The German War (97 page)

Despite the bitterness of Cold War polemics, it was hard to persuade the young on either side to become soldiers, especially not when a future German–German war lay in prospect. In East Germany, the 950,000 members of the Communist youth movement responded to calls to join the new National People’s Army by resigning en masse: they were not willing to jettison their ideals of ‘democractic pacifism’. Although most West Germans still regarded military service in the Wehrmacht in positive terms, rearmament and the reintroduction of conscription in 1956 were opposed by a loose coalition of Social Democrats, Christian pacifists and conservatives. Some, like Gustav Heinemann, who resigned from Adenauer’s government in protest, and Martin Niemöller, wanted Germany to remain unarmed and neutral in the hope that this would lead to national reunification. It was a coalition which would further build over the next few years to oppose the presence of an American nuclear arsenal on German soil.
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Now, instead of contributing to a new militarism, the cult of the ‘fallen’ became steeped in a pathos which, however nationalist in its cultivation of German victimhood, was shorn of bellicosity. In February 1943, Goebbels had entrusted the propagandist for the 6th Army, Heinz Schröter, with compiling a suitable selection of letters from German soldiers fighting at Stalingrad. Anticipating the creation of a ‘heroic epic of Stalingrad’ to rival the Nibelungen legend, Goebbels abruptly shelved the whole project once he realised how negatively the German public was responding to this way of mythologising defeat. In 1950, Schröter published the selection himself as
Last Letters from Stalingrad.
It was brought out by a small West German publishing house, but when it was taken up by the Bertelsmann book clubs in 1954 it reached a mass audience. There were thirty-nine letters, just as Schröter had originally proposed to Goebbels. Some contained signs of fabrication: the authorial voice was too uniform, factual inaccuracies too jarring, the kitschy episodes too dominant. Nonetheless, the collection was soon accepted as
the
authentic voice of the doomed warriors, their letters prized for their elegiac, tragically heroic tone, perfectly suited to being read aloud at commemorations. But they never served the purpose Goebbels had intended.
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There was no ‘Stalingrad syndrome’, no real desire to avenge the defeat. Instead, the letters became part of a culture of reconciliation, translated into numerous languages and recrossing the Iron Curtain to appear in Russian and East German collections; they were even made obligatory reading in Japanese schools. In the same year as Schröter’s volume appeared, the war veteran Heinrich Böll published a short story about a severely wounded soldier who returns to be operated on in an improvised hospital which the dying man gradually realises is his former school. Eventually he recognises his own hand in the incomplete chalked sentence on the board of the drawing class: ‘Come wanderer to Spa . . .’, Schiller’s version of the Simonides epitaph for the 300 Spartans – the verse which Göring had invoked for the Stalingrad fighters and which had moved Böll at the time. By puncturing the myth at its source, the young writer was accusing the humanistic Gymnasium of mis-educating the young in patriotism; it was a reprise of an accusation Erich Maria Remarque or Wilfred Owen had levelled it the previous war.
‘Opfer’
never quite lost its double connotation of active ‘sacrifice’ and passive ‘victim’. But even if reference to ‘the fallen’ still carried an echo of active, patriotic sacrifice, commemoration of the war was gravitating towards seeing soldiers as unwitting, passive and innocent victims. There was a certain inevitability here: defeat had shattered all wartime hopes, leaving only suffering, the shadow of futile heroism more potent than any general’s post-war assertions that the war in the east could have been won. And so, after all the apocalyptic prophecies, Germans found themselves not in but, somehow, on the other side of Hölderlin’s ‘unknown abyss’.
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*

At the end of the war Liselotte Purper was still young, a widow at 33. After the Red Army occupied the estate of Krumke in May 1945, she kept a low profile in order to avoid being recognised as a Nazi propaganda photographer and worked on the estate and as a dental assistant. In 1946, she moved to West Berlin and began to work as a photographer again, for the first time in her professional career using her married name, Orgel. Among her early post-war subjects, she chose to photograph men in a Berlin rehabilitation centre, the Oskar Helene Home. One man she photographed had lost his right forearm and was learning to use a file to do metalwork. The horrific injuries of war had been shown before, by Ernst Friedrich in his militantly anti-war tract of 1924,
War against War,
where his emphasis on the terrible destruction of life made him a particular object of hatred for the Nazis. Now, Liselotte Orgel used her wartime technique of angling the shot from below to accentuate the sense of strength and purpose in the man, conjuring up an uplifting message: simple manual work could reconstruct not just Germany’s shattered landscape but also Germans’ shattered bodies.
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Ernst Guicking’s luck held. After only a few weeks’ incarceration as a prisoner of war, he returned, finding Irene and their two young children at her parents’ home in Lauterbach. Her training as a florist and his childhood on the farm saw them through the post-war years: they began to grow flowers and vegetables on a strip of land next to the house. In 1949, Irene realised her pre-war dream and opened a modest flower shop of her own. When asked in 2003 whether she and Ernst had ever talked to their children about the war, Irene replied: ‘I don’t think so, I don’t think so, no. I don’t remember that, no. And then we were just so busy from morning to night in the market garden and the shop.’ She did not call to mind the letters she and Ernst had written in early 1942 about the deportation of the Jews and what happened to them in the east, or their anxiety that Germany should hold out in early 1945. What Irene did want to talk about was love, and this was the principal reason why she wanted to see their wartime correspondence archived and published.
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As families like the Guickings retrieved the private lives they had put on hold during the war years, they were also redeeming one of the promises they had made to each other at the time. In their 1950s version of the patriarchal nuclear family West Germans were keen to recompense themselves for having deferred personal life for so long. It was not untypical that, having finally secured the economic foundations of their family idyll, parents did not know what to tell their children. They might continue to believe that what they had done was justified but in many families new barriers of silence were erected between generations. While the next generation began to ask why Germans had unleashed such a calamity on the world, the older one was still locked into the calamity they had themselves suffered.

Notes

Abbreviations

AEK

Historisches Archiv des Erzbistums Köln

BA

Bundesarchiv, Berlin

BA–MA

Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg

Berlin, 1861–1945

DHM

Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

DLA

Dokumentation lebensgeschichtliche Aufzeichungen, University of Vienna, Department of Economic and Social History

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.),

1–10, Stuttgart/Munich, 1979–2008

DTA

Deutsches Tagebucharchiv, Emmendingen

Frankfurt, 1856–1943

Goebbels,

ed. Elke Fröhlich and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 1987–2008

IfZ–Archiv

Archiv, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich

1–42, Nuremberg, 1947–9

JZD

Jehovas Zeugen in Deutschland, Schreibabteilung-Archiv, 65617 Selters-Taunus

KA

Kempowski-Archiv, formally at Nartum, now Akademie der Künste, Berlin

LNRW.ARH

Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Abteilung Rheinland

LNRW.AW

Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Abteilung Westfalen

LWV

Landeswohlfahrtsverbandarchiv-Hessen, Kassel

Heinz Boberach (ed.),

1–17, Herrsching, 1984

MfK–FA

Museum für Kommunikation Berlin, Feldpost-Archiv

RA

Wilhelm Roessler-Archiv, Institut für Geschichte und Biographie, Aussenstelle der Fernuniversität Hagen, Lüdenscheid

RSHA

Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office)

Klaus Behnken (ed.),

Frankfurt, 1980

UV, SF/NL

Sammlung Frauennachlässe, University of Vienna, Department of History

1920–45

Munich, 1953–

YIVO Archives

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York

1

   Rethinking the final phase of the war: Kershaw,

Geyer, ‘Endkampf 1918 and 1945’, in Lüdtke and Weisbrod (eds),

35–67; Bessel, ‘The shock of violence’ in ibid.,

69–99, and Bessel,

2

   On bombing, Groehler,

Friedrich,

on rape, Sander and Johr (eds),

Beevor,

Jacobs,

women’s experience of the war, Dörr, ‘Wer

. . .’ 1–3; flight, prompted by Grass,

e.g. Schön,

interviews with German children, Lorenz,

Bode,

Schulz et al.,

for critical discussions, Kettenacker (ed.),

Wierling, ‘“Kriegskinder”, in Seegers and Reulecke (eds),

141–55; Stargardt,

introduction; Niven (ed.),

Fritzsche, ‘Volkstümliche Erinnerung’, in Jarausch and Sabrow (eds),

75–97.

3

   Joel,

Niven,

introduction; on 1950s, Moeller,

Schissler (ed.),

Gassert and Steinweis (eds),

1995 Wehrmacht exhibition and debate, Heer and Naumann (eds),

Hartmann et al.,

historical research began with Streit,

(1978); and continued to Römer,

(2008).

4

   Hauschild-Thiessen (ed.),

230: Lothar de la Camp, circular letter, 28 July 1943; Kulka and Jäckel (eds),

3693, SD Außenstelle Schweinfurt, o.D. [1944] and 3661, NSDAP Kreisschulungsamt Rothenburg/T, 22 Oct. 1943; Stargardt, ‘Speaking in public about the murder of the Jews’, in Wiese and Betts (eds),

133–55.

5

   Kershaw, ‘German popular opinion’, in Paucker (ed.),

365–86; Bankier,

Himmler,

171: speech at Posen, 6 Oct. 1943; Confino,

6

   Orlowski and Schneider (eds),

247: 18 Nov. 1943.

7

   Ibid., 338: 17 Mar. 1945.

8

5571, 5578–9 and 5583: 5 and 9 Aug. 1943; Stargardt, ‘Beyond “Consent” or “Terror”’, 190–204.

9

   Kershaw,

Kershaw,

I–II; Wilhelm II, ‘An das deutsche Volk’, 6 Aug. 1914, in

17–18; Verhey,