Many Kriegsenkel read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl in German literature class and watched documentaries about World War II or the episodes of the Holocaust miniseries on TV at home. Images of emaciated faces peering from behind barbed wire and of earthmovers pushing piles of dead bodies into mass graves are impossible to forget. Eva-Marie, born in 1967, reflected: “Every morning when I turn on the shower, I think about how the Jews were gassed, and that the Nazis experimented on them with boiling hot and freezing cold water. I think about these things very often, about the physical pain. I must have been fourteen or so when I watched the first documentaries, without any forewarning. Before that time, the world was still a good place.”
Not everyone reacted in the same way or shared the same memories of the history lessons. Some said that World War II was such a constant and repetitive topic at school that they got to a stage of being “completely fed up with it.” Others felt that although the war had been dutifully “worked through,” it was not really discussed or analyzed in depth. Their teachers were often older, of the war generation themselves, and uncomfortable with the topic. They had avoided moving beyond a dry presentation of historical facts, which failed to reach their students emotionally. Sanna, born in 1974, admitted: “History lessons at school were really boring; they did not have anything to do with me at all. You had to read those fifteen-odd pages, and you had to learn things by heart for the exams, but I can’t even recall those facts anymore now.”
A handful of people said that they could not remember that the war had been a topic at school at all, either because it had not been part of the curriculum or because they had no recollection of it. While the latter explanation is plausible, given the long time span that has passed and the unreliability of human memory, history lessons were indeed not uniform for all schools. In West Germany, responsibility for the education system lies primarily with the Länder, (the states), each deciding on its own educational policies and school curricula.4 Because the Kriegsenkel went to the Gymnasium at different times and in different parts of the country, it is quite possible that in some schools “history lessons had stopped at a time just before the war started,” as a few of them claimed.
However, while each person remembered a degree of working through the war and Holocaust at school slightly differently, some aspects of their reports closely resembled one another. The focus always lay on the reasons for Hitler’s rise to power, the factual history of World War II, and the systematic murder of six million Jews and countless other people in the concentration and extermination camps. Some teachers were more invested than others in imparting the message that the past needed to be remembered and that another Holocaust should never be allowed to happen again. This narrative always carried a moral weight and could not easily be questioned. “I always had the sense that there was no other option than to think of it [the war] as something very bad. You were quasi brainwashed to think like that. That was definitely the right thing to do, but . . .” Tom, born in 1969, summed up this sentiment, his hushed voice and uneasy look revealing his discomfort with admitting his conflicted emotions.
It went all but unnoticed that some aspects of World War II were missing from the history lessons altogether. Not one person recalled being told about the impact of World War II on the German civilian population, the bombing of German cities, or the expulsions from Eastern Europe. Before we were scheduled to meet for our first interview, Nora, born in 1959, went on the internet to look at photos of her hometown in 1945. She could not recall ever having seen images of her city in ruins before: “During Heimatkunde [local history and geography] lessons at school, we talked about rocks and things like that, but not about the destruction. Maybe they did not want to burden us kids with these things. But those photos of the destroyed city, I have the sense that I saw them for the first time last week.”
Leafing through around 50 of the 100 to 150 different history books that were used in West German schools between 1949 and 2000, historian Bodo von Borries (2004) found that World War II took up on average about twenty pages, with a separate chapter on the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust. Only one textbook used in schools in the 1970s and 1980s included some information about the bombing of German cities, and it also excluded information about the expulsions from the East and the violence inflicted by the Red Army in 1944–45. The calculations about German war casualties were “rather conservative” (Borries 2004, 403). As in other areas of society, in history books and history lessons the suffering of the German majority population took a step back to leave space for the consideration of the immeasurable pain the Germans had inflicted on their victims.
Most Kriegsenkel I interviewed firmly subscribed to the version of the past they had been inculcated in. They had deeply internalized the moral responsibility for their forebears’ crimes and commitment to the Holocaust memory. The wartime suffering of their own families and of the German population more broadly remained in the background. Even if they may have had some factual knowledge, it did not fully reach their consciousness.
“ZERO HOUR” AND THE “VICTORS OF HISTORY”: WORLD WAR II IN EAST GERMAN PUBLIC MEMORY
In East Germany, public narratives about World War II and National Socialism diverged from those of the West, and a substantially different view of the past was relayed to the population. However, while “victim” and “perpetrator” binaries were demarcated quite differently, they also ended up with a similar double phenomenon as in the early postwar period in the West: an even more pronounced exculpation from the crimes of the Nazi regime on the one hand coupled with a silencing of significant aspects of wartime suffering of the majority population on the other. Unlike in the West, however, the East German government upheld the same view of the past until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The GDR was founded in October 1949, a few months after its West German counterpart. The new government under Walter Ulbricht comprised members of the former Communist Party. Persecuted by the Nazis, they had fled to the Soviet Union before the war and were now returning from exile as the self-proclaimed “victors of history” (Danyel 1995a, 32). The new political elite understood themselves as the heirs of the communist resistance against Hitler, directly treading in the footsteps of the victims and not the perpetrators of the Nazi regime. National Socialism was interpreted as an expression of fascist class rule against which the communists had battled. The memory of those who had died in the antifascist resistance took center stage in commemorative practices (Danyel 1995b). People like Ernst Thälmann, a communist leader imprisoned by the Nazis and killed in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944, were upheld as paragons of virtue to inspire current and future generations. At the end of the induction ceremony for the Young Pioneers, the Communist youth organization, each child received a red flag symbolically soaked with the blood of the many victims of the struggle for socialism (Moeller 2005).
With a founding myth constructed around communist martyrdom and the final victory over the Nazi regime, the East German government consequently rejected all political responsibility for Hitler’s rise to power and the crimes committed in the German name. Although the East Germans in no way denied the Holocaust, the Jewish victims were often subsumed under the general term of “victims of fascism” (Danyel 1995b), and the Holocaust tended to be cited as a particularly cruel expression of fascist terror, without any distinctive significance or singularity. The end of the war was celebrated as “Stunde Null” (“Zero Hour”), the beginning of a new era with a clean slate, looking toward a brighter, socialist future. As in the West, the focus here too was on recovering economically and building a new and better society from the ruins. The gaze was firmly fixed on the future, not dwelling on the past. As in the West, people were expected to come to terms with the physical and emotional damage left by the war largely on their own.
However, as was the case in the Federal Republic immediately after the war, the general population was granted a certain measure of victimhood, portrayed here too as a group of powerless victims, in this case of “fascist seduction” (Moller 2003, 46). People were now given the chance to erase these