombings themselves—increasingly described sex-neutral cities, or even German or Western civilization, as the victims of the bombings. Typical was the 1953 collection, Balance of the Second World War, a book promoted, in the words of its publisher, in order "that the survivors . . . not simply push aside this most monstrous event of world history [the Second World War], but confront it in a very basic way."32 Presumably in the interests of such a confrontation, an essay called "The Air War over Germany" portrayed Germany as the innocent victim of a war against civilians, observing that "aside from Hiroshima, there has scarcely been a more terrible decision in the history of war than this one, which announced war and destruction to the way of life of a Western urban culture that had grown organically over a long period."33 The essay is notably silent on the possibility that the German war against civilians might have embodied some of the most terrible decisions in the history of war. Less glaring, but also significant, is the fact that the largely female experience of the bombing raids has become war and destruction of a "Western urban culture." To be sure, the destruction of urban infrastructure was significant by any measure. But by minimizing the human and emphasizing the cultural victims of the bombings, the author has obscured the degree to which this was a gendered experience. Germany, representing no less than Western urban culture, was the victim of the war.34 Most remarkable was the appropriation of the female rape experience by the nation. Although discussion of women's rapes became taboo a few years after the end of the war,35 references to the rapes hardly disappeared. In fact, they permeated the culture. But they ceased to be references to rapes of women, and instead turned into allusions to the rape of Germany. Cold War-era references to the Soviet rapes explained them in political, national, or even racial terms, and not as gendered acts. During the military occupation, CDU and CSU campaign posters portrayed Asian-featured, red-tinted men lurking in the shadows, a visual reference to the warrior/rapist. Their outstretched hands, however, reached not for a woman but for a chunk of Germany (compare figures 1.2,1.3). The image of a Germany raped by the Soviets made its way into official history when, in the mid-1950s, the Federal Ministry for Evacuees, Refugees, and War-Injured published a multivolume work on the flight and evacuation of Germans at the end of the war. The series testifies to the very real hardships of Germans who fled or were violently expelled from their homes. It also, however, endorsed a racial analysis of the rapes:

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Figure 1.3: Political poster of 1949 appealing to fears of the "rape" of Germany. The poster portrays an endangered Bavaria and recommends a vote for the CDU's Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union (CSU). In the original, the face is red. Courtesy of the Munchner Stadtmuseum.

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It can be recognized that behind the rapes stood a form of behavior and a mentality that seem strange and repelling to European concepts. One would have to trace them back in part to traditions and ideas that are still in effect, particularly in the Asian regions of Russia, according to which women, like jewelry, valuables, and the contents of apartments and armories, are the rightful bounty of the victor. . .. The fact that Soviet soldiers of Asian origin distinguished themselves by a particular ferocity and lack of moderation confirms that certain strains of the Asian mentality contributed substantially to these outbreaks.36

The notion that European Soviet soldiers conducted themselves better, on the whole, than did Asian Soviet soldiers is not borne out by the several volumes of documentation that follow this analysis, and the ministry would surely have objected to a similar racial explanation for German atrocities—including widespread rape—in the East.37 Especially notable in the present context, however, is how such an understanding of the rapes encouraged West Germans to recall the defeat in the East as the violation of Western civilization by a brutal Asian culture. This rhetorical opposition of a violent East against a civilized West predated the Federal Republic by decades, even centuries. The reiteration of this opposition after the war, however, served the emergence of a discourse that insisted on the necessity of the German war effort. According to this narrative, the Western Allies had refused to recognize that the Germans had been on their side, protecting the West against the onslaught of the East. As the Wehrmacht had defended Western civilization against the "Red Flood," the Western Allies had stubbornly insisted on unconditional surrender. The results were the perpetration of "Asiatic horrors" on the East Germans and expanded Soviet power in postwar Europe. Not only German civilians, but Western civilization and all its carriers became the victims of the war in this retelling.38 Ironically, as rape became a metaphor for German victimization, the government declined to recognize rape by the enemy or occupier as a form of injury deserving compensation. Insisting that rape was not an injury unless lasting physical damage had resulted and that children were the natural consequence of sexual intercourse, the Ministry of Labor turned down repeated petitions to recognize raped women under the Law to Aid Victims of War, or at least to contribute to the support of children who had resulted from the rapes.39 Only in the late 1950s did the Finance Ministry award limited support to a small number of raped women.40 As the experience of rape was degendered to apply to the nation, the state denied the possibility of a uniquely female experience of victimization by rape. Conventions of delicacy provided a ruse for minimizing women's rape experiences at the linguistic level and instead describing a national experience. The euphemism "Asian atrocities" typically replaced the word rape in the 1950s, thus substituting a racialized term for a gendered one.41 As late as 1985, the head of the Christian Democratic faction to the Bundestag feigned inability to call the wartime rape of German women by its name in a speech to the Federation of German Expellees: " I . . . express my solidarity . . . with you, the expellees. With two million of your fellow countrymen who lost their lives while fleeing or being driven out

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of their homes and with twelve million who, at the end of the Second World War, lost nearly everything but their lives—their homes, their property, their families and their honor—I do not wish to describe what was done to the women." Three paragraphs later, however, the speaker proved capable of referring to the "rape" of a gender-neutral Europe by the Soviet Union: "The purpose of a constructive Ostpolitik by the free Europeans and the free West cannot be to legitimize the rape and division of Europe."42 Stories of wartime victimization of women thus provided one important source for a popular, even official, version of German history that offered a sympathetic description of recent history. Allied bombers and the Nazi party could serve as the villains in tales of wartime victimization, but memories of flight and rape had an especially profound resonance in the formative years of the Federal Republic. In the context of the Cold War, stories of flight and rape helped to define a West Germanness that was based in large part on the threat from the East. But whatever the origin of Germans'suffering, as stories of victimization came to constitute national memory, they functioned ever less effectively in describing a female experience. The next chapter of women's history would be represented as one of heroism, sacrifice, and hard work. It, too, would provide material for the establishment of a positive national identity at the expense of fully recognizing women's unique experience. This strand of West German identity, however, depended less on the existence of an enemy "other" and more on a positive understanding of West Germany's human resources and economic success. Upon the military collapse, Germany was left with a marked "surplus of women" (FrauenuberschuB). In October 1946, there were seven million more women than men in occupied Germany. The demographic imbalance was particularly stark among young adults: for every thousand men in the Western zones between the ages of 25 and 30, there were nearly 1700 women of the same age.43 With men scarce, women pulled their families and German society through extraordinarily lean years, times so difficult they were called the "hunger years." Millions had already lost their homes to bombing raids, and the homeless population grew by millions more as refugees poured in. The lack of food supplies was catastrophic. In May 1945, Berlin housewives could claim a daily ration of 11 ounces (300 grams) of bread, 14 ounces (400 grams) of potatoes, 1 ounce (30 grams) of grain, 2/3 ounce (20 grams) of meat, and 1/4 ounce (7 grams) of fat—a ration card popularly nicknamed the "Ascension pass." This starving, homeless population went on to face the coldest winter in generations in 1946-47. Thus hard times persisted: in November 1947, the average weight for women was 93.5 pounds; for men, 92.3 pounds.44 With few means for obtaining basic necessities, and with even those necessities in appallingly short supply, women almost literally had to make something out of nothing in order to feed themselves and their dependents. They did so largely without men's help. Few men were around; they were either casualties of war or still in prison camp. Those who were present were often wounded, too weak to work, or psychologically shattered by their wartime and prison experiences. Amidst fantastic shortages, women worked the black market,

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stood in endless food lines, trekked to the countryside to barter away their last belongings, made bread out of acorns and soap out of ash, stole coal from trains and wood from off-limits forests, and mended their families' threadbare clothes when even needles were a precious commodity on the black market. Just as women's reproductive work became both more complicated and more vital for survival, a new, powerful symbol of women at the workplace emerged: the "woman of the rubble," who cleaned away the piles of stone and brick that constituted Germany's urban landscape. Rubble clearance was not an occupation women entered enthusiastically. The work was not only strenuous, it was deadend. Women were prohibited from entering apprenticeships that might have allowed them to advance in the construction industry. Since volunteers were lacking, occupation authorities assigned men and women who had belonged to Nazi organizations, as well as dependents of those implicated, to work removing rubble. When this proved an inadequate labor pool, the authorities instituted mandatory labor for the general population. In addition to those performing compulsory labor, another group volunteered for the task, not for the poor pay, but for the better ration cards they received as heavy laborers. However mixed their motivations, women set to the backbreaking work of moving, cleaning, and sorting building material for reuse—the first step of Germany's physical reconstruction. Women of the rubble peopled the streets of many German cities; they constituted five to ten percent of employed women in Berlin.45 Women of the rubble became a central symbol of the era.46 A single image linked women in rags and ruined cities on the one hand, Germans' resilience and the promise of reconstruction on the other. The survival of ordinary German families and the recovery of Germany as a whole were united in one figure: a woman who devoted her days to cleaning bricks and her evenings to feeding her family. Occupation authorities emphasized the link between the Nazi past and the current devastation by assigning former Nazis and their families to rubble clearance; initially, women of the rubble endured the occasional taunt, "Nazi Broads" (NaziWeiber).47 Nevertheless, the woman of the rubble quickly came to suggest a story that began with the bombing of German cities, focused on terrible hardships, and promised renewal by the cooperative efforts of ordinary Germans. Nazi politics, aggression, and war crimes provided only the haziest of backdrops for this story. The woman of the rubble had no questionable past: she came from nowhere to clean up the mess others had left behind. In the words of a 1946 pamphlet: There is no picture that characterizes the results of a catastrophic politics more impressively and graphically, but at the same time more movingly, than these untiring women working in the rubble in all weather. Of all the boasting promises that were once made to them, nothing remains but rubble and piles of stone, which they must literally clear away with their own hands so life can go on. They do not hide their disappointment over their fate, but whatever may happen, they want to put these hard times behind them.48 Rather than revisit the past, the women of the rubble wanted to "put hard times behind them" so "life could go on"—an attractive idea for most Germans.49 Popular metaphors such as "ruins of the soul" and "internal devastation," which linked

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the physical destruction of Germany with the psychological destruction of Germans, made cleaning up even more essential to Germany's renewal. "Ruins are a general phenomenon," wrote a contributor to a social work journal in 1949. "Just as concretely as they lie on the street corners, so are they present inside people."50 In addition to her lack of association with the past, the woman of the rubble had no complicated future. This became important as the mythology of the woman of the rubble developed in the 1950s—the decade of the "economic miracle." During the 1950s, West Germany's "economic miracle" became more than the measure of its recovery from the war. Given the difficulty of building a national identity on the troubled grounds of Germany's past as well as the widespread disinterest in the political foundations of the new state, collective economic success became an important basis for the establishment of a distinctly West German national identity.51 By the mid-1950s, however, it was clear that this recovery had had a price tag, albeit one to which few objected. West Germany's revival had required the quick denazification of technical experts, and it had involved an alliance with the West that some blamed for making reunification with East Germany impossible. Recovery had included rearmament and participation in military exercises, and it demanded an attitude of humility and gratitude toward the United States for Marshall Plan aid. But the phoenix had begun to rise from the ashes with the women of the rubble— women who projected an image of political neutrality, equality in sacrifice, and an ability to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.52 The woman of the rubble provided a symbol of rebuilding on a humble scale, innocent of the disputes that would mark later stages of reconstruction in the Federal Republic. The woman of the rubble did not share the fate of the victim of rape; she did not disappear in order that a nationalized, degendered version of her experience might take her place. In fact, visual images of the woman of the rubble became a cliche, gracing countless dust jackets and journalistic references to the era (figure 1.4). At the same time, the appealing simplicity of the woman of the rubble could be removed from her person and could represent not just women's extraordinary efforts but an entire era in West Germany's history. Consider this idealization of the immediate postwar period and the physical work of reconstruction by a Social Democrat who served in the Bundestag during the 1960s: "After the total war and total defeat, we began to clean up the devastated landscape, to organize the rebuilding. . . . Back then, Conservative and Social Democrat, Communist and Liberal, Catholic and Protestant sat together without examining each other suspiciously, without mistrust."53 Histories of the occupation era hardly support this portrayal of harmonious political life, however. Despite some promising developments, such as the establishment of an ecumenical Christian party to replace political Catholicism, divisions between Christian conservatives, Socialists, and Communists were bitter. The parliamentarian's reference to cleaning up the devastated landscape, however, suggests that his mental image was not one of the smoke-filled rooms of political meetings, which were filled by men. Rather, his reference is to the scene on the streets, where women dominated. Women of the rubble thus came to personify West Germany's reconstruction. They lay at the heart of a national identity that emphasized hard work and eco-

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Figure 1.4: Women of the rubble dancing during a break from their work. Images of women of the rubble quickly entered popular iconography of the reconstruction of West Germany. Photos such as this one emphasized the innocence of Germans engaged in the work of reconstruction. Courtesy of the Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz. nomic success, and they implied that 1945 was the "zero hour" that marked the beginning of the nation's history. Women found themselves unable, however, to translate memories of their hard work during Germany's hour of need into fairer treatment in the labor market. Memories of women's heroic role in feeding their families and cleaning up the bombed cities had greater potential to contribute to improved status for women than did images of women as victims or as fraternizers; thus their failure to have this effect is particularly telling. The adoption of the woman of the rubble as a national symbol served at best to compensate former women of the rubble for continued economic and legal discrimination.

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With the 1948 currency reform came a sharp rise in unemployment. Firms laid off workers, as labor paid with the new Deutschmark was much more expensive than that paid in the old currency. At the same time, millions who had supported themselves via the underground economy suddenly needed legitimate work. Registered male unemployment rose 42.5 percent and that of women 70 percent in the first month after currency reform.54 But women, whose ability to juggle paid employment with extended household responsibilities and underground work had made them heroines during the "hunger years," now found their applications for unemployment compensation rejected on the grounds that their presumed household responsibilities made them unavailable to the labor market.55 As a result, jobless women found it much more difficult to collect unemployment compensation than did men.56 As the new state was formed, women found that their extraordinary efforts did not constitute grounds to alleviate discrimination against working women. The position of the Social Democrats and the Communists that the principle of equal pay for equal work should now be anchored in the West German constitution (the "Basic Law") failed to gain a majority.57 The courts upheld separate women's and men's wage and salary classifications until 1955 and the thinly disguised alternative of "light" and "heavy" classifications thereafter. Age limits excluded adult women from practically all vocational training and from much employment at strikingly young ages. Women could have little hope that their government would challenge age discrimination: the federal ministry charged with addressing the problem turned down applicants for typing positions because they exceeded the cutoff age of twenty-five.58 As West Germany enjoyed its "economic miracle" in the 1950s, unemployment and poverty among middle-aged women reached critical proportions. In response, organizations of female employees did more than protest the general unfairness of age cutoffs and unequal pay. They also pointed out that such limitations hurt precisely those women who had contributed their labor during Germany's hardest years.59 To no avail. Narratives that linked women's hard work during the hunger years to a present in which the same women faced discrimination on the labor market did not resonate outside the circles of women's rights and women's labor advocates. The Woman of the Rubble became a profound symbol of West Germany's economic reconstruction; but the women of the rubble themselves faced brutal discrimination in the labor force that fueled the recovery. If the woman of the rubble provided a heroic, constructive identity for West Germans, other parts of women's occupation-era history were less positively construed. Most subject to criticism was women's sexual behavior: their fleeting relationships on the refugee trail, their cohabitation with men while they awaited word of their husbands, their use of prostitution as a strategy for survival. To many Germans, exploding rates of illegitimacy, sexually transmitted disease, and divorce indicated a terrible crisis.60 The harshest criticism, however, was reserved for women who associated with occupation forces. The "Yank's sweetheart" (Ami-liebchen)—the "fraternizer" in

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the U.S. zone, where fraternization was probably most common—came to be as deeply associated with these years as the woman of the rubble. Like the woman of the rubble, the Yank's sweetheart eventually represented something much larger than herself. Unlike the woman of the rubble, however, the Yank's sweetheart was no heroine. She became the symbol of Germany's moral decline, a symbol that implied that the decline occurred with the collapse of, rather than during, Nazi rule. When the Western occupation armies lifted their prohibitions on fraternization, a lively social culture featuring young German women and Allied soldiers, particularly Americans, began to flourish.61 By December 1945, most U.S. veterans— many of whom still had some reservations about Germans—were released from their duties. They were replaced by young men with no wartime experience, little bitterness against Germans, and eagerness for adventures abroad. Contact with German women became a routine part of their lives. Army investigators estimated that fifty to ninety percent of American troops "fraternized" with German women in 1946; one in eight married men had entered a relatively stable relationship in Germany.62 Women who formed liaisons with occupation soldiers sought emotional companionship at least as eagerly as they sought economic benefits. Occupation soldiers, quite simply, constituted a significant portion of the young, male population, and they often seemed more appealing partners than the demanding, wounded, and emotionally scarred German veterans returning from war. Insofar as women considered the economic advantages of relationships with foreigners, their behavior was consistent with traditions of women seeking suitors who could provide financial security. Relationships with the former enemy could be just as exciting, or just as drab, as relationships with Germans. But this perspective on fraternization would, at best, become material for "counter memory." Few Germans who were not involved in such relationships considered them anything other than prostitution, and Germans quickly adopted the American nickname for fraternizers, "Veronika Dankeschon" (Veronika Thank-You-Very-Much, whose initials were "VD").63 A "fraternizer," who slept with the former enemy and sometimes crossed racial or religious boundaries, put her reputation at risk. In the discourse of occupationera Germany, however, a fraternizer did not just prostitute herself: she stabbed her entire people in the back. She made a mockery of the sacrifices of German soldiers, now returning wounded and emotionally scarred. Forty years later a German veteran claimed still to be haunted by the words of an American serviceman: "The German soldier fought for six years; the German woman only five minutes."64 Other Germans who had suffered during the war and its aftermath also found grounds to resent fraternizing women. Germany's umbrella social work organization calculated the cost of treating STDs in Hessen in 1947 and duly informed its members that the sum could have paid the pensions of 17,800 war widows and orphans for a year.65 As fraternizers seemed to mock the sufferings of veterans and victims of war, contemporaries often felt that young women were sullying what they still believed was the good name of the German people. A twenty-two-yearold student and former Nazi wrote of fraternizers in 1946: "Have the German

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people no honor left? . . . One can lose a war, one can be humiliated, but one need not dirty one's honor oneself!"66 Like many of her contemporaries, this young woman concluded that the sexual conduct of many of her peers—and not the previous regime—had cost the nation its honor. During the military occupation, the entire German nation stood in the international spotlight, accused of an utter collapse of moral conscience. The Nuremberg trials were only the most prominent of many forums in which the world discussed German crimes. In this context, the appearance en masse of a familiar symbol of moral decline—the sexually promiscuous woman—made it easier for Germans to avoid thinking about much more troubling characters: the patriotic civil servant or soldier who had committed crimes against humanity in the name of his nation, or the upright housewife who had dutifully reported nonconformist neighbors to an unforgiving system of justice. In the American zone, the scandal of sexual promiscuity and the insult to Germans who had sacrificed a great deal coincided with fraternizers' apparent embrace of American material wealth and cultural modernism—wearing American nylons, dancing to American music, and so on. This reinforced fraternization's impact as a symbol of German decline. Even in the Weimar era, many Germans had feared that American consumer goods and cultural exports posed a threat to German culture and traditions. The extraordinary allure of this threat—American exports found enthusiastic markets in Germany—made it all the more dangerous.67 And although the Nazis had railed especially hard against American modernism, fear of American cultural imperialism was hardly limited to Nazi circles. Indeed, to many anti-Nazis as well as to Germans for whom Nazism had lost its appeal during the war, the challenge of the postwar era would be to gain recognition for what was good in German culture at the very moment when the international community busily sought aspects of German tradition that could help to explain genocide and military aggression. Germany's military and political loss must not be compounded by a loss of positive cultural identity.68 Yet preserving, or restoring, a German culture worthy of admiration seemed an uphill battle. Not only did the Americans have all the money as well as legal control over German cultural production in their zone, but there was tremendous demand on the German side for things American. This was hardly limited to fraternizers' legendary desire for stockings. American cigarettes, to name only one item, were not only a treasured luxury item but also black market currency, which meant that everybody wanted them. Nevertheless, ordinary black market consumers could believe that fraternizers were taking pleasure in what, for them, was a bitter necessity: not only acknowledging American military and political victory, but also bowing down before American commercial success. Thus the popular obsession with fraternizers did more than shift attention from violent racial and political crime to sexual misconduct. It also redefined the national terms of Germany's moral decline and, by implication, the possibilities for rehabilitation. Denazification and war crimes trials focused on a phenomenon that was not only homegrown but also associated with Germany's years of greatest power and an ideological insistence on a unique national character. Although much

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of the machinery of denazification was eventually turned over to the Germans, foreign control of the initial stages of the process made clear that rehabilitation, to some extent, would have to come from outside. Fraternization pointed to a much more appealing relationship between Germanness, moral decay, and the possibilities for rehabilitation. The years when Germans had most insisted on their national uniqueness (and greatness) were not Germany's low-water mark; they were, rather, the "good old days," as evidenced by Germany's strength, confidence—and sexual order.69 If fraternization symbolized Germany's decline, then that decline was associated with a loss rather than with a surfeit of national strength. Rehabilitation would not result from excising what was uniquely German and learning from foreigners, especially the Americans. Rather, it would depend on a reassertion of German independence, uniqueness—even sexual, racial, and cultural purity. The official, international discourse of Nuremburg, which certainly shaped foreign readings of the relationship between German national identity and a specifically German loss of decency, was opposed by an unofficial, domestic, and popular discourse of fraternization, which described a very different relationship between Germanness and the loss of moral bearings. This meant that statements like those of the twenty-two-year-old student, who blamed sexually delinquent women for "bringing down" their decent contemporaries, coexisted with a more complicated discourse in which fraternizers symbolized a larger degradation of Germany brought about by loss of sovereignty. On first glance, Erwin Oehl's 1946 painting, Fraternization, seems to portray a villianous fraternizer and a victimized veteran (figure 1.5). The grinning young woman cruelly kicks the haggard veteran, who is already precariously balanced on a crutch. The woman's leg, which unites sexuality and violence, takes the central position; the light coloring of the veteran's and woman's face, as well as of the woman's sweater, make them stand out against the dark, indistinct background. But this interaction is in fact the making of a third character: the occupation soldier, painted in darker colors and positioned in the background, who manipulates the young woman like a puppet. Even the woman's grin, so painful to the veteran, is only a mask, veiling her own distress. The sexual disorder is real enough, but it is only the tip of the iceberg: it is symptomatic of a much broader landscape of misery resulting from foreign occupation. As West Germany emerged from the hunger years, several developments seemed to confirm the link between fraternization and loss of national sovereignty. The currency reform resulted in the quick decline of mass prostitution as a survival strategy.70 It also set into motion a series of events that in less than a year resulted in the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany. Thus in retrospect the association of fraternization with lack of national self-determination was cemented. Fraternization's utility as a symbol for the larger degradation of foreign occupation was confirmed in the popular culture of the early Federal Republic. In a passage from a novel set during the occupation, which was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in 1955, a young prostitute who serves an American clientele contemplates suicide:

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Figure 1.5: Erwin Oehl, Fraternization, 1946. The fraternizer kicks the wounded German veteran; she in turn is manipulated by the American. Promiscuous female sexuality and foreign occupation combine to create an amoral order. The solution: restore both the national and the sexual order. Courtesy of the Miinchner Stadtmuseum.

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She felt no shame about being a whore; she was ashamed that everyone seemed to be a whore. . .. Whenever she walked past the PX, there were women outside, waiting for an obliging American. Whores. In the "Miicke" [a bar] the waiters would keep the Germans waiting but would dart about like weasels as soon as an American bawled at them. Whores. When ration cards were issued at the food office the officials would snap at the men and women who had queued up there for hours, but they would jump up obsequiously as soon as a conqueror entered the room. Whores. Sometimes she listened to her father's conversations with the neighbors when they assured each other and themselves that they had never been Nazis. Whores. The Americans who came to visit her would dodge along the walls when they left. Whores. And on the walls of the houses a new inscription was more and more frequently being chalked up: "Yankee Whore." Who then was a Yankee Whore, Inge wondered, when everybody was a whore?71

The degradation of the German landscape takes many forms: German women offer sex to American men, German men scramble to please American men, German men lie to themselves about their Nazi past; even American men hide in a cowardly manner after their visits to prostitutes. Prostitution is a metaphor for the entire society in which Inge lives, and a narrative that would single her out for blame is rejected. As a prostitute, however, Inge does retain a certain symbolic value and, fittingly enough, her character is killed off shortly after the currency reform. The fraternizer Inge is buried with the prostituted society she represents. Nevertheless, although Inge symbolizes the moral decline of her society, she is not to blame for this decline. Rather, foreign occupation is. In the final meeting of most of the book's central characters, an American officer who is one of the moral anchors of the tale admits that the military occupation was hypocritical and corrupting. "The occupation was a dictatorship, even if in democratic garb.... We arrived here with the Bible in one hand and the knout in the other. . . . We believed ourselves to be missionaries, but we did not love those under our charge. . . . Our efforts were marked by the motto: '. . .and unless you are willing I shall have to use force.'" When a German in the circle remarks that Hitler had employed a similar motto, the American responds that Hitler hadn't claimed democracy—and he hadn't been a foreigner.72 Neither the officer nor the author of the book are apologists for Nazism; this comparison of Hitler and the occupation government—to Hitler's apparent advantage—is thus astonishing. The message is clear: West Germany must attain national sovereignty and the Yanks must go home. Most Germans experienced the occupation as the time of their greatest physical hardship. With the phenomena of fraternization and mass prostitution, the occupation became, in the popular imagination, not only the material and political, but also the moral nadir of recent German history.73 Popular support for official attempts to "confront the past"—and for the government's choices of which "pasts" to confront—suggest that by the early 1950s most West Germans felt more traumatized by the years 1945-48 than by the years 1933-45. The young West German government, dominated by Christian conservatives who insisted upon the need for "moral renewal," neither rushed to make indemnity payments to victims of National Socialism nor was troubled by old Nazis' political prominence and

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readmission to the civil service. Instead, when focusing on issues they described as moral, the ruling parties responded to the legacy of the occupation era by working hard to "reconstruct the family" and to reinforce conservative sexual mores.75 Of all the striking images of women during the "crisis years," that of the fraternizer thus translated most directly into official attempts to shape the situation of women. Many political players argued that women's demonstrated competence, the demographic imbalance between the sexes, and the numerous single mothers constituted grounds for improving the status of women in family law. This position was defeated. The governing coalition countered that the apparent breakdown of sexual mores demanded a conservative family policy. In the founding years of the Federal Republic, the inferior status of illegitimate children was written into the Basic Law, husbands' legal advantage over their wives was confirmed, and discrimination against families with few children (including most female-headed households) in social programs was reaffirmed. Municipalities were even permitted to restrict the movements of registered, law-abiding prostitutes, a practice that had been outlawed during Weimar but reinstituted during the Nazi period. As victims and as rebuilders, women's symbolic value was positive, and it was transferred to West Germany as a nation. Women, however, would reap no material benefits from their unique burdens and contributions as women, although they shared in the improved standard of living that characterized West Germany as a whole.76 As fraternizers, by contrast, women's symbolic value was negative. Although certain universalized lessons emerged from the history of fraternization—lessons emphasizing the need for national self-determination—the most tangible response to memories of fraternization reflected unambiguously that this was women's history. The high profile of women during Germany's collapse and occupation—whether as saints or as sinners—was thus crucial in shaping West German national identity. Women did not only offer sympathetic images of victimization and rebuilding, generalizable images that provided alternatives to representations of militaristic, genocidal Germans. They also prompted a discourse about a decline in sexual morality and the loss of national sovereignty that helped to deflect attention away from troubling moral questions about the Nazi past. These popularized memories of women's pasts did not add up to a neat whole, a tidy package that equaled West Germans' national identity. The history from which these memories evolved was itself one of multiple identities: the same woman might have been the pitied victim of rape one month, a despised fraternizer the next. Furthermore, these aspects of women's history addressed different concerns during West Germany's formative years, and they worked in tandem with other factors shaping a new national identity. Stories that associated moral degeneracy with military occupation suggested that renewal could come only with national sovereignty. Generalized images of German victimhood countered accusations of German perfidy; reminders of rape at the hands of the Soviets helped to formulate a West Germanness that opposed all things Eastern. Recollections of rubble clearance, by contrast, associated West German well-being not with mem-

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bership in the Western alliance but rather with hard work by members of the national community. Although varied, these ways of connecting memories of the "crisis years" to the situation of West Germans in the 1950s did share something: they all reflected crucial concerns of the early Federal Republic. But these concerns did not remain constant. Many elements of West German national identity and West Germans' ways of "coming to terms with their past" were negotiated anew with the student movement of the late 1960s and the Federal Republic's turn to the left in the 1970s.77 Among these was the link between Cold War hostilities and the tendency to focus on German wounds suffered rather than German wounds inflicted during the war. The challenge to this link reshaped both public policy and official memory as Chancellor Willy Brandt, a Social Democrat, reconsidered foreign relations, instituting Ostpolitik, and the burden of historical guilt, kneeling before the Warsaw ghetto monument in 1970. The first challenge to the universalization of women's history, however, came in the early and mid-1980s, when the feminist movement had matured adequately to produce a significant historical literature.78 Feminist explorations of the "hour of the women," which drew heavily on oral histories, reclaimed for women crucial aspects of Germany's mid-century history. In so doing, they illuminated counter memories specific to women. Bearing titles such as "The Forgotten Work of Women in the German Postwar Period" and "Housework as Survival Work," feminist writings pointed out that histories of the hard work of "Germans" following the war obscured the extent to which that work had been performed by women.79 In describing the bombings, evacuations, and flight, they insisted, in the words of an interview subject that were chosen as a chapter heading for a major work, that "we [women] lived with the danger" (emphasis added), thus reclaiming the civilian experience for women.80 A groundbreaking article on the rapes demonstrated that as Germany lost the war, women had been "doubly defeated," targets not only of military but also of sexual violence.81 Even the previously despised fraternizer was reclaimed and assigned a uniquely female pioneering role that had been forgotten as friendship with the Western Allies became a foundation of postwar life. "The first human contact with the Allies," readers were reminded, "was via us women" (emphasis added).82 In short, this literature, which was both scholarly and popular, attempted to reappropriate memories of women's experiences for women. In the context of the feminist movement, this effort served two functions. First, it challenged a historiography that alternately overlooked women and discussed them on the basis of negative stereotype.83 In addition, it contributed to a new narrative strategy that, by retelling German women's past, struggled with the dominant female identities that had emerged since 1945—identities that troubled feminists. By noting that only women's hard work had made possible all Germans' survival, for example, younger feminists were able to pose questions of profound importance to their struggle: Why had the Federal Republic not been established along more sexually egalitarian lines? Why were the gendered roles of the 1950s so conservative? Why had their own mothers, who had proven their competence

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and independence, then embraced a domestic lifestyle that they, the daughters, would experience as a straitjacket?84 At the same time that the new feminist historiography posed troubling questions, it also suggested promising alternatives. Women had demonstrated their strength during the hunger years; female victims had recognized the devastating effects of Nazism, militarism, and sexism; many women of the late 1940s had rejected traditional limits on their sexual expression. This knowledge provided an intellectual, emotional, and rhetorical basis for calls to rethink the gender roles that had become normative in the Federal Republic. These images gained a hearing wide enough to allow them to enter mainstream—even official—discussions about the Nazi period and its aftermath. In his speech on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war, the West German president, Richard von Weizacker, gave special thanks to women, drawing on images of victimhood and rebuilding (but not sexual promiscuity) and noting that women's contributions had typically been forgotten: World history forgets their suffering, their renunciation, and their quiet strength all too easily. They worried and worked, carried and protected human life. They mourned fallen fathers and sons, husbands, brothers, and friends. In the darkest years, they preserved the light of humanity from extinction. At the end of the war, without prospects of a secure future, they were the first to lend their hands to place one stone upon another, the women of the rubble in Berlin and all over... . Because of the war, many women remained alone and spent their lives in loneliness. But if the people did not crack inside under the destruction, the devastation, the horrors and the inhumanity, if they slowly came back to themselves after the war, then we owe it first of all to our women.85 By enabling women to claim a laudatory past, the new historiography became an important source of identity for West German feminists. At the same time, efforts to read women back into postwar history challenged certain strands of West German national identity, a national identity that had been built, in part, on the universalization of experiences that were now being reclaimed for women alone. If women were raped by men—and not Germany by the Soviet Union—this had implications for West Germans' ability to think of their nation as victimized (and continually threatened anew) by the superpower to the east. This was doubly the case if a feminist discussion of rape demanded that increased attention be paid to Gennan men's rape of Eastern women during the war. If fraternization had been a form of emancipation for women unwilling to be bound by German men's demands—and not a moral decline associated with foreign influence—then this implied a reconsideration of the "moral order" of the 1950s, in which the reconstruction of the family had been linked to a recovery of national strength. Even for feminists, however, such narratives of women's experience could be troubling as well as liberating. They emerged in the context of a feminist exploration of the Nazi era, an exploration that emphasized misogynist population policies, the restriction of young women's horizons, discriminatory employment policies, and women's resistance.86 To feminists who combined their abhorrence of sexism with criticism of German unwillingness to take responsibility for some of

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the most horrible crimes in human history, the new historiography seemed dangerously apologetic. It appeared to describe German women persistently as victims and heroines, and never as perpetrators.87 To be sure, women's history articulated a new dimension of the perfidy of the Nazi regime: it was deeply sexist as well as racist and militaristic. Nevertheless, this historiography seemed to fit in all too well with a troubling new wave of representations of the lives of "ordinary people" during the Nazi years, representations in which "ordinary people" experienced good times and bad, but in any case were governed by forces beyond their control.88 Profound suspicion of this trend in the historiography increased as English-speaking feminist historians, who more often identified with refugees from and persecutees of Nazism than with women of the rubble, became a significant presence in the debate. The narratives offered by West German feminists had barely made a significant impact on discourses of the past when they were roundly challenged. That this challenge came not from antifeminists but from feminist scholars attested to the dynamism of feminist scholarship, but this was small comfort to feminists who found their explorations of the costs of patriarchy and Nazism countered by accusations of apologism. A second generation of feminist histories thus emerged, emphasizing German women's contributions to Nazi state and society. The bitterness of the ensuing dispute echoed that of the almost contemporaneous Historians' Debate and served as a reminder that this was not an ivory-tower matter.89 The battle for German women's past was not only a reexamination of chapters of women's past that had been universalized to apply to West Germany as a whole—and thus a reinterpretation of a national history. Once joined, the battle was also one for the identity of West German women and feminists. The history of memories of women's experience during Germany's "crisis years" shows that, in considering social memory, we need more than an awareness of the distinctions between counter, popular, and official memory. We also need to understand their interconnections. First, these interconnections help to explain the internal dynamics of social memory. Counter memories of a subordinate group, for example, might evolve into popular or official memories of a dominant culture if their group specificity can be reinterpreted to communicate a message with some resonance for the larger population. Counter memories of women's history of rape gave way to popular and official memories of a degendered German history of rape. Counter memories of relationships between German women and American GIs, by contrast, were not degendered, nor did they give way to a popular or public history of good relations between Germans and Americans in general. Instead, they were demonized to describe relationships devoid of moral integrity, still gendered but bearing a symbolic value for understanding the demise of Germany as a whole. Such shifts in the "location" of memory are significant, and studies that focus on official monuments or popular culture or counter memory run the risk of systematically missing large parts of the story. This is all the more so because shifts in location do not follow a clear chronological sequence, with one "location" replacing another. Counter memories of ordinary relationships between German

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women and occupation soldiers coexisted with popular memories of fraternizers as the most odious symptom of a degraded society. Counter memories of a female civilian life in the endangered cities coexisted with popular memories of cities in flames that described a genderless Germany victimized by war. No single blueprint describes the ways memories shift their location or when and how different memories of the same history can coexist in multiple locations, serving different functions in each. The way that memories function in varying locations instead depends on the second aspect of interconnections among forms of memory illustrated here: their relationship to larger social and political problems. In the case examined here, two such problems both played a role in the evolution of social memory and were resolved, at least partially and temporarily, by shifts in the location of certain memories. The first was the formation of a legitimate national identity in the aftermath of Nazism and in the multiple contexts of the Cold War, the economic miracle, and the desire to regain national sovereignty. The second was the distribution of power and privilege between the sexes in light of women's prominence during the "hour of the women." Through memories of women during the "crisis years," the history of women's status in the Federal Republic and the development of a distinct West German national identity were intertwined. Whether memories of the woman of the rubble would contribute to increased status for women or a positive image for West Germany, for example, could not be determined by the image itself: it was open to multiple interpretations and uses. Instead, the prospect of unemployed men in a poor economy worked against the transformation of the women of the rubble into a population of well-paid and wellrespected working women. Thus the woman of the rubble became a symbol rather than a member of the labor force. As a symbol, however, the woman of the rubble was not merely reactive. Once the economic miracle was under way, she assisted the formation of a legitimate national identity built on economic success. With the woman of the rubble, the "economic miracle" could trace its origins to a time prior to the Allied-initiated currency reform of June 1948, the Marshall Plan, or the Korea boom. According to the history implied by the woman of the rubble, the economic miracle had begun with "zero hour" and the hard work of Germans, who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. And as a cultural symbol, the woman of the rubble's message about women's work was as powerful as her message about Germans' work and had tangible results for attitudes regarding women's paid labor. Women worked only under the most terrible of circumstances, according to the story of the woman of the rubble. Their contributions in those times were laudable, but no woman in her right mind would want to return to such times, and no society that wanted to treat its women well would promote women's work if this was what women's work meant. Understanding the evolution of memories of the woman of the rubble can help us to understand how those memories shaped both national identity and women's status. Although this chapter has explored a case study, certain patterns may apply more generally. One is the universalization of histories specific to subpopulations in cases where those histories offer a positive identity to the whole. In the first

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decade after the Second World War, the identity of victim was appealing to West Germans; women's forms of victimization were especially fitting to the political context of the Cold War and the physical environment of destroyed cities. Likewise, a rags-to-riches story was attractive, and the woman of the rubble offered a version of this story that minimized the importance of the outside benefactor. Memories of fraternization, by contrast, offered scant material for the development of a positive identity for the larger community. Accordingly, they were more narrowly universalized to apply to the nation only as it lay subordinate to outside domination. A second pattern is the relationship between the social position of the group to which certain memories initially refer and the extent to which the memories continue to have implications for that group. In the context of a culture that subordinated women, women were not able to profit materially or politically from their original "ownership" of images of victimhood and heroic rebuilding. They did, however, pay tangible penalties for memories of sexual disorder. Finally, the feminist-inspired reexamination of memories of women's experience during the crisis years illustrates both the fluid nature of social memory and the implications of this fluidity for national identity and social hierarchies. Feminist-initated challenges to West German collective memory reflected changes in national identity and social hierarchies, as they emerged in the dual context of leftist challenges to West German national identity and feminist efforts to alter gender relations. Moreover, once under way, they helped to shape the further development of both phenomena. This process will no doubt become yet more complex in coming years. Much has changed since the 1980s: the incorporation into the Federal Republic of the former Democratic Republic, which had a distinct narrative of the relationship between the Nazi era and East German national identity; the very process of unification, which has created its own discourses of victimization, rebuilding, and past moral failures; the divergent histories of women in the two German states; and the different lenses with which East and West German feminists view their pasts and contemporary situations. All call for renewed negotiation of national identity, feminist identity, social memory, and the German past.

NOTES

1. A longer, more thoroughly referenced, version of this essay appeared in American Historical Review 101 (1996): 354-95; it is reprinted here with permission. 2. Sybille Meyer and Eva Schulze, Wie wir das alles geschafft haben: AUeinstehende Frauen berichten iiber ihr Leben nach 1945 (Munich: Beck, 1984), 178. 3. On the centrality of narratives of shared suffering/victimhood, inspiring tales of accomplishment, and morality tales in collective memory, see Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 58-60, 87-88. 4. See, for example, Christian Graf von Krockow, Die Stunde der Frauen: Bericht aus Pommem 1944 bis 1947 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1988). On the use of the social-historical period 1943-48, see Martin Broszat, Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Hans Woller, eds., Von Stalin-

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grad zur Wdhrungsreform: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland (Munich: 01denbourg, 1988). 5. On women's "lost opportunity" for emancipation, see especially Annette Kuhn, "Die vergessene Frauenarbeit in der deutschen Nachkriegszeit," in Elisabeth Freier and Annette Kuhn, eds., "Das Schicksal Deutschlands liegt in der Hand seiner Frauen ": Frauen in der deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte (Diisseldorf: Schwann Verlag, 1984), 13-24; Annette Kuhn, "Power and Powerlessness: Women after 1945, or the Continuity of the Ideology of Femininity," German History 7, no. 1 (1989): 35-46. 6. The heroic image of the fallen soldier, for example, all but disappeared from military cemeteries. Sabine Behrenbeck, "Heldenkult oder Friedensmahnung? Kriegerdenkmale nach beiden Weltkriegen," in Gottfried Niedhart and Dieter Riesenberger, eds., Lernen aus dem Krieg? Deutsche Nachkriegszeiten 1918 und 1945 (Munich: Beck, 1992), 344-64; George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 212-22. 7. The classic psychological treatment of West Germans' failure to "come to terms with their past" is Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfdhigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: R. Piper, 1967). The most influential philosophical discussion is Theodor Adorno's "Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit," in Theodor Adorno, Erziehung zur Mundigkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970). 8. On refugees, evacuees, and prisoners of war, see Robert Moeller's chapter in this volume. On Christians, see Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 206-30; Maria Mitchell, "Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism, 1945—1949," Journal of Modern History 65 (1995):278-308. On denazification, see Hans Woller, Gesellschaft undPolitik in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986), 95-166; Lutz Niethammer, Die Mitlduferfabrik: Die Entnazifizierung am Beispiel Bayerns (Berlin: Dietz, 1982); on veterans and former prisoners of war, James Diehl, The Thanks of the Fatherland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Albrecht Lehmann, Gefangenschaft und Heimkehr: Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in der Sowjetunion (Munich: Beck, 1986); on widows, see Elizabeth Heineman, "Complete Families, Half Families, No Families at All: Female-Headed Households and the Reconstruction of the Family in the Early Federal Republic," Central European History 29(1996):19-60. 9. On the need to recognize the traumas of our historical subjects without accepting their commemorative priorities, see Saul Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 85-101; Dominick La Capra, "Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians' Debate," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 108-27, here 122-23; Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance, 49. For an overview of disputes between practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte and their critics, see Ian Kershaw, "'Normality' and Genocide: The Problem of 'Historicization,'" in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 20-41. 10. On historians' and sociologists' ways of classifying varieties of social memory, see Thomas Butler, ed., Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992); Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: University of Vermont Press, 1993); IrwinZarecka, Frames ofRemembrance; Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); as well as the special issue of Representations, "Memory and Counter-Memory" (Spring 1989), and the journal History and Memory.

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11. In shaping women's second-class status in the early Federal Republic, the cultural history described here played a secondary role to economic, political, and social pressures. Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Robert Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Klaus-Jorg Ruhl, Verordnete Unterordnung: Erwerbstatige Frauen zwischen konservativer Ideologie und Wirtschaftswachstum (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994). 12. On this approach, see Saul Friedlander, Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 13; Friedlander, Memory, 11-12; Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance, 47, 145-47; Hutton, History, 22. 13. A chapter entitled "Women's Everyday Life in the War, 1939 to 1945" in one of the best books on German women during this period for example, focuses almost entirely on the years after 1942; Meyer and Schulze, Wie wir das alles geschafft haben, 27-41. See also Annemarie Troger's "German Women's Memories of World War II" in Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al., eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 285-99. Although this essay will frequently refer to "German women" or "West German women," the construction employed above—"German women who were politically and racially acceptable to the [Nazi] regime"—more accurately reflects the subjects of this essay. Using the generic term "women" avoids repeated cumbersome qualifications; more importantly, it reflects the fact that dominant German and West German culture referred to a generic "German woman" without noting just how limited this category actually was. Only the possibility of imagining a generic "German woman"—however inaccurately—enabled West Germans to generalize from "her" experience in the ways explored below. 14. Dorte Winkler, Frauenarbeit im "Dritten Reich" (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1977); Ursula von Gersdorff, Frauen im Kriegsdienst (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1969); Heineman, What Difference? 59-71. 15. Lutz Niethammer, ed., "Die Jahre weifi man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soil": Faschismus-Erfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Bonn: Dietz, 1983). 16. See especially Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), and the subsequent discussion of themes raised in the book, well summarized in Atina Grossmann, "Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism," Gender and History 3 (1991): 350-58; Adelheid von Saldern, "Victims or Perpetrators? Controversies about the Role of Women in the Nazi State," in David Crew, ed., Nazism and German Society (London: Routledge, 1994), 141-65. 17. On trauma and memory, see Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance, 16, 49. 18. Klaus-Jorg Ruhl, ed., Unsere verlorenen Jahre (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1985), 70, 74; The United States Strategic Bombing Survey: Overall Report (European War), 30 September 1945, 92-93, reprinted in The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1976). Statistics on the extent of the damage and the number of dead vary considerably. 19. The qualifications for mothers who wished to leave the endangered cities were repeatedly tightened. Beauftragte fiir den Vierjahresplan, Schnellbrief (Via 5550/726), 21 September 1943, R43 11/65 Id, Bd.8, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (hereafter BAK); Beauftragte fiir den Vierjahresplan, Abschrift zu Via 5558/223, May 1944, R43 11/65Id, Bd.8, BAK; Beauftragte fiir den Vierjahresplan, Schnellbrief (Via 5558/374), 25 August 1944, R43 II/651d, Bd.8, BAK. 20. Gerhard Baumert, Deutsche Familien nach dem Kriege (Darmstadt: E. Rother, 1954), 209-10. 21. Monthly Report of the Military Government—U.S. Zone, no. 9 (20 April 1946), 21; for subsequent trends, Gerhard Reichling, Die Heimatvertriebenen im Spiegel der Statistik (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1958), 15, 52-53.

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22. Helmut Heiber, ed, Goebbeh-Reden, vol. 2,1939-45 (Diisseldorf: Droste, 1972), 43132; Der Panzerbar, 27 April 1945, quoted in Ingrid Schmidt-Harzbach, "Eine Woche im April, Berlin 1945: Vergewaltigung als Massenschicksal," in Helke Sander and Barbara Johr, eds., BeFreier und Befreite (Munich: Antje Kunstmann, 1992), 21-45, here 23. 23. The highest estimates appear in BeFreier und Befreite, 60; more conservative figures appear in Erich Kuby, Die Russen in Berlin 1945 (Berlin: Scherz, 1965), 305-18. On the difficulty of quantification and contextualization, see Atina Grossmann, "A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers," October 72 (April 1995): 43-63. 24. For reports of the dangers men faced in defending women from rape, see Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, vol. I/I, Die Vertreibung der deutschen Bevolkerung aus den Gebieten ostlich der Oder-Neifie (1954: reprint, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), 65E. For reports of men's unwillingness even to try, see SchmidtHarzbach, "Eine Woche"; Kuby, Die Russen, 305-18; Annemarie Troger, "Between Rape and Prostitution: Survival Strategies and Possibilities of Liberation of Berlin Women in 1945-48," in Judith Friedlander, Alice Kessler-Harris, Carol Smith-Rosenberg, eds., Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 104. 25. Anonymous, Eine Frau in Berlin: Tagesbuchaufzeichnungen (Geneva: Helmut Kossodo, 1959), 81, 144,271; Schmidt-Harzbach, "Eine Woche," 39-42; Meyer and Schulze, Wie wirdas alles geschafft haben, 63. 26. See especially BeFreier und Befreite, 16-17; also the interview with Frau Fr., Institut fur Soziologie, Technische Universitat Berlin, 42.1 am grateful to Sibylle Meyer and Eva Schulze for making transcripts of this and other interviews available to me. 27. The police and judicial system turned a blind eye to the widespread abortions that followed these rapes. Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (New York: Oxford, 1995), 193-99. 28. For a gendered description of the bombings that was written by a man during the war and was published in 1948, see Hans Erich Nossack, Der Untergang (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1948), esp. 27, 49, 51. On the openness of early postwar discussions of the female experience of rape, see Grossmann, "Question." 29. Wounded veterans could claim victimhood, but typically preferred the more "active" identity of a soldier who had performed his duty; see Diehl, Thanks of the Fatherland. On prisoners of war, see Lehmann, Gefangenschaft; Robert G. Moeller, " 'The Last Soldiers of the Great War' and Tales of Family Reunions in the Federal Republic of Germany," Signs 24 (1998): 129^-6 and Moeller's and Biess's chapter in this volume. 30. Post-World War II monuments emphasized civilian suffering rather than soldierly heroism; Behrenbeck, "Heldenkult"; Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 212-16. 31. On the power of the visual image to overwhelm other sources, see Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance, 176-77; Friedlander, Introduction, in Probing, 1-21, here 16. 32. Bilanz des zweiten Weltkrieges: Erkenntnisse und Verpflichtungen fur die Zukunft (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1953), 11. 33. Hans Rumpf, "Luftkrieg iiber Deutschland," in Bilanz, 159-76, here 163. 34. The male author, writing in 1953, notes only in passing that the casualties were largely female; Rumpf, "Luftkrieg," 170. By contrast, the male author of a 1943 account straightforwardly describes the victims of bombing raids as women; Nossack, Der Untergang, 28, 51. 35. Grossmann, "Question." 36. Vertreibung, 61E. See also Walter Luedde-Neurath, "DasEndeauf deutschem Boden," in Bilanz, 421-38, here 430. See also the contemporaneous Johannes Kaps, ed., Martyrium und Heldentum Ostdeutscher Frauen: Ein Ausschnitt aus der schlesischen Passion 1945—46 (Munich: Niedermayer and Miesgang, 1954), which takes generalization a step further by framing

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the rapes not culturally as Western civilization versus Eastern barbarity, but rather theologically as Good versus Evil. 37. See also Ernst Nolte's characterization of genocide as "Asiatic," which likewise projects perpetratorship onto one of the very groups targeted by the Nazis. Ernst Nolte, "The Past That Will Not Pass," reprinted in James Knowlton and Truett Cates, eds., Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993), 18-23, here 22; see also Dominick LaCapra's commentary on this issue in La Capra, "Representing the Holocaust," 113; and Klaus Theweleit on Weimar-era sexualized fears of the East; Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols., trans. Stephan Conway, Erica Carter, Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 1989). 38. Luedde-Neurath, "Das Ende," 430-37. The same argument reappears thirty years later in Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europdischen Judentums (Berlin: Siedler, 1986), 19, 24-25. 39. "Fall 3:1st ein von Besatzungsangehorigen zwangsgezeugtes Kind auch als Kriegsopfer anzusehen?" Sozialarbeit 1, no. 3 (1952): 115-17; Bundesministerium fiir Arbeit an den Vorsitzenden des Ausschusses des Deutschen Bundestages fiir Kriegsopfer- und Kriegsgefangenenfragen (IVb 2-45/51), 22 January 1951, B149/1876 folio 10, BAK; Bundesministerium fur Arbeit an das Bundesministerium des Inneren, Finanzministerium, Bundesministerium fiir Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen (IV b 1073/50), 20 November 1950, B149/1876 folio 7, BAK. Some provincial welfare offices offered assistance. See Bundesministerium des Innernen (542011-334/53) an die Herrenlnnen-bzw.Sozialminister der Lander, 23 March 1953, B153/345-1, folio 154-56, BAK, and ensuing correspondence. 40. Gesetztiberdie Abgeltung von Besatzungsleistungen und Besatzungsschdden, 1 December 1955 (Bundesgesetzblatt 1955 I, 734); Finanzministerium, Rdvfg., 17 December 1956 (IIE/ 1-BL 1112-352/56/0 4250), reprinted as "Abgeltung von Besatzungsschaden; Gewahrung eines Ausgleichs fiir den Unterhalt von Kindern, die bei einer Vergewaltigung gezeugt worden sind (NR 21 BVB1.)," Verband der Kriegsbeschddigten, Kriegshinterbliebenen und Sozialrentner Deutschlands-Mitteilungen 7, no. 4 (April 1957): 185-87; Finanzministerium, Rdvfg., 4 December 1958, "Gewahrung eines Harteausgleichs fiir den Unterhalt von Kindern, die bei einer Vergewaltigung gezeugt worden sind, die nicht als Besatzungsschaden anerkannt werden kann" (II A/8 - Sk 0317 - 66/58), reprinted in Die Praxis 12, no. 3 (May 1959): 118-19; Auszug aus dem Schreiben des Finanzministeriums vom 18. Dezember 1958-VI-B/l-BL 1821-40/59, Best. 932 no. 213, Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz. 41. See, for example, Vertreibung, 6IE; Luedde-Neurath, "Das Ende," 430. 42. Alfred Dregger, "For a Free Germany in a Free Europe," speech delivered to the Federation of German Expellees, Bonn, on 28 April 1985, in Ilya Levkov, ed., Bitburg and Beyond: Encounters in American, German and Jewish History (New York: Shapolsky, 1987), 112. 43. Helga Grebing, Peter Pozorski, Rainer Schulze, Die Nachkriegsentwicklung in Westdeutschland: 1945-1949, vol. A, Die wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1980), 19. 44. Monthly Narrative Report for Land Hessen, November 1948 (transl.), Medical Division, Ministry of the Interior, Hessian State Ministry, Abt. 649 8/59-1/11, Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (hereafter HHA). Men's health problems had been aggravated by their incarceration as prisoners of war. See Frank Biess's chapter in this volume. 45. Meyer and Schulze, Wie wir das alles geschafft haben, 95. 46. On the myth of the woman of the rubble in the GDR, see Ina Merkel, .. . und Du, Frau an der Werkbank: Die DDR in den 50er Jahren (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1990), 31-47; Heineman, What Difference? 90-92.

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47. Fritz Kohler, "Keik ma die Nazi-Weiba! Unter uns: es sind gar keine," Frau von heute 2 (March 1946):29. Consider also the Allied-licensed "rubble films," which explored questions about the recent past against the physical backdrop of the ruined cities. Anton Kaes, From "Hitler" to "Heimat": The Return of History as Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 12. 48. Frauen gestern und heute (Berlin, 1946), 34-36; reprinted in Doris Schubert, Frauen in der deutschen Nachkriegszeit, vol. 1, Frauenarbeit 1945-1949 (Diisseldorf: Schwann, 1984), 263. 49. See also Arnold Sywottek, "Tabuisierung und Anpassung in Ost und West: Bemerkungen zur deutschen Geschichte nach 1945," in Thomas Koebner, Gert Sautermeister, Sigrid Schneider, eds., Deutschland nach Hitler: Zukunftspldne im Exil und aus der Besatzungszeit 1939-1949 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987), 229. 50. "Eheberatungsstelle in Hannover," Neues Beginnen 4 (1 March 1949): 3. For a literary example of such imagery, see Walter Kolbenhoff, Heimkehr in die Fremde (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1949), 60, 116; for religious use of such language, see Gert Sautermeister, "Messianisches Hoffen, tapfere Skepsis, Lebensbegehren: Jugend in den Nachkriegsjahren," in Deutschland nach Hitler, 261-300, here 278. 51. Peter Reichel, Politische Kultur der Bundesrepublik (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 1981), 110-49. On political disinterest, see Heinz Rausch, "Politisches BewuBtsein und politische Einstellungen im Wandel," in Werner Weidenfeld, ed., Die ldentitat der Deutschen (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1983), 119-53, here 130. 52. See also Wolfgang Mommsen, "Wandlungen der nationalen ldentitat," in Die ldentitat der Deutschen, 170-93, here 174-76. 53. Fritz Sanger, "Gefahrdete Meinungsfreiheit," in Axel Eggerecht, ed., Die zornigen alten Manner: Gedanken u'ber Deutschland seit 1945 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1979), 236. Consider also the aestheticization of images of the rubble and of the activity of removing it; Sautermeister, "Messianisches Hoffen," 261-300. 54. Schubert, Frauenarbeit, 103; Monthly Report of the Military Government—U.S. Zone, no. 37 (July 1948), 3-4, 79-80. 55. Petri, Bezirksfiirsorgestelle Friedberg (Hessen) an das Landesarbeitsamt (hereafter LAA), Frankfurt am Main, 7 January 1949, 940/164, HHA, and attached correspondence; Prasident des LAA Hessen an die Arbeitsamter (hereafter AA)-Dienstanweisung 17/48 (Entwurf), 10 September 1948, 940/176, HHA; President des LAA Hessen an die AA, Dienstanweisung 6/ 49 (Entwurf), 5 January 1949, 940/164, HHA; President des LAA Wtirttemberg-Baden an den Herrn Leiter der AA, 2 July 1948, Abt. 460 AATauberbischofsheim no. 15 Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe. 56. Monthly Report of the Military Government—V'.S. Zone no. 38 (August 1948), 75, 77. See also Heineman, What Difference? 92-94. 57. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood, 53. For an overview of legal issues regarding women and employment, see Ruhl, Verordnete Unterordnung. 58. "So geht es nicht, Herr Bundesminister!" Frau und Beruf 5, no. 3 (March 1955): 21-22; "Zusatzliche Einstellung von arbeitslosen alteren Angestellten," Frau und Beruf 4, no. 12 (December 1954): 4. 59. Such language permeated the journal for female salaried employees, Frau und Beruf. See, for example, "Zum Problem: 'Altere Angestellte,'" Frau und Beruf 2, no. 2 (February 1952): 1; "Noch einmal: Die alteren Angestellten," Frau und Beruf A, no. 5 (May 1954): 5-6; "Das Problem 'Altere Angestellte,'" Frau und Beruf?,, no. 5 (May 1958): 34. For later use of this strategy in regard to pension law, see Trade Unruh, ed., Trummerfrauen: Biografien einer betrogenen Generation (Essen: Klartext, 1987), 6.

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60. Barbara Willenbacher, "Zerriittung und Bewahrung der Nachkriegs-Familie" in Broszat et al., eds., Von Stalingrad zur Wahrungsreform, 595—618. 61. Fraternization was most common in the American and British zones and least common in the Soviet zone (which never banned it); see also Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 92-96. 62. "To Tell or Not to Tell Is Query of Worried Home-Bound GIs," Stars and Stripes, 28 June 1946, 3; "Yank-Fraulein [sic] Romances Seen Ruining Occupation," Stars and Stripes, 24 June 1946, 8. See also Maria Hohn's chapter in this volume. 63. Veronika Dankeschon first appeared as a comic character in Stars and Stripes; comics including her initials were published on 9 and 20 July 1946. 64. The German veteran's reference to the American soldier's blackness—not quoted here— reflects Germans' continuing anxieties about racial mixing; Hinterher, 31. See also the chapters by Maria Hohn and Heide Fehrenbach in this volume. 65. "Werden die Mittel zur Bekampfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten richtig verwendet?" Mitteilungen des deutschen Vereins fur offentliche und private Fiirsorge, no. 9 (September 1948): 161-63. See also Resolution of the Social Democratic Women of Heidelberg, folder 10 VD Staff Studies, Box 551, Records of Chief, Med. Aff. Section, Public Health & Public Welfare Branch, Civil Affairs Division, OMGUS RG 260, National Archives-Suitland. 66. Hilde Thurnwald, Gegenwartsprobleme Berliner Familien: Eine soziologische Untersuchung an 498 Familien (Berlin: Weidmann, 1948), 156. See also Bishop Otto Dibelius's 1947 speech, "Vor dem groBen Entweder-Oder," reprinted in Heinz Fast, Die Antwort der protestantischen Kirche auf die Niederlage von 1945 (Sankelmark: Grenzakademie Sankelmark, 1968), 23—30; "Betr. Grundlagen der Volkswartbundarbeit," Volkswartbund (NovemberDecember 1947), 5. 67. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 99, 174-81. 68. Heide Fehrenbach, "Cinema, Spectatorship, and the Problem of Postwar German Identity," in Reiner Pommerin, ed., The American Impact on Postwar Germany (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn, 1994), 165-96; Uta G. Poiger, "Rebels with a Cause? American Popular Culture, the 1956 Youth Riots, and the New Conception of Masculinity in East and West Germany," in American Impact, 93-124. 69. Or at least selective memories of sexual order. On sexual disorder under Nazism, see Heineman, What Difference? 26-38, 53-59. Postwar "fraternization" helped to displace memories of wartime concerns over relationships between Germans and foreigners; see Jill Stephenson, "Triangle: Foreign Workers, German Civilians, and the Nazi Regime; War and Society in Wurttemberg, 1939-45," German Studies Review 15 (1992): 339-59; Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des "Auslander-Einsatzes" in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Berlin: Dietz, 1985), 79-80, 122-28, 248. 70. On continuing "fraternization" and prostitution, see Maria Hoehn, "GIs, Veronikas, and Lucky Strikes: German Reactions to the American Military Presence in the Rhineland-Palatinate during the 1950s" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995). 71. Hans Habe, OffLimits, trans. Ewald Osers (1955; trans., New York: FrederichFell, 1956), 178. See also Karl-Heinz Helms-Liesenhoff, Die Demobilisierung der Gretchen-Armee (Grenchen: Spaten, n.d. [ca. 1955]). 72. Habe, Off Limits, 432-33. 73. Rausch, "Politisches BewuBtsein," 26. 74. On indemnification, see Constantin Goschler, Wiedergutmachung: Westdeutschland und die Verfolgten des Nationalsozialismus, 1945-1954 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992). On old Nazis

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in the civil service, see Curt Garner, "Public Service Personnel in West Germany in the 1950s," Journal of Social History 29 (1995-96): 25 - 80. Among prominent Nazis who attained high rank in the West German government was Hans Globke, who penned the official commentary to the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935; he became secretary of state to Konrad Adenauer. 75. While memories of sexual promiscuity played an important role in the "reconstruction of the family," they do not fully explain it; see Moeller, Protecting Motherhood. 76. References to women's activities during the "crisis years" helped to attain a constitutional guarantee of equal rights for women. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood, 38-75; Antje Spath, "Vielfaltige Forderungen nach Gleichberechtigung und 'nur' ein Ergebnis: Artikel 3 Absatz 2 GG," in Freier and Kuhn, eds., "Das Schicksal," 112-69. Nevertheless, discriminatory family and labor law insured that women's legal and material disadvantages persisted. 77. Alf Liidtke, " 'Coming to Terms with the Past': Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany," Journal of Modern History 65 (1993): 542-72; Andrei S. Markovits, "Coping with the Past: The West German Labor Movement and the Left," in Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate (Boston: Beacon, 1990). 78. Starting in the late 1960s, isolated but significant works on women's history during the Nazi period began to appear; these did not touch on the postwar period. Winkler, Frauenarbeit; Gersdorff, Frauen; Timothy Mason, "Women in Germany, 1920-1940: Family, Welfare and Work," History Workshop Journal, no. 1 (1976):74-113, and no. 2 (1976): 5-32. 79. Kuhn, "Die vergessene Frauenarbeit"; Schubert, Frauenarbeit, 32; Gabriele Strecker, Uberleben ist nicht genug: Frauen 1945-1950 (Freiburg: Herder, 1981). 80. Meyer and Schulze, Wie wir das alles geschafft haben, 27. See also Gerda Szepansky, "Blitzmddel, " "Heldenmutter, " "Kriegerwitwe": Frauenleben im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986). 81. Ingrid Schmidt-Harzbach, "Doppelt besiegt: Vergewaltigung als Massenschicksal," Frankfurter Frauenblatt (May 1985): 18-23. For other West German feminist treatments of the subject in the mid-1980s, see note 24. The reclamation of a peculiarly female experience of defeat, determined by rape, reached a wider audience with Helke Sander's controversial 1992 film, BeFreier und Befreite. 82. Meyer and Schulze, Wie wir das alles geschafft haben, 67. 83. Annemarie Troger, "Die DolchstoBlegende der Linken: Frauen haben Hitler an die Macht gebracht," in Frauen und Wissenschaft: Beitrdge zur Berliner Sommeruniversitdt ftir Frauen (Berlin: Courage, 1976), 350-52. 84. See note 5, as well as Helke Sanders-Brahms's film, Deutschland Bleiche Mutter, 1980; also the discussion of the film in Kaes, From "Hitler" to "Heimat," 160. 85. Richard von Weizacker, "Zum 40. Jahrestag der Beendigung des Krieges in Europa und der NS-Gewaltherrschaft," in Ulrich Gill and Winfried Steffani, eds., Eine Rede und ihre Wirkung: Die Rede des Bundesprdsidenten Richard von Weiszacker vom 8. Mai 1985 (Berlin: Roll, 1987), 175-91, here 178. 86. Representative early collections include Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung, ed., Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch: Zur Geschichte der Frauen in der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981); Annette Kuhn and Valentine Rothe, Frauen im deutschen Faschismus, 2 vols. (Diisseldorf: Schwann, 1982-83); Maruta Schmidt and Gabi Dietz, eds., Frauen unterm Hakenkreuz (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1983). 87. Angelika Ebbinghaus, ed., Opfer und Tdterinnen (Nordlingen: Delphi Politik, 1987); Christina Thiirmer-Rohr et al., eds., Mittaterschaft undEntdeckungslust (Berlin: Orlanda, 1989); Karin Windaus-Walser, "Gnade der weiblichen Geburt? Zum Umgang der Frauenforschung mit Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus," Feministische Studien 6 (November 1988): 102-15;

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Lerke Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat, eds., TochterFragen: NS-FrauenGeschichte (Freiburg: Kore, 1990). 88. Kaes, From "Hitler" to "Heimat," 161-92. 89. See notes 37 and 38 on the Historians' Debate and note 16 on the Feminist Historians' Debate.

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Survivors of Totalitarianism RETURNING POWS AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINE CITIZENSHIP IN WEST GERMANY, 1945-1955 FRANK

BIESS

BETWEEN 1945 and 1955, more than one million German POWs returned from captivity in the Soviet Union to West Germany.1 After having served as Hitler's soldiers on the Eastern front where, as recent research indicates, many of them became bystanders, accomplices, and perpetrators of genocide, they faced a prolonged period of deprivation and forced labor in Soviet POW camps.2 While hundreds of thousands of sick POWs were released in the immediate postwar period, the bulk of German POWs were forced to contribute to the rebuilding of the Soviet Union through forced labor and did not return until the late 1940s and the first few months of 1950. The last 30,000 German POWs were convicted of war crimes by Soviet courts and were finally repatriated in two waves in 1953 and in 1955, the last ones after Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's visit to Moscow. When the mass of the POWs returned home during the late 1940s, they encountered a Heimat (homeland) that had radically changed since they had left it in order to fight the war on the Eastern front.3 Yet while the POWs met an environment that still bore the visible marks of total defeat, they also reentered a West German society that was undergoing a rapid transformation into a liberal-democratic and increasingly "Americanized" society.

This essay focuses on the way a changed and changing West German society received and treated returning POWs from the Soviet Union during the first postwar decade.4 By analyzing West German responses to returning POWs, the essay highlights the nature of West German society specifically as & postwar society. It seeks to demonstrate that as a result of the delayed return of the POWs, West German society was compelled to cope with the direct social, moral, and psychological consequences of the racial war of destruction on the Eastern front well into the second half of the 1950s.5 The concept of "totalitarianism" was central to West German responses to returning POWs from the Soviet Union. Yet in these responses, totalitarianism did not primarily feature as an analytical concept signifying a political system. It rather appeared as a psychological force that threatened to destroy the moral and personal integrity of the individual.6 West German reactions to returning POWs consisted of two distinct yet related components: a process of disintegration through vie-

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timization that turned these former soldiers of Hitler's army into victims of totalitarianism and a process of reconstruction that transformed them into survivors of totalitarianism. While victimization persisted throughout the period considered here, it was increasingly tempered by an emphasis on reconstruction that coincided with the reconstruction of West German society at large and its gradual integration into the Western Cold War alliance during the first half of the 1950s. By the mid1950s, the then dominant image of the POWs as survivors of totalitarianism indicated a specific West German way of relating to the past and it reflected distinctly West German ideals of masculine citizenship.7 This synthesis, as the essay will show, firmly anchored returning POWs in the political, social, and moral fabric of postwar society. Yet at the same time, it also represented one of the origins of the massive social conflicts of the 1960s. Contrary to previous research, West Germans' relationship to the Nazi past during the first postwar decade was not characterized by complete silence or collective amnesia.8 The rise and fall of the Third Reich had left ever-present marks that were too visible simply to be ignored, and it had produced experiences that were too traumatic simply to be repressed. During the first postwar decade, West Germans debated their recent past during the Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War in a very intense, albeit also highly selective, manner. Many different groups in German society crafted tales of the past that tended to emphasize their suffering and generally neglected the various degrees of their passive tolerance or active complicity with the Nazi regime. In so doing, these groups supported their claims for material compensation from the West German welfare state. They also sought to reclaim a moral high ground as Hitler's victims, a position that they had lost as a result of their exposure as perpetrators by Allied prosecutions of Nazi crimes at Nuremberg and elsewhere.9 Within this larger context of West German selective memory, the experience of returning POWs occupied a privileged position. In a more dramatic fashion than perhaps any other group in postwar German society, returning POWs from the Soviet Union united in their personal and collective histories the German paradox of combining, in many cases, a function as perpetrator or bystander during the war with an experience of victimization after the war. As Robert Moeller has argued, in West German public memories returning POWs from the Soviet Union became one of the two main reference groups of a "rhetoric of victimization" that explicitly equated the suffering of "German victims" with the suffering of "victims of Germans."10 This equation focused especially on the phenomenological similarity of the camp experience that Jews and other victims of Nazism allegedly shared with German soldiers who were interned in Soviet POW camps after 1945. This equation of Jewish victims and returning POWs, however, did not come into being quasi automatically after the Wehrmacht's unconditional surrender. A variety of public and private statements from the early postwar period indicate instead how West Germans employed the issue of German POWs as one way to address the complicated problem of German individual guilt and moral responsibility. Individual Germans demanded, for example, that POWs should be repatriated

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according to the extent of their involvement with National Socialism. The Hessian state government and parts of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) discussed the exchange of antifascist POWs for well-known National Socialists.12 Other voices located the harsh treatment of German POWs in the Soviet Union in the context of "Hitler's criminal conduct" in the East or rejected "the simple equation of POW and concentration camps."13 While it is impossible to ascertain how widespread these attitudes were, their existence demonstrates that the perception of returning POWs as victims represented a social and discursive process that silenced other, more differentiated, voices of the early postwar period. Within these specific West German narratives of victimization, the discussion of medical and psychological consequences of captivity assumed a special significance. Beginning in 1946, West German medical doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists began to diagnose the condition of sick and utterly exhausted returning POWs as "dystrophy." The term apparently derived from the Russian and entered German medical literature only after the Second World War. Dystrophy originated from malnutrition in the camps. It signified a variety of physical symptoms such as water edema, liver damage, and loss of sexual instinct as well as a wide range of "psycho-pathological behavior," including apathy, depression, and loss of all moral inhibitions.14 These psychological symptoms indicated that returnees were suffering from what today would be called "posttraumatic stress disorder" (PTSD).15 In her classic 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt analyzed the destructive impact of the concentration camp as the "most consequential institution of totalitarian rule" on the individual personality of inmates.16 Even before the publication of Arendt's study, dystrophy literature addressed similar problems with respect to former German POWs in the Soviet Union. German physicians and psychiatrists argued that the camp experience "de-differentiated" and "primitivized" the POWs, who had therefore developed "abnormal" and "asocial" personalities.17 These deformations seem to have not only resulted from the POWs' material deprivation but also derived from their exposure to a foreign natural and social environment that was deemed incompatible with any German sense of Heimat.18 Contemporary observers noted that the "endless space of the Russian landscape" and the "completely different way of life" in the Soviet Union had shaped German POWs to such an extent that "their nature and facial expressions have become Russian" and they "had lost much of their actual humanity."19 Dystrophy literature thus indicated the extent of German POWs' victimization by ascribing to them the allegedly subhuman features of their former enemies on the Eastern front. Moreover, dystrophy did not only call into question German POWs' ethnic identity, it also destroyed their sexual identity. Virtually all discussions of dystrophy emphasized in particular the loss of any sexual desire among starving German POWs in the Soviet Union as a result of the exclusive focus of all libidinal instincts on food.20 This diagnosis stood in marked contrast to concerns about homosexuality and "sexual perversions" among German POWs from Western POW camps.21 According to dystrophy literature, POWs in the Soviet Union were de-

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Figure 2.1: Heimkehrer 1946. During the immediate postwar period, German POWs returned in an utterly miserable condition. West German observers described their physical and psychological condition as "dystrophy" and often ascribed to returning POWs the allegedly "inferior" moral characteristics that had previously been assigned to the victims of Nazi racial persecution. Courtesy of the Landesbildstelle Berlin.

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sexualized and thus returned from Soviet captivity as emasculated and infantilized sexual beings. These deficiencies, moreover, did not only concern the psyche but extended to the very sexual characteristics of their bodies. In the first monograph on dystrophy, the psychotherapist Kurt Gauger described the dystrophic femininzation of returnees' bodies, which had apparently assumed female shapes and features with "pubic hair of the female type" as well as the "first signs and sometimes fully developed forms of female breasts."22 Dystrophy literature thus indicated that the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht was followed by a complete emasculation of its former soldiers in Soviet captivity. As a growing literature on trauma, memory, and war has demonstrated, trauma does not represent a timeless fact with a clearly discernable psychobiological essence.23 Instead, the interpretation and diagnosis of trauma is closely linked to larger cultural narratives of war and defeat. Dystrophy literature therefore also needs to be analyzed from the perspective of the "social construction of illness."24 This is not to say that German POWs did not suffer any serious health damages as a result of their deprivations in Soviet captivity. Yet in the aftermath of genocidal warfare on the Eastern front, discussion of these physical and psychological deficiencies of returning POWs assumed a specific meaning. In a peculiar inversion of racialist discourse, these diagnoses assigned to German POWs the racial and sexual markers that Nazi propaganda had assigned to their former enemies on the Eastern front. Dystrophy literature indicated that German POWs in the Soviet Union had become dehumanized in a similar way to the primary victims of Nazi racial warfare on the Eastern front, Russians and Jews.25 It therefore signaled how postwar internment in the Soviet Union had inscribed the military defeat of the Third Reich onto the body and the psyche of its former soldiers. Moreover, by ascribing these "inferior" characteristics to German POWs, these diagnoses indicated that they were not just losers of an "ordinary" war. They rather portrayed them as losers of a racial war of extermination in which defeat was always associated with racial or moral inferiority. This pathologizing tone in dystrophy literature also derived from the personnel and conceptual continuities in the medical and psychiatric profession. Before 1945, some of the most prolific writers on dystrophy had displayed a strong allegiance to the ideology and practice of National Socialist health policies. As an "enthusiastic propagandist for the Nazis," Kurt Gauger, one of the main authorities on dystrophy in the postwar period, had advocated a "political psychotherapy" during the Third Reich.26 Dystrophy authors like Gauger were therefore strongly predisposed to viewing health problems of returning POWs as indicators of an alleged moral inferiority. Yet dystrophy literature was not an exclusive specialty of a few compromised members of the medical and psychiatric profession. Contributions on dystrophy appeared in all established medical and psychiatric journals.27 While not all of them shared the cultural biases of the diagnoses cited above, most commentators accepted the notion of a specific "pathology of captivity" among returning POWs.28 State authorities, moreover, also adopted this perception of the POWs' condition as pathological. In a meeting with church welfare organizations in October 1953, a representative of the Ministry of Expellees underscored the severe physical and

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psychological damages that returning POWs suffered as a result of dystrophy and cited Kurt Gauger's book as the authoritative treatment of the issue.29 As late as 1956, the Ministry of Labor commissioned a collection of medical, psychological, and sociological studies on dystrophy because it represented a "widespread, obvious, and threatening syndrome for everybody who is affected by it."30 The West German discussion of the medical and psychological consequences of Soviet captivity during the late 1940s and early 1950s thus established dystrophy as the specific trauma of the Second World War. Dystrophy exhibited similarities as well as differences to the characteristic trauma of the First World War—"shell shock," or war neurosis.31 Like shell shock, dystrophy signified the collapse of preceding ideals of militarized masculinity. Yet while shell shock had exposed the anachronism of Victorian ideals of heroic soldierly conduct in the age of the machine gun, dystrophy denoted the breakdown of the Nazi ideal of the racially superior warrior on the Eastern front.32 The symptoms and the etiology of dystrophy also differed widely from those of shell shock. Shell shock manifested itself in "uncontrollable shaking, stuttering, tics and tremors and disorders of sight, hearing and gait" as well as "insomnia, wild emotional outbursts, racing heart beat and nervous exhaustion."33 Whereas shell shock thus referred to a loss of control over bodily functions, dystrophy rather indicated the extreme reduction or even complete extinction of physical and psychological capacities.34 Significantly, moreover, shell shock resulted from exposure to intolerable conditions on the front and was therefore largely limited to front soldiers. Dystrophy, on the other hand, derived from camp internment and thus affected, at least in theory, millions of civilians as well. In that sense, dystrophy indicated the collapse between front and home front, between civilian and military victims, that distinguished the Second from the First World War. This focus on the POWs' deprivations in the camps rather than on their previous experience on the front in dystrophy literature fostered the elimination of considerable differences between various forms of internment during and after the Second World War in West German postwar consciousness.35 Dystrophy literature allowed West Germans to claim their share in what was perceived as a Europewide camp experience that, according to one commentator, had deprived "millions of prisoners of all categories" in "concentration, forced labor, and POW camps" of their personal freedom.36 This equation then enabled Kurt Gauger, at a medical congress on "Prisoner-of-War Diseases" in 1953, to discuss the dystrophy syndrome with reference to a female concentration camp survivor from the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He asserted as a "simple fact" that "captivity in Theresienstadt, just like in the POW camps in the Soviet Union, led to severe dystrophy."37 A contribution to the state-commissioned study on dystrophy, moreover, explicitly rejected calls for a differentiated treatment of returning POWs and concentration camp survivors by emphasizing the "similarity of the captivity situation."38 Dystrophy literature therefore left no doubt that returning POWs, like Jews, should be described as victims of the camp, as victims of totalitarianism. This portrayal of returning POWs as dehumanized victims of totalitarianism paradoxically served a variety of useful functions for individual POWs as well as

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for West German society at large. It eliminated, for example, differences not just between returning POWs and Jewish victims but also among returning POWs. This was especially significant because an unusually high percentage of SS men seem to have fallen into Soviet captivity and returned to West Germany together with ordinary POWs.39 As a result of their delayed return, they benefited from a special amnesty for returning POWs that excluded virtually every POW who had returned after 8 May 1947 from denazification procedures.40 Returning POWs, moreover, were not only collectively exonerated, they were also almost indiscriminately integrated into the wide range of "war damaged" groups that were entitled to material compensation from the West German welfare state. Most medical commentators agreed that the physical and psychological consequences of captivity should be compensated according to the 1950 "Federal War Victims' Benefit Law."41 Returning POWs, including SS men, also received benefits according to the 1954 "Prisoner-of-War Compensation haw."42 The undifferentiated perception of POWs as victims of totalitarianism thus clearly obscured the considerable differences among them that had still been recognized during the early postwar period. Within West German society at large, the perception of returning POWs as completely deformed and demoralized victims served the rather obvious purpose of providing a moral counterweight to Allied accusations of German complicity in National Socialist crimes. Whereas ordinary Germans had been forced to confront the horrors of the liberated concentration camps immediately after the war, they could now point to returning POWs from the Soviet Union as having undergone an allegedly similar experience. How closely an awareness of conditions in concentration camps during the Nazi period was linked with perceptions of returning POWs as victims became apparent in a letter of one Frau R., a mother of a POW in Russia, to a Catholic priest in 1947. Conversations with returned POWs from the Soviet Union had convinced her that captivity in the Soviet Union was indeed "not comparable" to conditions in the "German concentration camps." It was, in fact, "much worse." Whereas "innocent people who had only done their duty at the front" had to suffer for a prolonged period of time, "the people in the concentration camps were immediately anaesthetized in the gas chambers" even though, she added, "it was terrible and not nice to treat people like that."43 Such voices from the grassroots level indicate how in West German popular consciousness an existing awareness of German crimes and a certain degree of compassion for Germany's victims was gradually overshadowed by an increasing self-perception of Germans as victims. This identification with returning POWs as victims of totalitarianism, moreover, united the overwhelming majority of ordinary Germans with political representatives in all major parties except the Communist party (KPD). To both ordinary Germans and their political leaders, images of victimized POWs confirmed earlier National Socialist predictions of the catastrophic consequences of a Soviet military victory. The West German societal consensus of POWs as victims thus indicated the continuity of an antibolshevist community of suffering that had emerged during the last years of the war and reached into the postwar period.44

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This continued antibolshevist community of suffering received its annual symbolic affirmation in national commemorations of the fate of German POWs in the Soviet Union. After 1950 the Association of Returned POWs annually organized, in cooperation with the two Christian churches, unions and employer organizations, and the federal government, a "week of remembrance" as well as a "day of loyalty" featuring a two-minute work and traffic stoppage, fires of admonishment along the border between West Germany and East Germany, and torchlight parades of returned POWs in POW uniform.45 The image of POWs as victims thus maintained a public presence during the first postwar decade, periodically reminding all West Germans of the continuity between past and present horrors of Soviet bolshevism. In the new context of the Cold War, to be sure, West German antibolshevism dissolved into a larger Western antitotalitarianism. Members of the West German Foreign Office welcomed American wishes "to activate the question of German POWs for the active defense propaganda against Russian Communism."46 Similarly, a formal West German complaint at the United Nations against Soviet failure to repatriate German POWs indicated that West Germans sought to transform the "vital question of German POWs into a cause of the free world."47 Yet accusations of Soviet inhumanity also increasingly served as a way to critique the remnants of the Western Allies' prosecution of German crimes against humanity. After the early 1950s, demands for a release of the last POWs from the Soviet Union were routinely linked with calls for a general amnesty of German war criminals who were still imprisoned by the Western Allies. West Germans thus employed the victimization of German POWs in the Soviet Union not only to align themselves with Western antitotalitarianism, but also to erase the last distinctions between themselves and "the West" that resulted from the Western Allies' prosecution of the crimes committed by the perpetrators of the preceding German version of totalitarianism.48 While the perception of returning POWs from the Soviet Union as victims served a variety of political purposes that were both symbolic and practical in the postwar period, it also presented considerable problems to West German society. Physically and morally deformed POWs, after all, were ill-suited to contribute to the enormous task of rebuilding an utterly devastated society, and they were certainly incapable of defending this society at the forefront of the Cold War. Their integration into postwar society as victims was therefore merely negative in that it turned POWs into a symbol for the defeated nation but did not assign them a positive function within postwar society. The POWs, however, were "men in their best years" from every social background who, as one observer noted, had a "decisive part in the fate and the shaping of our social order."49 For functional as well as symbolic reasons, the reconstruction of West German society thus required their positive integration as citizens of a liberal democratic republic. They therefore needed to be transformed from victims into survivors of totalitarianism. Because the victimization of POWs in West German public discourse had been perceived as a process of moral, physical, and psychological disintegration, their

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Figure 2.2: During the early 1950s, the fate of the German POWs still held in the Soviet Union received enormous public attention and confirmed the continuity of an "antibolshevist" consensus from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic. This picture depicts a twominute traffic stoppage in West Berlin in 1952 on occasion of the annual "week of remembrance" for German POWs in the Soviet Union. Courtesy of the Landesbildstelle Berlin. reconstruction as postwar citizens demanded a process of reintegration on all these levels. This process, to be sure, was greatly facilitated by the much improved health conditions of POWs who returned after 1948-49. 50 Yet the perception as survivor instead as victim applied to all POWs from the Soviet Union. It involved a revaluation of the collective POW experience that transcended its purely victimizing aspects as well as a new definition of the POWs' places as male citizens within postwar society. The two Christian churches played an especially significant role in the moral revaluation of the POW experience. As the only major institutions that had survived the collapse of the Third Reich nearly unchanged, the churches possessed a singular moral authority in postwar Germany. They were thus uniquely positioned to offer redemptive meaning to disillusioned and demoralized POWs that went beyond mere victimization. Church publications portrayed captivity as a period of "soul searching" that had led to a kind of "Christian community experience" during which former soldiers had realized their previous "distance from God."51 Given the Christian emphasis on suffering as precondition for redemption, church publications asserted that the deprivations in captivity had earned returning POWs a "knowledge" and an "invisible crown" that signaled their larger "mission as a

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secret order for our torn people in the middle of Europe."52 Because religion had inspired returning POWs to survive an "unprecedented boundary situation of occidental man," they were supposed to redeem postwar society from "Eastern and Western nihilism."53 According to these statements, the Soviet POW camp epitomized the destructive tendencies of modernity, such as massification, collectivization, and secularization. The POWs' survival in the camps therefore predisposed them to provide a corrective and a counterweight to these very tendencies at home. The interpretation of captivity as religious conversion represented more of an ideological project, to be sure, than a reflection of actual religious sentiments among returning POWs. Catholic priests and Protestant ministers who had been active in Soviet POW camps provided mixed reports about the piety of German POWs.54 Yet church authorities also received letters from former POWs testifying to the support that religion had provided to them in mastering an unprecedented personal and moral crisis situation.55 A Catholic memo on the "spiritual and religious situation in Germany" identified a "singular religious wave especially among soldiers in the internment camps" as a result of the "catastrophic ending of the war." According to this analysis, former soldiers' resurgent religiosity was, however, soon stifled by the bleak reality of life in postwar Germany and hence replaced by a widespread "nihilism."56 Church organizations were therefore determined to activate even the "small number of those who had gone through the Christian community behind barbed wire," hoping that their survival in captivity would have a "revolutionary impact" on Christian communities at home.57 The extensive involvement of church welfare organizations in the social and religious care of returning POWs actively sought to foster their religious sentiments.58 Church groups hoped that even a small cell of religiously inspired survivors of captivity would function as important agents of a "rechristianization" of postwar society.59 Secular commentators shared the churches' interpretation of captivity as a period of spiritual and moral regeneration. According to these voices, German POWs had not succumbed to "massification" in the camps. Unlike members of "more primitive peoples," the German POWs had allegedly demonstrated their membership in a German Kulturnation by displaying an unbroken attachment to culture and education in captivity. Their suffering in Soviet camps had thus entailed a "deep educational value."60 The liberal economist Ludwig Preller shared this notion of returning POWs as contributing to a "spiritual renewal" of postwar society and identified them, together with returning emigrants, as the two most important groups that could infuse a torn society with new meanings.61 This redemptive interpretation of Soviet captivity was also in tune with the "organizational ideology" that the "Association of Returned POWs" (Verband der Heimkehrer, VdH) was developing during the early 1950s. The VdH sought to create, according to James Diehl, "a community of experience [among returning POWs] whose negative experience was now given a positive revaluation."62 Two exhibits that the VdH organized during the 1950s clearly documented these efforts. They were entitled "Prisoners of War Speak" and "We Admonish" and tried to pre-

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Figure 2.3: Karl Sieth, "Der Gekronte." In postwar West Germany, the two Christian churches frequently portrayed the suffering of German POWs in the Soviet Union as a precondition for redemption and saw returning POWs as important agents of a "rechristianization" of postwar society. This painting reflects this religious interpretation of captivity by portraying a German POW as a modern Christ figure wearing a barbed-wire crown. During the early 1950s, it was displayed at an exhibition on the experience of German POWs. Courtesy of the Verband der Heimkehrer, Bonn. sent the lessons of the captivity experience to a larger audience. These exhibits, to be sure, did not tell stories of deformed and victimized German POWs but rather told tales of moral resistance and inner strength. The handicraft works on display that had been produced by POWs in the camps documented, for example, their dexterity under primitive conditions and signaled that even the Communist labor system of norms and quotas had not corrupted established notions of German "quality work." These exhibits thus sought to document how German POWs had "asserted themselves spiritually" by maintaining their "humanity in the midst of inhumanity" and by holding on to beliefs in "freedom," "Heimat" (homeland), and "family."63

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These recast memories of the POW experience were supposed to confirm the transhistorical continuity of timeless German values that had been untainted by total war and total defeat. The POWs' conduct in Soviet captivity seemed to represent a source of an essential "Germanness" that should contribute to the moral foundation of postwar society. As survivors of totalitarianism, moreover, returning POWs also demonstrated that in the postwar period to be (West) German meant to be anticommunist. Returning POWs were uniquely prepared to assert the legitimacy of West Germany as the only representative of the nation by associating the German Democratic Republic with conditions in Soviet POW camps. This was clearly the message of returnee Alfred H.'s description of his homecoming experience to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. He had passed through GDR territory on his return from the Soviet Union, and he identified "Germany's demarcated Eastern zone" as the "mirror image of Russia." Only after he had crossed the border between East and West did he and his fellow POWs, who were "all eyewitnesses and reporters on conditions behind the Iron Curtain," feel the "love of the Heimat." Only then, he added, "were we in Germany."64 At the same time, however, the POWs' survival in captivity also provided a possibility for the assertion of a distinctly German identity in the face of increasing American influences. Especially in the aftermath of the return of the last POWs in 1953 and 1955, their commitment to "comradeship, faithfulness, and personal integrity" in captivity was frequently juxtaposed to the alleged superficiality of an increasingly Americanized, West German consumer culture.65 A 1957 poster advertisement of a VdH documentary movie on the fate of returning POWs explicitly contrasted the figure of the German returnee with representations of American popular culture such as rock' n 'roll and jazz. 66 By the mid-1950s, representations of the POWs as survivors of totalitarianism thus countered earlier perceptions of POWs as completely demoralized victims who had lost their identity as Germans. Instead, the returned POW now appeared as a powerful symbol for an ideal West German citizen who was firmly anticommunist yet also kept a skeptical distance from the "American way of life." Tales of POWs as survivors of totalitarianism, however, could not disguise the fact that there were other returning POWs who had survived not because they had adhered to timeless German values but because they had cooperated with Soviet authorities as antifascist activists or camp officials during captivity. It is estimated that almost half of all German POWs participated in one way or another in antifascist reeducation programs.67 Some of them later assumed positions within the camp administration. Beginning in the late 1940s, returned POWs began to charge some of these political activists and camp officials with having denounced their fellow POWs to Soviet authorities or even with having personally tortured them. In more than one hundred so-called "Kameradenschinder" trials (trials of those who tortured their comrades) during the first half of the 1950s, these activists were sentenced to prison terms from a few months up to fifteen years.68 These trials signaled the legal and symbolic exclusion of former antifascist activists from the "comradeship" and the "community of experience" among returning POWs that was an ideological product of the revaluation of the captivity

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experience. Antifa-activists, to be sure, were excluded not for explicitly political reasons, but rather because of their alleged moral and personal failure in captivity. Observers of the trials generally would not concede that antifascist activists had acted out of genuine political convictions. Instead, their conduct was explained in terms of a "psychology of the Kameradenschinder" that had led them to betray their "comrades" out of the lowest possible motivations.69 Commentators frequently stressed Antifa-activists' earlier allegiance to National Socialism as party functionaries or even SS members. Their smooth transition to Communist activists in the POW camps allegedly suggested their affinity to a "totalitarian" personality structure.70 The antifascist activists' moral weakness thus appeared as the negative foil to the steadfastness of ordinary POWs whose proven immunity against any totalitarian temptation predisposed them to be ideal citizens of a liberal-democratic republic. These trials were also part of a larger moral reconstruction of postwar West German society. By constructing a clear dichotomy between "loyal" and "disloyal," between "comradeship" and "betrayal," the trials sought to give new meanings to these moral categories that had become highly questionable as a result of their uses for the justification of National Socialist crimes.71 The trials also addressed the more general problem of individual moral and legal responsibility under totalitarian conditions, which also figured prominently in later NS trials. Some of the Antifa-activists employed defenses similar to those used by National Socialists during their trials. They argued, for example, that they had been pressured into collaboration with Soviet authorities or that they had only collaborated in order to protect other German POWs. 72 VdH representatives who were called as experts on conditions in the camps asserted, however, that any voluntary antifascist activity implied the possibility of incriminating other POWs and could thus not be excused with reference to repression or force.73 This rather uncompromising attitude toward antifascist activists thus stood in marked contrast to the VdH's persistent efforts on behalf of a general amnesty for German war criminals imprisoned by the Western Allies.74 While the legal prosecution of Nazi crimes abated during the first half of the 1950s, these trials indicated that in the early Federal Republic, collaboration with the foreign Soviet dictatorship, not with the homegrown Nazi dictatorship, appeared as the truly pathological behavior.75 The trials also clearly served an important function as political propaganda in the context of the Cold War. By prosecuting former antifascist activists, the trials pathologized and criminalized precisely those returning POWs who were received as ideal, newly converted antifascist citizens in East Germany.76 The trials thus sought to expose not just "pathetic torturers" but also "an entire system that used them as instruments to achieve its goals."77 This potentially negative propagandistic impact of the trials was also recognized by the leadership of the East German Socialist Unity party (SED). The SED tried to intervene in the Soviet Union's decision to release the last German POWs in 1955 partly because it was concerned that their repatriation might lead to new trials against former antifascist activists in West Germany.78 Similarly, the West German Foreign Office indirectly con-

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firmed the political significance of the Kameradenschinder trials when it tried to stop the prosecution of two former POWs who had served as camp functionaries in a Yugoslavian POW camp because it threatened to damage diplomatic relations with the only non-Stalinist country in Eastern Europe.79 The Kameradenschinder trials thus indicated how East and West German confrontations with the POW experience became increasingly entangled in the larger Cold War confrontation between East and West during the 1950s.80 The transformation of returning POWs from victims into survivors and the concurrent exclusion of antifascist activists through the Kameradenschinder trials were part of the larger project of reconstructing West German national identity in the aftermath of total war and total defeat. This universalization and appropriation of the primarily male POW experience for the nation represented a complement and a corrective to the universalization of female experiences during the early postwar period.81 Yet unlike the rather static interpretations of the female experience, the interpretation of the male POW experience was dynamic and underwent a crucial shift from the late 1940s to the early 1950s. The shift in emphasis from POWs as victims to POWs as survivors of totalitarianism significantly influenced the reconstruction of gender relations in West Germany and crucially shaped negotiations of men's place in postwar society. It therefore did not only reflect returning POWs' moral integration into postwar society, but also promoted their social and sexual integration into the workplace and the family. During the occupation period, returning POWs' right to return to their old workplace was not universally insured in all three Western zones.82 Even where POWs had the right to return to their old jobs, these jobs often no longer existed as a result of Allied bombardment or postwar dismantling of industry.83 With a growing demand for jobs after the 1948 currency reform and concurrent mass repatriations of returning POWs from the Soviet Union, however, German employment officials increasingly engineered the replacement of working women with returning POWs, particularly in typically "male" industries such as construction and in the public sector.84 These informal policies were formally codified in the 1950 "Returned POW Law" (Heimkehrergesetz), which provided a legal guarantee to returning POWs to be rehired in their old jobs and granted those POWs who had returned after 1 January 1948 the same preferential treatment in finding new employment that the war-disabled or the recognized "victims of fascism" enjoyed.85 An increasingly sex-segregated as well as expanding labor market thus ensured a relatively smooth absorption of returning POWs into the world of work.86 Besides their integration into the workplace, the restoration of returning POWs' position within the reproductive sphere of the family appeared to be another essential component of their transformation into postwar citizens. Given the central significance of the reconstruction of the family for the larger task of rebuilding postwar society, West German responses to returning POWs perceived them primarily as actual and potential fathers and husbands. Returning POWs were supposed to rectify the perceived gender imbalance in postwar society by transform-

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ing "incomplete" into "complete" families. In addition, their proven moral strength as survivors of totalitarianism also uniquely predisposed them to restore a moral order to families that had allegedly been undermined as a result of the upheavals during the war and in the postwar period. A host of prescriptive literature therefore suggested to women how they should retreat from the strengthened positions within families that they had gained during the war and the immediate postwar period for the benefit of their returning men.88 The moral revaluation of the captivity experience thus directly influenced the conservative family ideology of the 1950s and, at least in theory, fostered the re-creation of men's authority over women. Inextricably intertwined with the restoration of returnees' position as fathers and husbands within reconstructed families was their heterosexual stabilization. Just as the POWs' desexualization in captivity had constituted an important aspect of their victimization, their resexualization became crucial to their transformation into postwar citizens. The close links between the reconstruction of the social and the sexual order in postwar West Germany became evident in widespread concerns over the dangerous consequences of returnees' failed resexualization.89 Postwar commentators created a causal connection between returning POWs' failure to channel their sexual drives into a heterosexual direction and their alleged overrepresentation among sex and property crimes.90 This alleged link between the sexual problems of returnees and their inclination toward crime then also aroused the interest of state authorities. In a letter to all district attorneys and judges, the attorney general of Lower Saxony highlighted the diminished criminal responsibility of returnees resulting from the late consequences of dystrophy. In this context, he approvingly cited the case of a returning POW who had committed incest with his twelve-year-old daughter; he was not convicted to a prison term but was instead referred to a hospital in order to cure his dystrophy.91 Aside from uncontrolled heterosexuality, a "lapse into homosexuality" appeared as another, equally pathological consequence of returnees' failed resexualization.92 These concerns over returning POWs' homosexuality were especially voiced after 1948 -49, when nutrition levels had improved in Soviet captivity and the POWs had regained their sexual energy but were still confined to an exclusively male environment in the camps.93 Homosexuality thus appeared as an indicator of social disorder or of an extreme crisis situation such as Soviet captivity and was also frequently associated with totalitarian political convictions.94 The restoration of a controlled heterosexuality to returning POWs was therefore crucially linked to their transformation into survivors of totalitarianism and hence into ideal liberal-democratic citizens. The focus on returnees' reproductive functions as fathers and husbands also shaped the manner in which they were integrated into postwar society. It transplanted the primary locus of their readjustment to a civilian environment from society at large into the families. Unlike after World War I, the return of the soldiers did not trigger public conflicts fueled by violent fantasies.95 The pacification of returning POWs after 1945 was therefore not just based on the "economic mir-

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acle" and the rather generous social policy measures that it provided. It also derived from the "privatization of reconstruction" in postwar West Germany, which reduced the potential for conflict that was inherent in returnees' confrontation with a dramatically changed society by defusing it within many individual families.96 How conflicted returning POWs' readjustment to civilian society actually was became evident, however, because the skyrocketing divorce rates within postwar families were even surpassed among families with returning POWs.97 The normative prescriptions of gender relations therefore stood in marked contrast to the social realities within postwar families in general and families of returning POWs in particular. Yet although the postwar "crisis of the family" affected families of returnees more dramatically than other families, a probably even larger percentage of returning POWs either succeeded in making the necessary adjustments to continue conjugal life or, in the case of unmarried POWs, found a wife over the course of the 1950s.98 Inside the families, the more long-term conflicts seem to have been not so much between the sexes but rather between generations. After a period of crisis and adjustment, husbands and wives were united in their shared experience of overcoming hardship and suffering during the war and the immediate postwar period. For the next generation, however, it was very difficult to relate to these shared experiences of catastrophe of the preceding generation.99 Implicitly, the youth rebellion of the 1950s already challenged the ideals of masculine citizenship that were associated with returning POWs as survivors of totalitarianism.100 A politicized student generation during the 1960s explicitly attacked these ideals. The 1968ers saw their fathers' generation no longer as survivors of totalitarianism but rather exclusively as "perpetrators of fascism," or even in the words of Gudrun Ensslin, one of the founding members of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof group, as the "generation of Auschwitz."101 While the conflicts over the postwar readjustment of returning soldiers had thus been largely contained inside the families during the 1950s, the student revolt of the 1960s transported these conflicts back into society. The ideals of masculine citizenship that emerged from West German responses to returning POWs were therefore almost immediately challenged again, implicitly during the 1950s and explicitly during the 1960s. Still, they represented a significant departure from preceding ideals of masculinity. Unlike the militarized and overtly aggressive masculinities of the Nazi period, the emphasis on returning POWs as fathers and husbands highlighted their identity as civilians. West German responses to returning POWs thus signaled a significant break with a thirtyyear process of militarization during which male identities had primarily rested on their functions as soldiers.102 Postwar ideals of masculinity, to be sure, also differed from the utterly destroyed masculinities of the immediate postwar period that had been associated with POWs as victims. The revaluation of their collective experience provided returning POWs with new bases of moral authority within postwar society as well as within the families. These tamed masculinities then corresponded precisely to the tamed militarism of the new West German army and its

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ideal soldier as the "citizen in uniform." Unlike the victimized POW, the new German man embodied by the survivor of totalitarianism would be capable of taking up arms again. Yet he would do so not out of a sense of racial superiority or imperialist dreams of conquering "living space" in the East but rather in order to defend his family and a democratic order against a perceived totalitarian threat from behind the "Iron Curtain."103 The "remasculinization" of West Germany therefore did not represent a mere restoration but rather a recasting of masculinities.104 It thus reflected the broader recasting of West German society, politics, and culture that remained deeply embedded in German traditions yet also differed significantly from a mere restoration of the old order.105 Throughout the first postwar decade, returning POWs from the Soviet Union brought back to West German society the experiences of warfare on the Eastern front and of Soviet captivity as one of its consequences. Their reception and treatment demonstrated, however, that West Germans sought to confront the consequences of Nazi ideological warfare within a distinctly de-ideologized and depoliticized framework. After the immediate postwar period, the integration of returning POWs into West German society was never defined as an explicitly political problem that would imply a reckoning with political responsibilities and individual guilt. The perception of POWs as victims as well as their transformation into survivors was based on moral, religious, psychological, or sexual categories; it was never based on political categories. While the perception of returning POWs as morally inferior victims still echoed the specificity of the war on the Eastern front, their transformation into survivors increasingly removed captivity in the Soviet Union from this specific historical context and portrayed it as a paradigmatic moral and spiritual regeneration. These depoliticized West German responses to returning POWs, to be sure, served important political functions.106 They allowed West Germans to distinguish themselves from the parallel East German reception of returning POWs, which focused almost exclusively on the POWs' alleged political transformation in Soviet captivity.107 At the same time, these depoliticized responses to returning POWs both reflected and promoted the integration of West Germany into the Western alliance. Depictions of returning POWs as both victims and survivors fit neatly into the Western antitotalitarian consensus and the moralizing and psychologizing West German response to returning POWs also underlined the significance that the West assigned to the reconstruction of the individual personality in the aftermath of the totalitarian experience. The returning POW as survivor thus also represented a posttotalitarian, liberal notion of the individual that stood in clear contrast to the collectivist ideal of both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. This transformation of returning POWs into productive and reproductive citizens repressed, however, their earlier destructive function as soldiers of an ideological war. While these different functions were united in the collective biography of returning POWs, they became increasingly separated in their perception by postwar West German society.

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Figure 2.4: Movie poster, Die Glocke von Friedland. The experience of returning POWs was frequently portrayed as a moral counterweight to increasing American influences in postwar West Germany. This 1957 advertisement of a documentary film on the experience of POWs after their return to West Germany contrasts the figure of the returned POW with rock 'n' roll and jazz as icons of American popular culture. Courtesy of the Verband der Heimkehrer, Bonn.

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NOTES For their generous funding of the research and writing of this essay, I am grateful to Brown University, the Watson Institute of International Studies, the University of Kiel, and the Institute of European History in Mainz. A version of this essay was presented to the 1997 annual conference of the German Studies Association. For their extremely helpful comments on various drafts of this essay, I would like to thank the commentator of the session, Diethelm Prowe, as well as the following persons: Pertti Ahonen, Volker Berghahn, Carolyn Dean, Gabi Friedman, Robert Moeller, and Karine Ranee. 1. This figure appears in the Statistisches Bundesamt, Fachserie A, Bevolkerung und Kultur, Volkszahlung vom 6. Juni 1961, Vorbericht 8, Heimgekehrte Kriegsgefangene, Zivilinternierte und Zivilverschleppte (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1961), 8. The actual number of returnees was slightly higher because this registration was based on the 1961 census and thus did not include former POWs who had died or who had left West Germany after their return. 2. On German soldiers on the Eastern front as perpetrators, see especially Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995). With the opening of Russian archives, an archivally based history of captivity in the Soviet Union is emerging; see Aleksandr E. Epifanow, Die Tragodie der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in Stalingrad von 1942 bis 1956 nach russischen Archivunterlagen (Osnabriick: Zeller Verlag, 1996). 3. Those POWs who had been residents of former German territories in Eastern Europe could not return to their homeland at all and encountered a completely new postwar environment. 4. This essay does not focus on the experience of returning POWs themselves. On the POWs' own homecoming experiences, see chapter 4 of my Ph.D. dissertation, "The Protracted War: Returning POWs and the Making of East and West German Citizens, 1945-1955" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2000). On West German responses to returning POWs in general, see Arthur L. Smith, Heimkehr aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Die Entlassung der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen (Stuttgart: DVA, 1985); Albrecht Lehmann, Gefangenschaft und Heimkehr (Munich: Beck, 1986); Peter Steinbach, "Zur Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in der Sowjetunion im Zweiten Weltkrieg und in der Friihgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Ein Beitrag zum Problem historischer Kontinuitat," Zeitgeschichte 17 (1989): 1 — 18. 5. Historians of postwar Germany are only beginning to define the impact of the war on the Eastern front on both postwar societies as a central theme of inquiry; see Klaus Naumann, "Nachkrieg: Vernichtungskrieg, Wehrmacht, und Militar in der deutschen Wahrnehmung nach 1945," Mittelweg 367 (1997): 11-26. 6. My usage of the concept of "totalitarianism" derives from Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), as opposed to the social-scientific definition in Carl Friedrich and Zbiginiew Brezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York: Praeger 1956); see also Abbot Gleason, The Concept of Totalitarianism: An Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 7. My notion of citizenship here is a cultural rather than a legal one. The "ideal citizen" is a person who is in accordance with the prevailing norms and values of a society. 8. This was the classic thesis of Alexander and Margerete Mitscherlich, Die Unfahigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). 9. On these "selective" West German confrontations with the past, see for the realm of high politics Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfange der Bundesrepublik und die NS Vergangenheit (Munich: Beck, 1996); on industrialists, see S. Jonathan Wiesen, "Big Business, Public Relations, and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1950," Central European History (29) 1996:

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201-26; on female memories of the past, see Elizabeth Heineman, "The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany's 'Crisis Years' and West German National Identity," American Historical Review 101 (1996): 354-96; and on war memories, see Robert Moeller, "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany," American Historical Review 101 (1996): 1008-48. The article by Elizabeth Heineman has been reprinted in this volume with only minor editorial changes. Robert Moeller's article is published in a revised version in this volume. The references for both articles pertain to the original versions in the American Historical Review. 10. Moeller, "War Stories." 11. J. Windhagen to Kardinal Frings, 23 November 1945, Historisches Archiv Erzbistum Koln (hereafter cited as HEK), CRII, 25.19,2. 12. "Grosshessisches Staatsministerium, Minister fur Wiederaufbau und politische Bereinigung, Betrifft: Austausch von Kriegsgefangenen gegen Aktivisten," 29 November 1945; Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv 502/1001; "Unsere Kriegsgefangenen," Der Tagesspiegel 8 January 1946, Archiv des Diakonischen Werkes (hereafter cited as ADW), ZBB 141d. 13. First quotation is from Flugblatt, "Heimkehrer aus dem Osten: Wie helfen wir ihnen?" January 1946, ADW, HGsT, Allg.Slg, C232; second quotation is from Dr. Herman Walz, "Das Problem der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen und der Dienst der Weltchristenheit," Referat auf der Tagung der deutschen Presse bei der evangelischen Akademie in Bad Boll, 20 November 1946, Evangelisches Zentralarchiv (hereafter cited as EZA), 2/519. 14. On the first usage of the term dystrophy, see H. Weiss, "Ernahrungsstorungen, ihre Begleit- und Folgeerscheinungen bei Heimkehrern," Hippokrates 20 (1949): 48-52; on physical symptoms, see Manfred Balderman, "Die Wesen und Beurteilung der Heimkehrerdystrophien und ihre Behandlung," Miinchner Medizinische Wochenschrift 93 (1951): 61-67; on psychological symptoms, see Manfred Balderman, "Die psychischen Grundlagen der Heimkehrerdystrophien und ihre Behandlung," Miinchner Medizinische Wochenschrift 93 (1951): 2187-90. 15. On PTSD, see Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Pamela Bullinger, "The Culture of Survivors: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Memory," History and Memory 10 (1998): 99-132. 16. Arendt, Origins of'Totalitarianism, 441. 17. Ulrich Gries, Abbau der Personlichkeit: Zum Problem der Personlichkeitsverdnderung bei Dystrophie in sowjetischer Gefangenschaft (Munich: Ernst Reinhard Verlag, 1957), 133. 18. Baldermann, "Die psychischen Grundlagen"; Dr. Walter Hemsing, "Die seelische Situation der Kriegsgefangenen und die innere Gesundung der Heimkehrer," EZA 2/640. 19. "Die psychische und physische Situation der Ostheimkehrer. Beobachtungen und Erfahrungen im Heimkehrerhotel Willingen," n.d., EZA 2/259. 20. Among many examples, see Peter Cuno, "Psychologische und psychiatrische Beobachtungen und Erfahrungen aus 29 monatiger Gefangenschaft," Der Nervenarzt 20 (1949): 202-6; H. Dams, "Eigen-Beobachtungen: Unterernahung in russischer Gefangenchaft," Deutsche Medizinische Rundschau 3 (1949): 1277-79; Walter F. Seemann, "Uber Hungerreaktionen von Kriegsgefangenen: Eine psychoanalytische Studie," Psyche 4 (1950): 107-19. 21. Otto Suhren, "Sexuelle Probleme in der Kriegsgefangenschaft," Zeitschriftfur Haut-und Geschlechtskrankheiten 13 (1952): 216-17. 22. Kurt Gauger, Die Dystrophie als psychosomatisches Krankheitsbild: Entstehung, Erscheinungsform, Behandlung, Begutachtung: Medizinische, soziologische und juristische Spdtfolgen (Munich: Urban and Schwarzenberg, 1952).

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23. For an excellent introduction into the literature on trauma and memory, see Paul Lerner and Mark S. Micale, "Trauma, Psychiatry and History: A Conceptual and Historiographical Introduction," in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 18701930, ed. Paul Lerner and Mark Micale (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) as well as the literature cited in note 15. 24. See Jens Lachmann and Gunnar Stollberg, The Social Construction ofIllness: Illness and Medical Knowledge in Past and Present (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992). 25. On images of the "Russians" during the Third Reich, see Wolfram Wette, "Das RuBlandbild in der NS Propaganda," in Hans Erich-Volkmann, ed., Das Rufilandbild im Dritten Reich (Cologne: Bohlau, 1994), 55-78, and Jiirgen Forster, "Zum RuBlandbild der Militars, 19411945," in ibid., 141-63. 26. See Kurt Gauger, "Psychotherapie und politische Weltanschauung," in George Mosse, ed., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset, 1966), 215-17. On Gauger's biography, see Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 121—27, quotation on 126. Another example of these continuities was a medical doctor, Prof. Ernst G. Schenk, who returned from Soviet captivity in 1955 and subsequently edited a multivolume study on consequences of "life under extreme conditions" in Soviet captivity. Before 1945, Schenk was "food inspector" of the SS and thus partly responsible for the food situation in concentration camps. He was tried for having been involved in food experiments with concentration camp inmates, but he was acquitted in 1968; on Schenk, see Ernst Klee, Auschwitz, die NS Medizin und ihre Opfer (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1997), 179-89. 27. The journals I have consulted include Medizinsche Klinik, Miinchner Medizinische Wochenschrift, Deutsche Medizinische Rundschau, Hippokrates, Der Nervenarzt, Psyche, Psychologische Rundschau. 28. For an example of a rejection of a "pathology of the returning POW," see Willi Schmitz, "Kriegsgefangenschaft und Heimkehr in ihren Beziehungen zu psychischen Krankheitsbildern," Der Nervenarzt 20 (1949): 303-11; for other examples of a pathologizing treatment, see Hans Malten, "Heimkehrer," Medizinische Klinik 41 (1946): 593-600; and H. Kilian, "Zur Psychopathologie der Heimkehrer," Deutsche Medizinische Rundschau 3 (1949): 1277-79. 29. EKD an Leitungen der deutschen evangelischen Landeskirchen in Westdeutschland, 4 November 1953, EZA 4/447. 30. These studies were published in Bundesministerium fur Arbeit und Sozialordnung, ed., Die Dystrophie: Spatfolgen und Dauerschaden (Stuttgart: Georg Thieme Verlag, 1958). 31. On shell shock, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture (London: Virago Press, 1987), 167-94; and on Germany, see the excellent dissertation by Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Neurosis, and German Mental Medicine (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1996). 32. On heroic notions of the soldier in both world wars, see Omer Bartov, "Men and the Mass: Reality and the Heroic Image in War," in idem, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15-32. During the last years of the war, this ideal was already tempered by a more defensive image of the suffering soldier who sacrificed his life for the defense of "Europe" against bolshevism; see Sabine Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden: Nationalsozialistische Mythen, Riten, und Symbole 1923 bis 1945 (Cologne: SH Verlag, 1996), 533-92. 33. This list of symptoms is provided by Lerner, "Hysterical Men," 2. 34. Dystrophy diagnoses included the state of "apathy," the "extinction of the emotive capacities of body and soul" that Michael Geyer has described as a "paradigmatic reaction to mass death in the Second World War"; Michael Geyer, "Das Stigma der Gewalt und das Problem der

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nationalen Identitat," in Chrisian Jansen et al., eds., Von derAufgabe der Freiheit: Festschriftfur Hans Mommsen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 673-98, quotation on 681. 35. For a brief analysis of these differences, see Lutz Niethammer, "Alliierte Internierungslager in Deutschland: Vergleich und offene Fragen," in Jansen et al., eds., Von derAufgabe der Freiheit, 472-73, 485-92. 36. Hans Malten, "Heimkehrer," Medizinische Klink 41 (1946): 593-600, quotation on 593. 37. Kurt Gauger, "Die Dystrophie als Gesamterkrankung," in Tonband Protokoll der Referate des ersten Arztelcongresses fur Pathologie, Therapie, und Begutachtung der Kriegsgefangenenkrankheiten in Bonn am 17.10.1953, Archiv des "Verbandes der Heimkehrer" (cited hereafter as VdH Archive), 11-20, quotation on 15. Significantly, Gauger did not grant the same severe consequences to a German political prisoner who was interned in a concentration camp in Germany, 18-19. 38. Dr. med Gerhard Schreiber, "Zur Frage der Dauerschaden nach Dystrophie," in Bundesministerium fur Arbeit und Sozialordnung, ed., Die Dystrophie, 139. Schreiber responded to the study by Max Michel, Gesundheitsschdden durch Verfolgung und Gefangenschaft und ihre Spdtfolgen (Frankfurt am Main: Roderberg, 1955); Michel had emphasized the considerable differences between concentration and POW camps. 39. Niethammer, "Alliierte Internierungslager," 477-78. 40. Given the high humber of SS men among late returnees, the consequences of this amnesty deserve further study; see "Gesetz iiber die Anwendung des Befreiungsgesetzes auf Heimkehrer," Amtsblatt des Hessischen Ministeriums fiir politische Befreiung, 21 April 1948, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (hereafter cited as BAK), B150/336 a; Smith, Heimkehr, 127-32. This amnesty did not apply to those returning POWs who were rated in category I or II ("major offender" or "offender"), which was extremely rare anyway. 41. On provision and passage of the law, see James Diehl, The Thanks of the Fatherland: German Veterans after World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 10940. Medical doctors responsible for certifying returning POWs' psychological problems as "war damages" seem to have been rather sympathetic to their concerns and assured them that "because we were in the war as well, everything is being done on our part to help the comrades to get their rights"; Dr. med. Keller vom Landesversorgungsamt Wiesbaden, in Kriegsgefangenenkrankheiten, 97, VdH Archive. 42. Diehl, Thanks of the Fatherland, 171-74. See the cases of SS Sturmmann Erich G. und SS Hauptscharfiihrer Karl Friedrich S., who received compensations of 1440 DM and 1500 DM, respectively, Landesarchiv Berlin (hereafter LAB), Rep. 12, Acc.2992, Nr.361. 43. Frau R., Hildesheim an Herr, Dkp. Miiller, 2 September 1947, HEK CRII, 29.19,8. 44. Moeller, "War Stories," 1019-21; on antibolshevism during the last years of the war, see Marlies Steinert, Hitlers Krieg und die Deutschen: Stimmung und Haltung der deutschen Bevolkerung im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Diisseldorf: Econ, 1970), 592-93; and Behrenbeck, Der Kult, 533-606. 45. Bundesminister der Vertriebenen an EKD, 5 October 1950, EZA 4/476; "Allgemeine Informationen, Anweisungen und Empfehungen zur Kriegsgefangenengedenkwoche 1952, Praktische Vorschlage zur Ausgestaltung einer Kriegsgefangenengedenkwoche," EZA 2/84/6453/10. 46. Aufzeichnungen von Triitzscheler, Politisches Archiv, Auswartiges Amt (hereafter cited asPAA), B 10/2/1977. 47. John L. Morton, "Sie sind nicht vergessen: Die Kriegsgefangenenfrage vor den Vereinten Nationen," Hamburger Echo, 2 September 1950, Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (hereafter cited as ASD), FES, 044, "Kriegsgefangene" 1950, Box 1477; see also Moeller, "War Stories," 1023. 48. For links between demands for release of POWs in the East and war criminals interned

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by the Western Allies, see the speech by Theodor Heuss, "Das Menschliche des Kriegsgefangenen Problems: Rundfunkansprache des Bundesprasidenten zur Woche der Kriegsgefangenen," Neue Zeitung, 20 October 1952, 5, ASD/FES, 044 "Kriegsgefangenenfragen," 1951-52; on the "war criminals" issue in general, see Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, 133-306; on the significance of Western integration for dealing with the German past, see Ulrich Brochhagen, Nach Ntirnberg: Vergangenheitsbewaltigung und Westintegration in der Ara Adenauer (Hamburg: Junius, 1995). 49. "Altersaufbau der Kriegsgefangenen und VermiBten in der U.S. Zone," EZA 2/640. According to this statistic, close to 80 percent of POWs and MIAs were between 20 and 40 years old; Helmut Bader, "Der noch nicht zuriickgekehrte Heimkehrer," Neubau 5 (1950): 183-89. 50. See Gerd Sedlmayer, "Wandlungen im Krankheitsbild der Ostheimkehrer," Medizinische Klinik AA (1949): 1277-79. 51. "Der Heimkehrer fragt—was antwortet die Kirche?" EZA 2/532. 52. "GruGwort an die Heimkehrer," hrsg. vom Evangelischen Hilfswerk, EZA 2/600. 53. Caritas Kriegsgefangenenhilfe, "Zur Religios-Geistgen Lage unserer Kriegsgefangenen," HEK, CR II, 29.19,8; Gerhard Krause, "Deus semper major: Bericht eines Spatheimkehrers," Zeitwende 27 (1956): 145- 49. 54. Caritasverband Kriegsgefangenenhilfe an die Caritasverbande der deutschen Erzdiozesen, June 1947, HEK, CR II, 25.19,11; Lehman, Gefangenschaft und Heimkehr, 112, also emphasizes the POWs' low religiosity. 55. See, for example, Christoph Probst aus Lager Minsk an "Herrn General" in Celle, 21 July 1946, EZA 2/527; Anton Georgen an Kardinal Frings, 6 January 1949, HEK, CR II, 25.19,10; Rudolf Minz an Kardinal Frings, 23 March 1948, HEK CR II, 25.19,7. 56. "Uber die geistig religiose Lage in Deutschland," n.d. HEK, CR II, 25.18,8. 57. "Niederschrift iiber die Tagung 'Kirche und Heimkehrer' in der britischen Zone am 1 September 1948," EZA 2/601. 58. The Catholic Caritas Kriegsgefangenenhilfe and the Protestant Evangelisches Hilfswerk were primarily or exclusively concerned with returning POWs; see the documentation in EZA 4/359 and in Archiv des Deutschen Caritasverbandes (DCV), DCV, 372.2.056. 59. Wolfgang Lohr, "Rechristianisierungsvorstellungen im deutschen Katholizismus, 19451948," in Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, ed., Christentum undpolitische Verantwortung: Kirchen im Nachkriegsdeutschland (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1990), 25-41. 60. Walter Hemsing, "Der deutsche Geistesmensch in der Kriegsgefangenschaft: Eine psychologische Untersuchung," Psychologische Rundschau 3 (1952): 291-302. 61. Ludwig Preller, "Die geistige Situation in Deutschland und der Heimkehrer," Vortrag gehalten bei der Tagung iiber Notstande der Heimkehrer auf der Comburg, 12 June 1948, BAK B150/339/1. 62. Diehl, Thanks of the Fatherland, 174-75. 63. "We Admonish" toured through more than 60 cities between 1951 and 1958 and was seen by at least 750,000 visitors; "Aufstellung der Besucherzahlen der Ausstellung 'Wir Mahnen' seit Marz 1951," VdH Archiv, Kulturarbeit 4; the quotation is from "Wegweiser durch die Ausstellung 'Wir Mahnen,'" VdH Archiv. 64. Alfons H. an Adenauer, 23 May 1950, PAA/B10/2/1977. 65. Irmgard Kiihne, "Manner aus dem Feuerofen," Christ und Welt 8 (1955): 7; Ursula Kardoff, "Ihre Sorgen nehmen wir nicht ernst: Heimkehrer berichten von ihren ersten Eindriicken in der Heimat," Christ und Welt 9 (1956): 7; on these representations of POWs in 1955, see Robert Moeller, " 'The Last Soldiers of the Great War' and Tales of Family Reunions in the Federal Republic of Germany," "Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24 (1998): 129-145. 66. Movie poster, Die Glocke von Friedland, VdH Archive; on West German reactions to

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American popular culture in general, see Uta G. Poiger, "Rock 'n' Roll, Female Sexuality, and the Cold War Battles over German Identities," Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 577-616. 67. Lehman, Gefangenschaft und Heimkehr, 49; on reeducation efforts in general, see Arthur L. Smith, The War for the German Mind: Reeducating Hitler's Soldiers (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1996). 68. "Zusammenstellung der im Bundesjustizministerium bekannten Falle rechtskraftiger Verurteilungen von Heimkehrern wegen KameradenmiBhandlungen [1956]," BAK, B 150/7123/2. 69. Valentin Gorges, "Man muB leben: Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie der Kameradenschinder," Deutsche Rundschau 78 (1952): 599-604. 70. Franz Wurm, "Schuld und Niederlage der Antifa," Neues Abendland 1 (1952): 404-14; Hans Stretch an Lager Friedland, 2 November 1949, NHStA, Nds.386, Accl6/83, Nr. 105. 71. On notions of "comradeship" as facilitating participation in mass murder on the Eastern front, see Thomas Kiihne," 'Kameradschaft—das Beste im Leben eines Mannes': Die deutschen Soldaten des Zweiten Weltkrieges in erfahrungs- und geschlechtergeschichtlicher Perspektive," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 504-29. 72. Budesjustizministerium an Bundesministerium fur Vertriebene, Verfahren des Landgerichts in Ravensburg am 23.5.1950 gegen Artur K., BAK, B150/7123; Landgericht Essen, Verfahren gegen Peter G., 28 January-1 December 1952, BAK, B150/7123; Verfahren gegen Arno R, NHSA, Nds. 386, Ace. 16/83, Nr.105. For a fuller discussion of these trials, see the modified German version of this essay; Frank Biess, "Vom Opfer zum Uberlebenden des Totalitarismus: Westdeutsche Reaktionen auf die Riickkehr der Kriegsgefangenen aus der Sowjetunion, 1945-1955," in Kriegsgefangenschaft im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Eine vergleichende Perspektive, eds. Gilnter Bischof and Riidiger Overmans (Ternitz-Pottschach: Verlag Gerhard Holler, 1999), 365-89. 73. Werner KieBling an Herrn Oberstaatsanwalt Verden/Aller, 7 March 1955, VdH Archive Nr. 37, 15/51-33. 74. See, for example, the correspondence of VdH's manager, Werner KieBling, with Werner Best and his assurance of support for a general amnesty and for a "solution of the POW question in the West"; Werner KieBling an Dr. Werner Best, 17 May 1952, VdH Archive, Kriegsgefangenenfragen, Ordner Nr. 4. 75. AdalbertRiickerl,NS-Verbrechen vorGericht: Versuch einer Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (Heidelberg: C. F. Miiller, 1984), 123-39. 76. On the East German reception of returning POWs, see my article '"Pioneers of a New Germany': Returning POWs and the Making of East German Citizens," Central European History 32 (1999): 143-80. 77. "Zehn Jahre Zuchthaus fur Gefangenen-MiBhandlung," Schwabische Landeszeitung, 13 July 1949, AdS, FES 044-1949, Box 1424. 78. Beate Ihme-Tuchel, Die Entlassung der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen im Herbst 1955 im Spiegel der Diskussion zwischen SED und KPdSU," Militargeschichtliche Mitteilungen 54 (1994): 449-65. 79. Von Triitzscheler an Bundesministerium der Justiz, 5 March 1954; Bundesministerium der Justiz an Bayrisches Staatsministerium der Justiz, 5 January 1955; BAK, B 150/7123. 80. Michael Borchard, "Zwischen den Fronten des Kalten Krieges: Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in der Sowjetunion, 1949-1955," in Haus der Geschichte, ed., Kriegsgefangene (Diisseldorf: Droste, 1995), 85-91. 81. Heineman, "The Hour of the Woman," 387; Moeller, "Last Soldiers." 82. Until 1948, British occupation authorities did not grant this right; see "Entrechtete Heimkehrer," Wirtschafts-Zeitung 3 (1948): 2; Fr. Zeitler, "Heimkehrer und alter Arbeitsplatz," Recht und Arbeit 2 (1949): 446-49; Klaus-Jorg Ruhl, Verordnete Unterordnung: Berufstdtige

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Frauen zwischen Wirtschaftswachstum und konservativer Ideologie in der Nachkriegszeit (1945-1963) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994), 117 n.132. 83. Diehl, Thanks of the Fatherland, 67-68. 84. See Ruhl, Verordnete Unterordnung, 116-26, with examples of the replacement of women by returning men in the public transportation sector. 85. "DasneueHeimkehrergesetz,"DerArfoe%eier2(1950): 15-18; on the passage and provisions of the law in general, see Diehl, Thanks of the Fatherland, 101-8. 86. This does not mean, however, that returning POWs did not encounter significant problems at the workplace, partly because many of them needed to work in jobs for which they were underqualified or not qualified at all; on these problems, see Monika Uliczka, Berufsbiographie undFliichtlingsschicksal: VWArbeiter in der Nachkriegszeit (Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1993). 87. On the significance of the family in postwar reconstruction, see Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Woman and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Elizabeth Heineman, "Complete Families, Half Families, No Families at All: Female-Headed Households and the Reconstruction of the Family in the Early Federal Republic," Central European History 29 (1996): 19-61; on perceptions of POWs as fathers and husbands in 1955, see Moeller, "'The Last Soldiers of the Great War.'" 88. Helmut Bader, "Ehekrisen unserer Heimkehrer," Neubau 5 (1950): 51—54; H. Kilian, "Das Wiedereinleben des Heimkehrers in Familie, Ehe und Beruf," and Eberhard Schaetzing, "Die Frau des Heimkehrers," both in H. Biirger-Prinz and H. Giese, eds., Die Sexualitat des Heimkehrers: Vortdge gehalten auf dem 4. Kongress der deutschen Gesellschaft fur Sexualforschung 1956 (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1957), 27-38, 43-50. 89. These concerns were articulated at the 1956 Congress of the German Society for Sexual Research, which was entirely dedicated to the problem of Heimkehrer sexuality. See BiirgerPrinz and Giese, eds., Die Sexualitat des Heimkehrers. 90. Frenzel, "Der Heimkehrer in Straf und Ehescheidungsprozessen," Deutsche Richterzeitung 28 (1950): 232-33; Jochen Gerchow, "Uber die Ursachen sexueller Fehlhaltungen und Straftaten bei ehemaligen Kriegsgefangenen," Deutsche Zeitschrift fur die gerichtliche Medizin 42 (1953): 452-57; Gunther Keller, "Kriegsgefangenschaft und Heimkehr: Kriminalitat und strafrechtliche Behandlung der Heimkehrer" (Ph.D. diss., University of Freiburg, 1953), 23436, arrives at the conclusion that at least in Freiburg, returning POWs were not overrepresented in crime statistics. 91. Der Niedersachsische Minister der Justiz an die Herren Oberlandesgerichtsprasidenten und die Herren Generalstaatsanwalte (Abschrift), 22 June 1950, EZA 2/604. In a similar trial, a psychotherapeutic evaluation attributed the molestation of a young girl by a returned POW in 1950 to the late consequences of dystrophy originating from a six-month internment in a Soviet POW camp five years before the offense in 1945; see Gauger, Die Dystrophie, 194205. 92. Stransky, "Mehrfachdeterminationen der Sexualstorungen bei Heimkehrern," 24. 93. Fifteen to twenty percent of returnees apparently admitted to having engaged in homosexual relationships in the camps; see H. Kilian, "Das Wiedereinleben des Heimkehrers in Familie, Ehe und Beruf," 34; and Moeller, "Last Soldiers." 94. On homosexuality in postwar Germany, see Robert Moeller, "The Homosexual Man Is a 'Man,' the Homosexual Woman Is a 'Woman': Sex, Society, and the Law in Postwar West Germany," Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 (1994): 395-429; on homosexuality and POWs, see Lehmann, Gefangenschaft und Heimkehr, 149—51; on the construction of links between homosexuality and totalitarianism, see Carolyn Dean, Sexuality in Modern Western Culture (New York: Twayne, 1996), 60.

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95. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vols. 1-2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 1989). 96. These measures are discussed in Diehl, Thanks of the Fatherland. This "privatization of reconstruction" forms the central argument of a recent oral history study on the consequences of the war in West Germany. See Vera Neumann, Nicht der Rede Wert: Die Privatisierung der Kriegsfolgen in derfrilhen Bundesrepublik: Lebensgeschichtliche Erinnerungen (Munster: Verlag Westfalisches Dampfboot, 1999). 97. Bericht der Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur Jugend- und Eheberatung in Hannover fur das Geschaftsjahr 1951/52, ADW, CA/W 408 A. The court in Hildesheim reported that every third marriage of returning POWs ended with a divorce. West German divorce rates reached a highpoint of 187.7 per 100,000 residents in 1948 (1939: 89.1) and declined thereafter; see Statistisches Jahrbuch (1952), 45. 98. See the stories of postwar readjustments within families in Sibylle Meyer and Eva Schulze, Von Liebe sprach damals keiner: Familienalltag in der Nachkriesgzeit (Munich: Beck, 1985), 150-68, 206-13. 99. See, for example, the stories provided in Ingeborg Bruns, Als Vater aus dem Krieg heimkehrte: Tochter erinnern sich (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991); Kuhne, "Kameradschaft," 526, also emphasizes generational over gender conflict. 100. See Uta G. Poiger, "Rebels with a Cause? American Popular Culture, the 1956 Youth Riots, and New Conceptions of Masculinity in East and West Germany," in Rainer Pommerin, ed., The American Impact on Postwar Germany (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1995), 9 3 124; see also Kapar Maase's article in this volume. 101. Quoted in Der Spiegel 51, no. 23(1997): 113. 102. Elizabeth Domansky, "Militarization and Reproduction in World War I," in Geoff Eley, ed., Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870—1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 427-63; Moeller, "Last Soldiers." 103. On military reform and the ideal of the "citizen in uniform," see David Clay Large, Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 177-84; Moeller, "Last Soldiers"; on new conceptions of masculinity, see Poiger, "Rebels with a Cause?" 104. Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); on "remasculinization" in Germany, see also Robert G. Moeller, "The Remasculinization of Germany in the 1950s: An Introduction," Signs 24 (1998): 101-6; and idem, "Last Soldiers." 105. See the essay by Volker Berghahn in this volume. 106. On this relationship between "depoliticization" and "repoliticization" in West Germany, see Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 107. On this comparison between East and West Germany, see my dissertation "The Protracted War."

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Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims WEST GERMAN PASTS IN THE 1950s ROBERT

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IN 1959, a decade after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, the philosopher Theodor Adorno sharply criticized West Germans for failing to accept responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism; he took them to task for their inability to "come to terms with the past."1 Adorno's own past no doubt contributed to his fears of the potential for the "continued existence of National Socialism within democracy" (original emphasis). National Socialism had driven him to the United States, a country where he never felt at home, and confronted him with a world of mass murder that brought him to reflect on the meanings of Auschwitz and the accident of his own survival. Through this lens, he critically assessed the processes of remembering and forgetting in the Federal Republic of the 1950s as West Germans sought to move beyond their "most recent history." Fourteen years after the defeat of Germany, Adorno was angry and afraid because of the apparently willful inability of many of his fellow citizens to acknowledge their responsibility for the most devastating war in world history and a racialist campaign to "cleanse" Europe of Jews and other groups considered subhuman. For Adorno, the past that West Germans should "come to terms with" was the past of a terrorist state they had brought to power, the past of Auschwitz and the mass destruction inflicted by Germans on the rest of Europe. Adorno concluded that "the much-cited work of the reprocessing of the past [Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit] has not yet succeeded, and has instead degenerated into its distorted image—empty, cold, forgetting."2 Adorno's judgment has been echoed by countless others who have commented on the silence surrounding the past of National Socialism in the 1950s. Adorno's reflections, however, do not adequately capture how West Germans remembered and processed their "most recent history" (jiingste Vergangenheit) in the first decade and a half after the war's end; they came to terms with the past but not in ways that Adorno prescribed. There were many accounts of Germany's "most recent history" that circulated in the Federal Republic; remembering selectively was not the same as forgetting. Although not in ways that satisfied Adorno, in the early 1950s many West Germans showed a willingness to acknowledge the horrors of what the first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, called the "saddest chapter" in their history.3 They took responsibility for making amends for crimes that had been committed "in the name

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of the German people."4 Defining the "path to Israel"—Adenauer's pursuit of reparations for the state that had become home to many survivors of the German attempt to murder all European Jews—and programs to provide compensation for some others persecuted by the Nazi state established a crucial public policy arena in which West Germans accounted for the crimes of National Socialism.5 In the debates over reparations for Israel, the German past was filled with faceless criminals who acted "in the name of the German people." Pathbreaking work by Norbert Frei has shown how West Germans also explicitly addressed the past of National Socialism and war when they demanded that felons with faces—Nazis charged and sentenced by the Allies for particularly egregious offenses—be granted amnesty. They sought not to avoid or suppress the past but to rectify what they saw as the unduly harsh punishments imposed by the victorious Allies. Frei, Curt Garner, Ulrich Brochhagen, and James Diehl have also detailed West German attempts to rehabilitate and reintegrate former Nazis through legislative measures that transformed them into the victims of misguided postwar Allied denazification efforts, premised on assumptions of "collective guilt" and the equation of membership in the Nazi party with responsibility for the excesses of the Nazi state.6 In other war stories from the late 1940s and 1950s, Germans were not innocent fellow travelers; rather, they had resisted the Nazi regime and provided evidence of another, better Germany even from within the depths of the Third Reich. West German discussions of the meaning and significance of resistance focused not on the opposition of Communists, a legacy claimed by those other Germans across the border in the East, but on the participants in the attempt on Hitler's life on 20 July 1944, and groups with no specific political affiliation like the "White Rose." This version of the last years of the war offered proof that Germans had demonstrated their eagerness to liberate themselves from the Nazi yoke before they were liberated by the Allies.7 This article focuses on still other memories of National Socialism and the war's end that were crucial to the self-definition of the Federal Republic. It examines how stories of the consequences of the war on the Eastern front became parts of public memory in the 1950s. In telling the story of the end of the war in the East, West Germans emphasized the stunning evidence of crimes committed not by Germans against others, but by others against Germans, crimes that, according to some contemporary accounts, were comparable to the crimes of Germans against the Jews. The most important representatives of German victimhood were the women, men, and children who left or were driven out of Eastern Europe by the Red Army at the war's end and others in German uniform for whom the war ended with captivity in the Soviet Union. There were some 12 million expellees, nearly two-thirds of whom resided in the Federal Republic in 1950. According to contemporary sources, over 3 million German soldiers had spent some time in Soviet hands, and more than a million of them reportedly died in captivity.8 These groups were joined by their common experience of a direct confrontation with the Red Army; they were eyewitnesses to the war on the Eastern front, a front that moved steadily westward in late 1944 and early 1945. About the pasts of these victims, their relatives

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Figure 3.1: In early summer 1943, some 52,000 German soldiers were marched through the streets of Moscow on their way into Soviet prisoner of war camps. According to contemporary estimates, over 3 million German soldiers spent some time in Soviet captivity. Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, 183/E0406/22/9. and loved ones, and the victims next door, most West Germans were anything but "empty, cold, forgetting"; indeed, these were pasts that they recalled with tremendous passion and extraordinary detail. Shifting the focus from what West Germans should have remembered to what they did remember reveals that a past of German suffering was ubiquitous in the 1950s. This article describes how in the first postwar decade the stories of expellees from eastern Germany and Eastern Europe and German POWs imprisoned

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in the Soviet Union were crafted into rhetorics of victimization in the arena of public policy and in the writing of Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history). West Germans collectively mourned the suffering of these groups, and their experiences became central to one important version of the legacy of the war; their private memories structured public memory, making stories of Communist brutality and the loss of the "German East" crucial parts of the history of the Federal Republic. Focusing on German suffering also made it possible to talk about the Third Reich's end without assessing responsibility for its origins, to tell an abbreviated story of National Socialism in which all Germans were ultimately victims of a war that Hitler started but everyone lost. In the 1950s, this was the past that most West Germans chose to remember. Competing pasts of the victims of World War II pervaded public policy debates in the early history of the Federal Republic. When Konrad Adenauer first addressed the newly elected parliament in September 1949, the chancellor expressed his concern about nascent antisemitic tendencies in West Germany and his sense of profound disbelief that "after all that has happened in our time, there should still be people in Germany who persecute or hate Jews because they are Jews." Just as troubling to Adenauer, however, was another past that lived on in the present, a past in which others were persecuted because they were German. Heading the list were "1.5 to 2 million German prisoners of war," whose whereabouts were unknown but who were most likely in the Soviet Union or elsewhere in Eastern Europe; expellees, "whose deaths number in the millions"; and other ethnic Germans still held against their will by Eastern European Communist governments. Honoring the dead, bringing home the POWs and others unjustly held, and meeting the needs of all German victims of the war were essential parts of a just social contract in a new democratic republic.9 The Bundestag, the West German parliament, addressed these multiple pasts in its first electoral period, the years 1949-53. In 1949 some critics were skeptical that Adenauer's government would adequately meet the obligations of Germans to compensate those persecuted by the National Socialist regime. However, by the time the Bundestag ratified a treaty providing for the payment of reparations to Israel almost four years later, there was no question that the Christian Democratic chancellor was politically committed to reconciliation with Israel. In September 1951, Adenauer announced officially that "the Federal Government and with it the great majority of the German people are aware of the immeasurable suffering that was brought upon the Jews in Germany and the occupied territories during the time of National Socialism.... Unspeakable crimes were committed in the name of the German people, and these oblige [us] to make moral and material amends [Wiedergutmachung]."10 Adenauer's passive construction carefully differentiated between guilt and responsibility; crimes had been committed, but no criminals were named. Nonetheless, the chancellor left no doubt that West Germans must squarely confront the claims of Jewish victims. West Germany's official overture to Israel met considerable domestic opposition

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from those who questioned the need for payments to persecuted Jews. Adenauer faced not only hostile public opinion but the resolute resistance of leading members of his own party, who claimed that reparations exceeded the means of an impoverished postwar Germany and that compensation for Jewish victims would spark resentment among Germans and a resurgence of antisemitism.11 The chancellor's motives in overcoming these impediments to the reparations treaty and pushing through approval by the cabinet and ratification by the Bundestag in March 1953 are subject to more than one interpretation. There is much evidence that Adenauer was ultimately driven by his desire to convince the Western Allies that Germany would confront its moral obligations for the past in order to gain full acceptance as an equal partner in the postwar Western alliance. Negotiations with Israel ran parallel to deliberations over West German integration into a Western European defense alliance; they tied Germans' "moral rearmament" to the military rearmament of the West German state. In his memoirs and other accounts, Adenauer's actions expressed firmly held convictions, not a response to Allied expectations and pressure. Ultimately, whatever the balance between sincerely held moral beliefs and political realism, it is difficult to imagine that without the chancellor's forceful intervention the Bundestag would have ratified the reparations agreement with Israel.12 The West German state also acknowledged the "saddest chapter" in its history by addressing the demands for compensation from others persecuted by the Nazis and still resident in the Federal Republic. In the same year that it ratified the treaty with Israel, the Bundestag approved legislation that built on state initiatives, particularly in the U.S. zone of occupation, and established a national framework to address individual claims from these other victims of the Nazis. Constantin Goschler analyzes and documents in detail the West German attempts to "make good" (Wiedergutmachung) the harm done by National Socialism and shows the clear limits most West Germans placed on what constituted "racial, religious, or political" persecution during the Third Reich. Victims not forgotten but explicitly excluded from these categories included gay men, subjects of forced sterilization, foreign slave workers, violators of racist laws against sexual relations between "Aryans" and "non-Aryans," and for the most part Sinti and Roma (so-called "Gypsies").13 These exclusions revealed a West German tendency to equate racial persecution exclusively with antisemitism and to collapse National Socialist atrocities into the mass extermination of the Jews.14 Even with these limitations, however, the law to provide compensation to the victims of Nazi crimes encountered substantial criticism from many West German citizens and state officials.15 Again, it was Adenauer's intervention and the solid support of opposition Social Democrats that provided the majority sufficient to override popular and official resistance to the compensation scheme. Public discussion of restitution for victims of National Socialism and reparations for Israel revealed how divided West Germans remained over their responsibility for the atrocities of the Third Reich. The treaty with Israel and the establishment of an institutional framework to acknowledge the loss and suffering of other victims of "racial, religious, or political" persecution represented the explicit

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admission, however, that the Nazi state had committed crimes "in the name of the German people." Particularly in the first four years of the Federal Republic, the Bundestag and Adenauer did not entirely avoid or repress this part of the past. Acknowledgment of Jewish victims of National Socialist crimes was directed at an international audience, but it also made it easier for the Bonn government to acknowledge German victims of the Red Army and postwar Communism. In the process, the fates of these two victim groups were frequently linked. On the agenda of the same session in which Bundestag delegates debated the final form of the treaty with Israel were initiatives to address the problems of those fleeing from the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany and those expelled from Eastern Europe.16 The ghosts of victims, some Jewish, some German, often seemed to hover in the halls of the Bundestag, competing for recognition. Victims were also joined together under the word millions, a term associated with Jewish victims of National Socialism, prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, and expellees.17 In debates over compensation for veterans returning from prisoner-of-war camps, Margarete Hiitter, a staff member of the German Office for Peace (Deutsches Biiro fiir Friedensfragen) could group together the prisoner of war, "the representative of the sacrifice brought by all Germans," with the "victim of the concentration camp." These groups were the "most tragic figures of the politics of the Third Reich," both victims of Hitler's Germany.18 The rhetoric of German victimization and Soviet barbarism could be traced back to the last years of the war.19 New in the postwar years, however, was the explicit equation of the suffering of German victims and victims of Germans. Jews and Germans had experienced the same forms of persecution argued Adenauer's minister of transportation, Hans-Christoph Seebohm, a member of the German party (Deutsche Partei), because "the methods that were used by the National Socialist leaders against the Jews and that we most vehemently condemn are on a par with the methods that were used against the German expellees."20 German expellees became another category of victims driven from their historic homelands because of their "ethnicity" (Volkszugehorigkeit); Jews persecuted by Germans were one group of victims among others.21 If compensation for Jewish victims was part of a West German strategy to gain favor with the Western Allies, measures to meet the needs of German victims were not. Indeed the Bundestag discussions of German suffering unified all political parties in sharp criticism of the Western forces of postwar occupation, which were depicted as doing nothing to meet the needs of these groups. The British and Americans were taken to task for viewing German losses through the distorted lens of theories of "collective guilt."22 To be sure, in the early 1950s, descriptions of German suffering were more likely to portray the losses inflicted on Germans by the Red Army than cities destroyed by U.S. and British bomber pilots. It is not surprising that in the context of the Cold War, attacking the Soviet Union—past and present—was far easier than recounting the sins of former enemies who were now allies. In some cases, however, criticism of the Soviet Union was also a medium for denouncing the postwar settlement and the Western Allies who had unquestioningly accepted it. West Germans charged that by endorsing the mandatory re-

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moval of millions of Germans from areas in Eastern Europe seized by the Red Army and doing nothing to meet the needs of German victims of the war, the Allies had responded to Nazi injustice with unjust acts of no less consequence,23 leaving Germans "to dish out the soup that the military governments had prepared."24 In a host of federal programs aimed at meeting the needs of "war-damaged" groups, particularly expellees and veterans, and, among them, returning prisoners of war, the West German state set out to "equalize the burdens" of the arbitrary consequences of the war. A host of social-welfare measures sought to mediate the differences between the woman whose husband had come back from the war and the woman whose husband had not, between veterans who were permitted to return immediately after the end of fighting and prisoners of war, between POWs in the Soviet Union and those in the hands of the Western Allies, between POWs whose former homes were now "behind the iron curtain" and those who had lived in western Germany before the war, and between "new citizens" (Neubiirger) driven from their homes in Eastern Europe and West Germans who had suffered no such dramatic displacement.25 Achieving some measure of social justice among those who had suffered little or nothing and those who had lost everything emerged as a key measure of the legitimacy of the West German state.26 In the process of identifying the needs of war veterans and expellees, the West German state also allowed German victims to act for themselves, represent their own interests, and shape policy. After World War I, veterans and others who had suffered most from the war and the economic instability of the early postwar years had perceived themselves to be excluded from parliamentary deliberations of compensation for their losses; their resentment translated into loud attacks on the "Weimar system."27 In the Bonn republic, mass organizations of expellees and veterans quickly emerged as important actors in negotiations over how best to meet their needs. Their interests were also represented in a cabinet-level office, the Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War-Damaged (Bundesministerium fur Vertriebene, Fliichtlinge, und Kriegsgeschadigte), and they spoke from the floor of the Bundestag as members of all major political parties.28 Despite the broad consensus favoring payments to German victims of the war and the expulsion, no victim group received everything it wanted. Finance Minister Fritz Schaffer constantly reminded his colleagues that Germany was a poor nation, barely able to contribute to containing Communism in the present, let alone to pay for Communism's past crimes against expellees and POWs.29 Discontent over a glass half-empty, however, did not lead to massive political opposition to the Bonn government as it had to the Weimar Republic. In part, this was because veterans and expellees, the two most effectively organized groups claiming compensation, had been asked to participate in defining solutions for their own problems and had achieved at least something of what they were after. As James Diehl has convincingly argued in his analysis of those policies aimed specifically at veterans, the West German government also won acceptance for its initiatives to "equalize the burdens" of the war and compensate the "war-damaged" by stressing that it had crafted programs that were singularly German, grounded in the best

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tradition of the German social-welfare system and seen as the essential corrective to punitive policies imposed by the Allies in the years of postwar occupation.30 Defining the just claims and rights to entitlement of some and the moral obligations of others was part of establishing the bases for social solidarity in West Germany. The Germany that committed crimes against others was an aberration; it was succeeded by a Germany that helped to ease German suffering. All major political parties could agree on the version of the legacy of National Socialism that was embodied in Bundestag discussions of the victims of the expulsion and the survivors of Soviet captivity; the suffering of these groups remained outside the realm of political wrangling. The deep divisions between Social Democrats and Adenauer's government were at least momentarily bridged by a shared relationship to the lasting consequences of a common past. For the West German state, acknowledging the pasts of expellees and prisoners of war not only involved assessing material need, it also included ensuring that the testimonies of these groups would become part of West Germany's public memory. In the case of those driven out of Eastern Europe, the Bonn government pledged to preserve the "cultural values" of the expellees by incorporating the history of Germans in Eastern Europe into West German school curricula and establishing a series of research institutes for the scholarly study of the Central European past and present. The state formally acknowledged that it would be essential to educate West Germans about the history of Germans in Eastern and Central Europe, who were now the "new citizens" (Neubiirger) in a democratic republic.31 West Germans were also constantly reminded of the soldiers for whom the war on the Eastern front had been followed by the battle to survive Soviet captivity; those German POWs still in the Soviet Union were never far from public attention. Newspaper stories describing "Graves and Barbed Wire: The Fate of Millions" evoked images of millions of German POWs, not millions of victims of concentration camps.32 Annual days of remembrance for POWs called attention to those Germans for whom the war was not yet over.33 Little more than five years after the war's end, the Federal Republic was also calling on the United Nations to investigate charges of the violation of human rights, not of others by Nazis but of German POWs and deported ethnic Germans by their Soviet captors.34 The state's commitment to creating a detailed record of German loss and suffering was also apparent in its sponsorship of two projects that sought to collect the memories of POWs and expellees as sources for writing the "contemporary history" of the postwar period. A systematic effort to document the "expulsion of the Germans from the East" was formally initiated by the Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War-Damaged shortly after the creation of the office in Adenauer's first government. Its editorial board was made up of eminent professional historians led by Theodor Schieder of the University of Cologne, who had lived and taught in KQnigsberg until the war drove him west in 1944.35 His co-workers included Hans Rothfels, who also had worked in Konigsberg until 1938, when he fled the Nazis, who considered only his Jewish origins, not his Protestant baptism. Rothfels had returned from the United States, where he had spent the war years,

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Figure 3.2: "Our Prisoners of War and the Deportees (civilian prisoners) Accuse." The German prisoner of war in Soviet hands became an important symbol of the postwar Communist brutality against Germans. In the early 1950s, West Germans had to defend themselves against charges of their own crimes against others during World War II, but they also played the role of the accuser, indicting postwar Communist governments that continued to imprison German soldiers and civilians. Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, Plak 5/47/49.

to take a chair at Tubingen. 36 Working on individual volumes was a team that included Werner Conze, the major West German proponent of social history in the 1950s, and a number of youthful assistants, among them Martin Broszat, who later went on to direct the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, who in the 1960s would emerge as the leading advocate of a "historical social science." 37 In eight volumes, including three full-length diaries, the Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa (Documentation of the Expulsion of Germans from East-Central Europe) described the experiences of Germans as they fled before the Red Army advance in 1944 and 1945 and as they left and

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Figure 3.3: "Expellees: Your Misery Is Our Misery." This poster issued by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) represents the kind of direct political appeals that all postwar West German political parties made to victim groups. The use of a female image to symbolize the fate of the expellee also suggests that women and children were overrepresented among those driven out of Eastern Europe at the end of the war. Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, Plak 4/8/27.

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were driven from their homelands in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia and from the eastern parts of Germany that became Poland after the German surrender.38 At the core of the project was a massive collection of some 11,000 eyewitness accounts recorded by expellees themselves, frequently assembled with the cooperation of their interest-group organizations. The editors were aware of the problems inherent in such subjective testimony, but they guaranteed that the fraction of the reports ultimately published had been subjected to painstaking "authentication and verification" and constituted a completely reliable record of the "entire process of the expulsion in [its] historical accuracy."39 The "documents of the expulsion" were, as one review put it, "documents of horror."40 Countless individual reports of terror, rape, plundering, the separation of families, forced deportations, starvation, slave labor, and death combined to give shape to the "mass fate" of Germans in Eastern Europe, the "German tragedy," "contemporary history in documents."41 Even those eyewitnesses who claimed to have been skeptical of the terrifying picture of the Bolshevik painted in Nazi propaganda conceded that they confronted a reality that often exceeded Joseph Goebbels's predictions.42 The federal government complemented the volumes on the expulsion with an extensive collection of testimonies from prisoners of war. Although its work was not completed until the 1970s, the POW project also had its origins in the 1950s and was seen explicitly as an essential continuation of the effort to capture the eyewitness accounts of expellees. Detailed descriptions of the conditions in Soviet camps had been collected since the late 1940s by veterans' associations, the German Red Cross, and church organizations, which had taken the lead in tracing the fates of German POWs. After 1953, much of this documentation was collected by the Bundesarchiv. In 1957 the West German state appointed a "scientific commission" to assemble these eyewitness accounts and other forms of evidence in order to provide a complete "documentation of the fate of German prisoners in the Second World War," an initiative that in the words of one newspaper account would create the opportunity for "Prisoners of War [to] Write Contemporary History."43 The documentation should serve "for the present and future of our nation to secure the suffering of the prisoners, which has already begun to fade from public consciousness," a record that could meet the most demanding criteria of "objectivity" and "exactitude."44 Heading the project was Erich Maschke, a chairholder at the University of Jena under the Nazis, a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union until his release in 1953, and in the 1950s a professor of social and economic history at the University of Heidelberg.45 Maschke and his co-workers ultimately sifted through thousands of written and tape-recorded accounts. Of the twenty-two books published by the project, thirteen described the areas where German POWs had been most numerous, their treatment had been worst, and they had remained imprisoned the longest—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and particularly the Soviet Union, which alone filled eight volumes; the testimonies assembled were more evidence of Communist atrocities in Eastern Europe.46 This emphasis on the East corresponded to the contemporary assessment that the differences in the treatment of

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German POWs by Western Allies and Communists were ones of kind, not degree.47 For POWs, no concerns loomed larger than malnutrition and starvation, and they described the dangerous balancing act of remaining sick enough to avoid forced labor but well enough to avoid death.48 Work rebuilding the Soviet Union was sometimes remembered as a source of pride and accomplishment, but it was more frequently equated with slave labor, as one POW remarked, a form of direct retribution that represented the "payment of reparations."49 Particularly for the period of the late 1940s, reports were filled not only with tallies of death from malnutrition but also with accounts of mass shootings by Red Army troops and Communist partisans and the dumping of the dead into unmarked graves.50 The experiences of POWs in the Soviet Union diverged from those of expellees in important respects. The POW camp was a world without women, a sharp contrast with the westward "treks" of expellees, in which women outnumbered men. In addition, for at least some of the students in the "barbed-wire university," as POWs ironically called the camps, the school term ended only in the mid-1950s, while for most expellees the return "not to home [Heimat] but at least to the Fatherland" was complete by the late 1940s.51 Despite these differences, the accounts of expellees and POWs also provided much evidence of the ways in which they had experienced the end of the same war. As the Red Army moved westward in late 1944, the line between front and home front dissolved. In the words of Margarete Schell, a German actress from Prague and the author of one of the fulllength diaries published by the Schieder project, Germans in Czechoslovakia had lived "a soldier's life . . . only much worse."52 The history of National Socialism and the war that both expellees and POWs told began only at the moment when the Red Army appeared, reaching the outskirts of the village or capturing the soldier. In neither documentation project did the editors elicit testimony about Germany's war of aggression on the Eastern front or German rule in Eastern Europe; both projects recorded and sanctioned silence and selective memory. In both cases as well, victimization by the Red Army followed victimization by benighted, fanatical Nazis who postponed evacuation in the face of the Red flood or insisted on fighting to the bitter end. This was the same history that was told from the floor of the Bundestag in debates over measures to meet the material needs of expellees and returning veterans, a history peopled with innocents in which a handful of zealous Nazis had deluded good Germans. Victims of Germans were not completely absent from these accounts, but when those who testified acknowledged the suffering of Jews at the hands of Germans, it was most frequently in order to establish a measure for the horror of their own experience.53 In some cases, POWs, expellees, and the editors of the documentation projects claimed that what Germans had suffered under Communists was comparable in its horror only to what Jews had suffered under Nazis. History had repeated itself concluded Maria Zatschek, an expellee from Czechoslovakia who remarked, "what a bad comedy all this is: nothing is original, a copy of the Hitler regime, again and again we have to hear: 'Just as you have treated the Jews.' " 5 4 It was this similarity of suffering reflected Wolfgang Schwarz, author of

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the volume on "cultural life" among German POWs in the Soviet Union that made the POWs "brothers of the prisoners in the concentration camps."55 In their assessment of the expulsion from Czechoslovakia, the editors of the documentation expressed similar views. They pointed out that the analogy between German and Jewish victims was unmistakable when Germans took the place of Jews in former Nazi concentration camps: "In some of these camps, particularly Theresienstadt, only the victims had changed: where Jewish prisoners had suffered from the National Socialist system of oppression, Germans were now tortured and maltreated."56 Both POWs and expellees depicted themselves individually and collectively as victims of an ideology no less irrational than National Socialism; like the Nazis, the Soviets had reduced identity to ethnicity, singling out their victims only because they were Germans. The standard of measurement of the sufferings of Germans thus became "the horrible crimes committed against the Jews in Hitler's concentration camps,"57 the goal of the Communists, nothing less than the "cleansing" and "de-Germanization" (Entgermanisierung) of Eastern Europe.58 In Bundestag debates over restitution for victims of the war, Germans and Jews were rhetorically lumped together. In the accounts provided in the documentation projects and in some of the editorial commentary that framed eyewitness stories, the overwhelming similarity of the treatment of all victims and the moral equivalence of their suffering were stated even more explicitly. Some German eyewitnesses could claim to know what Jews had experienced, not because they themselves were guilty of crimes but because what Jews in concentration camps had endured "could not possibly have been worse" than what Germans had suffered at the hands of the Communists.59 There is no way to assess how many West Germans read the testimonies recorded in the documentation projects. The POW project only began publishing its findings in the 1960s, and the final installment was not issued until 1974. One reason for this delay was that by the time all volumes were completed the West German government had become far less intent on sustaining memories of Communist atrocities. In an age of "peaceful coexistence" between East and West, some pasts were best allowed to slumber or to circulate at most in small editions, distributed to research institutes and university libraries.60 The expellee project completed publication by 1961, but its considerable bulk doubtless also limited its accessibility. However, for the tens of thousands of POWs and expellees whose experiences were documented—and the millions more they represented—the invitation to bear witness and the assurance that their memories would be preserved as part of an official chronicle made it easier, as Maschke expressed it, for these German victims to "overcome the destiny of painful and terrifying memories."61 Public recognition and individual catharsis were parts of the same process.62 The federally sponsored publication projects that chronicled the fate of German expellees and POWs also corroborated other accounts of German suffering at the war's end that circulated in West German politics and popular culture in the 1950s. Expellees' and veterans' organizations encouraged their constituents to record their experiences and to publicize the enormity of their suffering; interest-group publications provided a forum in which it was possible to foster group identities.63

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Memories of POWs in the Soviet Union and expellees also resounded in the arena of foreign policy. The record of German loss was cited as evidence in support of demands to revise the postwar settlement that had extended Poland's boundary westward significantly into territory once part of the German Reich.64 The last remaining POWs in the Soviet Union also remained a national preoccupation until Adenauer negotiated their release in September 1955. When the 9,626 POWs began to leave the Soviet Union the next month, West German press accounts used the occasion not only to celebrate these survivors of Communist captivity but to rehearse endlessly the horrors that they had experienced.65 As late as 1967, shortly after Adenauer's death, 75 percent of those questioned in a public opinion survey placed the release of the last POWs from the Soviet Union at the top of the list of the first chancellor's accomplishments.66 Themes of expulsion and the experiences of soldiers on the Eastern front were also the stuff of novels and movies. Between 1951 and 1959, some 19 million viewers saw Griin ist die Heide (The Heath Is Green), a movie that tells the story of a Pomeranian landowner who flees westward at the end of the war, leaving everything behind. Only the generosity of new friends in the Liineburger Heide and the natural beauty of the forest allow him to "forget what I have lost."67 An entire genre of "expellee literature" told similar tales but focused less on the successful integration of expellees into West German society than on the terror they had experienced before reaching their new home.68 Numerous as well were popular novels, memoirs, and movies that described the war on the Eastern front and the long march into Soviet POW camps from the perspective of the common soldier, victimized first by zealous Nazi leaders, then by the Red Army. These were epic dramas of suffering, inner strength, and quiet courage stemming not from ideology but from common decency and tales of adventurous schemes to resist Communism by whatever means possible.69 Such accounts were part of the general tendency in the 1950s to see the returning German veteran as a noble survivor, unjustly branded by the victors as a militaristic criminal; they contributed to a conventional wisdom according to which the Wehrmacht had dutifully carried out orders, scrupulously following the established rules of warfare.70 The same general themes gained credence among West Germany's Western allies, particularly as the United States increased its pressure to see West Germans once again in uniform, essential recruits in the battles of the Cold War.71 The imposing bound volumes from the POW and expellee documentation projects did not circulate nearly as widely as these other accounts in the popular media, but they told the same stories. They sanctioned and substantiated fictionalized tales and individual memoirs, blurring the line between fiction and fact. As one reviewer of the first volumes published by the Schieder project noted, this authorized record should dispel completely whatever skepticism had greeted other dramatic presentations of the experiences of expellees in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The documentation delivered "irrefutable proof of the accuracy of those descriptions" as well.72 The debates over material compensation for Jews and others persecuted by the Nazis made clear that these "racial, political, and religious" victims of National

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Figure 3.4: "We Admonish: The Prisoner of War Camp as Experience and Lesson." This poster advertised a traveling exhibition sponsored by the Association of Returning Veterans in 1953. The image also appeared on a lOPfg stamp issued by the West German government in the same year. It indicates the way in which shaved heads and barbed wire were associated in West German popular consciousness not with victims of Nazi concentration camps but rather with German prisoners of war in Soviet captivity. Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz. Plak 5/47/50.

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Figure 3.5: In September 1955, Konrad Adenauer traveled to Moscow. In return for assuring the Soviets that he would grant them diplomatic recognition, Adenauer received promises that the last remaining German prisoners of war would be released. These returning soldiers were on one of the first transports from the Soviet Union in October 1955. Adenauer's negotiation of the release of the last German prisoners of war was long remembered as one of the most important accomplishments of his tenure as chancellor. Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, 146/85/24/14. Socialism were not forgotten, but they remained faceless and without speech. In Adenauer's cabinet, there was no Ministry for Survivors of Nazi Persecution and Nazi Concentration Camps, intent on acknowledging, ordering, analyzing, and sanctioning the suffering of the victims of Germans. Although a number of memoirs of concentration camp victims were published in Germany in the first two years following the war, by the late 1940s this was increasingly a genre that West German trade publishers avoided.73 To be sure, documentation of the crimes of Germans against others was available, and the trials of leading Nazi war criminals by the Nuremberg Tribunal alone generated a mountain of evidence of German atrocities, a crucial source for key aspects of German "contemporary history." In the 1950s, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich drew on this documentation and other sources to begin writing a critical history of the National Socialist regime. No attempts were made, however, to supplement objective analysis with personal accounts of those persecuted by the Nazi regime. For example, the Schieder documentation offered many descriptions of the crimes committed by Poles and Soviets against Germans in Lodz, but neither the West German state nor West German scholars undertook

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systematic efforts to record Jewish voices that could have told other stories of Germans who until the spring of 1945 called that city Litzmannstadt.74 For the most part, victims of Germans remained objects, not subjects, of their own history, a history never told from their perspective.75 In 1955, Hans Rothfels, a coworker on the expellee documentation project and editor of the Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte (Quarterly Journal of Contemporary History), the most important new postwar German historical periodical, illuminated the "profound paradox" of the war's end by drawing up a balance sheet called "Ten Years After" ("Zehn Jahre danach"). He effectively summarized how competing pasts had become part of the history of the Federal Republic. Rothfels recalled both the "horrible things that took place in occupied areas, particularly in the East" and what was done "to real and imagined opponents in concentration camps," even as he described in far greater detail the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe and the last-gasp attempts of the German army and navy to hold off the Red Army. The way to remember May 1945, Rothfels concluded, was with an "hour of commemoration" for all victims, including those killed by Germans as well as those Germans "murdered after the end of hostilities, those who drowned or perished in the snow as they attempted to flee, who froze or starved, who did not survive the forced marches or forced labor camps [Zwangslager] . .. and also those women, who after the deepest humiliation took their own lives, or their husbands, who resisted this disgrace," an unambiguous reminder of the literal rapes that heralded the symbolic rape of eastern Germany and Eastern Europe by the Red Army. Mourning these German victims should not, Rothfels warned, diminish memories of the suffering of others. A complete tally could, however, only be one that captured "reality in its horrifying totality."76 West Germans were by no means silent about the "horrifying totality" of the past in the first decade after the end of the war, but their memories were selective. They had less to say about the parts of that totality in which some Germans were perpetrators than about the parts that encompassed their own experiences as victims. With this past—the past of what they had lost—they literally filled volumes. Remembering the end of the war and memorializing their own suffering was part of the process by which West Germans came to terms with one set of pasts and created the bases on which it was possible to found the postwar order. The Basic Law (Grundgesetz), adopted in 1949, the constitutional basis for the Federal Republic of Germany, defined the institutions that would shape a democratic political system in those parts of Germany occupied in 1945 by the French, British, and Americans. The formal act of founding the Federal Republic did not, however, establish collective identities that could bind West Germans together socially and politically, creating an "imagined community," the phrase used by Benedict Anderson to describe the "deep horizontal comradeship" that forms the basis for the social and political solidarity that can unify a nation. Anderson analyzes cases in which an "imagined community" was largely shaped through an ideology of nationalism.77 The problem for Germans after 1945 was not how to create a conception

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of the nation, but rather how to establish a sense of collectivity that did not draw on a nationalist rhetoric contaminated by its association with National Socialism. A revolution from above, imposed by the victorious Allies, provided no adequate framework, and in the Western zones of occupation, Allied programs of democratic reeducation were deeply resented by most Germans and largely abandoned by the late 1940s as the military powers that had crushed the Third Reich changed course and sought to accelerate the conversion of erstwhile enemies into allies in the battles of the Cold War. The de facto division of Germany and the Federal Republic's forced march into the Cold War Western alliance solidified geographic boundaries determined by the victors, but in the 1950s, it was left to Germans, West and East, to create themselves. An "imagined community" in the Federal Republic was shaped in part by stories of the "economic miracle" (Wirtschaftswunder), West Germany's rapid exit from devastation to prosperity. Currency reform in 1948 marked the end of the "war and postwar era" (Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit) that began in 1943 with the German defeat at Stalingrad and the intensified bombing of German cities and ended five years later when the money they carried in their wallets, the goods offered in their shops, and the economic systems that structured their lives distinguished Germans in East and West.78 In the next chapter of this tale of West Germany's emergence from the rubble, American loans and the Marshall Plan sparked European economic recovery, but, so the story goes, it was ultimately uniquely German determination, hard work, and Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard's model of a "social market economy" that permitted the Federal Republic to bask so quickly in the warm glow of economic prosperity.79 Writing in 1967 and echoing many of Adorno's concerns about the West German unwillingness to confront the Nazi past, psychologists Alexander and Margarate Mitscherlich saw in selfcongratulatory accounts of postwar prosperity and economic recovery a clear indication of West Germans' "inability to mourn" their complicity in National Socialism. Leaving behind this difficult history was made possible by a massive self-investment in the "expansion and modernization of our industrial potential right down to the kitchen utensils." In the psychic economy that the Mitscherlichs described, creating for the future was a way to avoid the past.80 Neither Adorno nor the Mitscherlichs fully understood that in the 1950s, selective memories of the war's end also shaped the basis on which a new West Germany was erected. Shared values in the Federal Republic were not only created by celebrations of present prosperity and predictions of uninterrupted economic growth. One of the most powerful integrative myths of the 1950s emphasized not German well-being but German suffering; it stressed that Germany was a nation of victims, an "imagined community" defined by the lasting consequences of the devastation of the Second World War. Remembering what had been lost was of great significance for assessing postwar accomplishment and envisioning what still should be restored. In the 1950s, the stories of expellees and POWs in the Soviet Union became the stories of all West Germans; in the categories used by contemporaries, the fate of these groups came to represent the fate of postwar Germany. The Red Army's rape

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of German women as it moved westward in the spring of 1945 became the rape of the German nation.81 The loss of homes and belongings in the East represented the eradication of a German Heimat, a sense of rootedness and belonging that had existed for centuries in central Europe. The literal loss of property and the sources of livelihood by expellees became a metaphor for the displacement of other Germans, driven from their homes by falling bombs, and the flight of Eastern European Germans into West Germany was a constant reminder of the division of the national Heimat between East and West. The detention of German POWs by the Soviets long after the release of most German prisoners in the late 1940s was universally condemned by West Germans as a case of arbitrary injustice, based only on a desire for vengeance. A violation of international law, Soviet treatment of German POWs allowed West Germans to claim that the Red variant of totalitarianism was just as capable of crimes against humanity in the 1950s as the brown variant had been in the 1940s. POWs, presumed innocent, were doing penance for all Germans. And self-congratulatory accounts of the successful social and economic integration of expellees and returning POWs into West German society were tales of the Federal Republic's ability to overcome and move beyond the ravages of war, creating homes and a livelihood even for Germans who had lived elsewhere before 1945. The "imagined community" that emerged in West Germany in the 1950s was a community that acknowledged and overcame loss and suffering; its success was measured in its ability to affirm German victims—the representatives of a victimized Germany—and to assist them in "coming to terms with" their pasts. In the late 1960s and 1970s, West Germans came to a much more critical understanding of National Socialism. Memories of German victimization, dominant in the 1950s, were challenged by accounts in which Nazi crimes and the victimization of others by Germans were central. Still, this complication of public memory never meant the complete silencing or forgetting of another version of the past in which Germans had suffered as much as Jews and others persecuted by National Socialism. Seen against the background of the history of certain forms of public memory in the 1950s, it becomes apparent that when themes of German innocence and victimization surfaced in the mid-1980s in the "Historians Dispute" or even more recently in May 1995 when Germans were exhorted not to forget "the beginning of the terror of the expulsion," they represented nothing particularly novel but rather the return of the (never completely) repressed.82 In the sixth decade after the war's end, "coming to terms with the past" must involve not only the continued study of National Socialism, European Jewry before the Holocaust, and the "final solution," but also a clearer understanding of how Germans came to terms with other pasts—their own pasts as self-identified victims—in the early history of the Federal Republic.

NOTES

This is a revised version of my article, "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany," American Historical Review 101(1996): 1008 -48.1 have recast the

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introduction and conclusion to conform to the general themes of this volume, and I have incorporated relevant literature that has appeared since the first publication of the article. Research for this article was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Global Peace and Conflict Studies Program of the University of California, Irvine. My thanks to Lynn Mally, who commented extensively on this revised version. 1. Theodor W. Adorno, "What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?" in Geoffrey Hartmann, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 114-26. 2. Ibid., 124. 3. Verhandlungen des deutschen Bundestags (Bonn: Universitats-Buchdruckerei Gebr. Scheur, 1950) (hereafter VDBT), (1.) Deutscher Bundestag, 252. Sitzung, 4 March 1953, 12092. 4. Quoted in Rolf Vogel, ed., Deutschlands Weg nach Israel: Eine Dokumentation mit einem Geleitwort von Konrad Adenauer (Stuttgart: Seewald Verlag, 1967), 36. 5. In general, see Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germany