At the same time, the left-wing student movement of 1968 protested against the continuities between the Third Reich and the FRG, claiming that almost the entire bureaucratic, military, and political elite of the Nazi regime had found equivalent or better careers in the new state. Publicly, as well as at home with their families, young people demanded answers from their silent parents about their involvement in, or tacit support for, the atrocities of World War II, and they strongly identified with the victims of the Holocaust (see Jureit and Schneider 2010). Psychoanalysts Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich’s widely read book The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (1967) criticized their fellow Germans for being in denial about their collective and personal responsibility for the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. This psychological mechanism had left them incapable of mourning the loss of Hitler, whom they had supported in overwhelming numbers, and also of feeling empathy for the millions of victims. The so-called “generation of ’68” was born roughly between 1935 and 1950. In terms of age, these are the mothers and fathers of my interviewees. However, only Charlotte’s parents, whose story will be told in chapter 6, directly participated in the protest movement. Most others came from predominantly conservative middle-class families, where the parents tended to condone the grandparents’ silence and denials rather than challenge them.
By the end of the 1960s and up until today, the public focus in West Germany had clearly shifted. The dominant view of National Socialism and World War II has been one in which Germans were—if not collectively guilty—certainly collectively accountable for the war and the Holocaust. Public commemorations stress the need to remember the past and impart to the younger generations the moral responsibility to ensure that history will never repeat itself. The US TV miniseries Holocaust, broadcast in 1979, contributed to a change in public opinion. Almost half of the population over fourteen years of age watched at least part of the series. Viewers followed the struggle and suffering of the Jewish German Weiss family through the war and into the concentration camps. For the first time victims were turned into living, breathing people with individual histories instead of abstract statistics and piles of withered corpses. In the mid-1980s right-wing historians tried to juxtapose the murder of the European Jews with the mass murders under Stalin in an attempt to relativize the Holocaust in the “historians’ controversy” (Historikerstreit). They were vehemently criticized and marginalized by the vast majority of academic voices, which affirmed the historic significance and singularity of Auschwitz.2 Talking about German suffering and claiming any kind of victim status was deemed suspicious and was denounced as a denial of responsibility for the crimes committed. In his famous speech of May 8, 1985, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the liberation from the Nazi regime, then president Richard von Weizsäcker confirmed that German crimes against humanity must remain at the center of public memory into the future:
There is no such thing as the guilt or innocence of an entire nation. The vast majority of today’s population were either children then or had not been born. They cannot profess guilt of their own for crimes that they did not commit. . . . But their forefathers have left them a grave legacy. All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it. The young and old generations must and can help each other to understand why it is vital to keep alive the memories. (von Weizsäcker 1985)
This has since remained the normative framework for German national memory, into which all the other memories have to be integrated (Assmann 2006b). At the same time, acknowledging the horrors of what Germans had done and accepting moral responsibility had all but closed off the space in which it was permissible to publicly discuss German losses. While some historians do not fully agree—as some accounts of wartime suffering can be found throughout the postwar period (for example Moeller 1996, 2005; Niven 2006a; Wittlinger 2006)—publicly speaking of German victimhood was largely considered a moral taboo from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.
It is daring to label West Germany’s culture of commemoration of this time as “repressive erasure” (Connerton 2008), because the label has connotations of totalitarian regimes. Researchers have denounced the suppression of open debates about past mass losses in relation to the political purges under Stalin in the Soviet Union (Baker and Gippenreiter 1998; Merridale 1999, 2010) and to the crimes of the military junta in Chile under Pinochet (Becker and Diaz 1998). During the “Great Leap Forward” of the late 1950s and early 1960s in China, tens of millions of people starved to death because of natural catastrophes compounded by economic mismanagement and political fervor. More than fifty years on, the Chinese Communist Party still has not officially acknowledged the massive loss of human life or publicly commemorated the victims (Feuchtwang 2011). However, “repressive erasures” do not necessarily have to take violent forms but can signify the existence of a master historical narrative that people are expected to internalize and that, while highlighting some aspects of history, at the same time neglects or deliberately edits out others (Connerton 2008, 60). Over the years, a number of public scandals have underscored that the officially sanctioned version of the German past is indeed quite prescriptive. Striking the wrong chord in a public speech or choosing words carelessly can easily derail or at least tarnish political, academic, or intellectual careers. One such example was the affair around Phillip Jenniger’s controversial speech in November 1988, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass). Jenninger, then president of the German Parliament, attempted to explain the reasons behind the popular support of National Socialism. He failed to dissociate himself clearly from the ideas he outlined, calling them “fascinating,” and his monotonous voice was perceived as not carrying enough empathy for the victims. More than fifty members of parliament walked out in protest, and the ensuing political storm forced Jenninger to resign, ending his career in politics (Fischer and Lorenz 2007, 240–42).
“We Never Talked about the Destruction”: History Lessons in West German Schools in the 1970s and 1980s
A country’s culture of commemoration is not only communicated in public policies and political debates, memorials and museums. It also filters into history books and lessons at school, where the aim is to impart knowledge about historical events to the younger generation and to cultivate certain attitudes vis-à-vis their nation’s past. German studies scholar Rainer Bendick (2001, 541) explains that history books “relay patterns of perceptions and interpretation of the past, that are foundational to a society. . . . With their help, the next generation is expected to learn an understanding of history, which correlates with the self-image of the society in which they as adults will one day assume responsibilities.”
Most Kriegsenkel were of high school age in the late 1970s and 1980s, and what they learned about National Socialism, World War II, and the Holocaust largely mirrored the public narratives of the time. Many of my West German interviewees remembered their history lessons quite clearly, although they had taken place almost thirty years earlier. The dominant impression was that National Socialism and the war were talked about a lot in the Gymnasium, which, belonging to middle-class families, the majority of them had attended.3 Their teachers, especially the younger and more left-leaning ones who had received their training around the time of the protest movement of 1968, had put in great effort to teach their pupils about the widespread popular support for Hitler and about the horrors of the Holocaust. Students watched documentaries about the liberation of Auschwitz in class or visited concentration camps on school excursions. The message about the indescribable cruelty Germans were capable of hit