An in-depth analysis of how, during the Cold War, the respective
political leaderships of the two Germanys developed very different
narratives concerning the legacy of the Third Reich and of the
Holocaust in particular. Heft (History/Ohio Univ.) describes how,
in Communist East Germany (GDR), the prevailing ideology of
"antifascism" came to be divorced from Nazism; rather, it stood for
opposition to the "bourgeois capitalists" in Bonn, London,
Washington, and, ultimately, Israel. The GDR's leaders viewed
themselves as victims of the Nazis, rather than as heads of one of
the Third Reich's successor states, with all the obligations that
might entail. Thus, in the early '50s, when some of the GDR's
leading theorists advocated reparations to Jewish Holocaust
survivors, they were purged from the party. The history of
Holocaust memory in West Germany is decidedly more ambivalent.
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer accepted the policy of reparations to
the Jews, but he did so grudgingly while also "integrating"
ex-Nazis into his Christian Democratic government and proceeding
sluggishly in prosecuting suspected Nazi criminals. The "heros" of
Herf's study are a number of West German presidents, particularly
Theodor Heuss (in office 1949-59), who took the initially highly
unpopular stance that postwar Germans should feel collective shame,
if not collective guilt, for the Nazis' war crimes, as well as such
Social Democratic leaders as Kurt Schumacher, Ernst Reuter, and
Willy Brandt. Heft focuses almost exclusively on policy-makers;
there is unfortunately little here on the role of public opinion in
West Germany, and nothing on such cultural influences as the writer
Gunter Grass, or on the roles of the small Jewish communities in
each country. Still, this illuminates much of the political
cultures of the two Germanys. Heft also has provided a valuable
case study of how the quest for memory and justice are largely
subsumed by present-day nationalist and other political needs.
(Kirkus Reviews)
What has Germany made of its Nazi past?
A significant new look at the legacy of the Nazi regime, this
book exposes the workings of past beliefs and political interests
on how--and how differently--the two Germanys have recalled the
crimes of Nazism, from the anti-Nazi emigration of the 1930s
through the establishment of a day of remembrance for the victims
of National Socialism in 1996.
Why, Jeffrey Herf asks, would German politicians raise the
specter of the Holocaust at all, in view of the considerable depth
and breadth of support its authors and their agenda had found in
Nazi Germany? Why did the public memory of Nazi anti-Jewish
persecution and the Holocaust emerge, if selectively, in West
Germany, yet was repressed and marginalized in "anti-fascist" East
Germany? And how do the politics of left and right come into play
in this divided memory? The answers reveal the surprising
relationship between how the crimes of Nazism were publicly
recalled and how East and West Germany separately evolved a
Communist dictatorship and a liberal democracy. This book, for the
first time, points to the impact of the Cold War confrontation in
both West and East Germany on the public memory of anti-Jewish
persecution and the Holocaust.
Konrad Adenauer, Theodor Heuss, Kurt Schumacher, Willy Brandt,
Richard von Weizsacker, and Helmut Kohl in the West and Walter
Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck, Otto Grotewohl, Paul Merker, and Erich
Honnecker in the East are among the many national figures whose
private and public papers and statements Herf examines. His work
makes the German memory of Nazism--suppressed on the one hand and
selective on the other, from Nuremberg to Bitburg--comprehensible
withinthe historical context of the ideologies and experiences of
pre-1945 German and European history as well as within the
international context of shifting alliances from World War II to
the Cold War. Drawing on West German and recently opened East
German archives, this book is a significant contribution to the
history of belief that shaped public memory of Germany's recent
past.
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