There was one particular topic on which his peers also questioned the official version of history presented by their teachers: when it came to the image of the Soviets as friends and liberators. The vast majority of rapes and other acts of violence the Red Army committed at the end of the war had happened in the territory that later became the GDR. Knowledge about these crimes circulated among friends and family, quietly and behind closed doors. A number of East German Kriegsenkel had an awareness of what had happened to the women in their neighborhoods or families. They found the official image of the virtuous communist heroes confusing at best. Parents would strongly impart to their children that these topics had to be kept in private and should not be mentioned outside the walls of the family home.
Although in the West students could in theory have questioned the way World War II was presented in class (though no one I talked to actually did), voicing dissent was riskier in the East. The official version could not be challenged without consequences. Alfred (born in 1963) recalled that one of his friends had dared to mention that Russian soldiers had raped his grandmother and that the boy had been “taken away” by the teacher. His sister Anna (born in 1965) was absolutely certain that had she raised her hand in history class to ask “What about all that injustice the Russians have done to us?” their parents would have gotten arrested. Aspects of German wartime suffering, which did not fit into the officially sanctioned narrative, were excluded from East German history classes as much as from West German ones. As in the broader East German community, this exclusion mainly concerned topics around the violence of the Red Army and the expulsions from Eastern Europe. Other topics, like the bombing of East German cities toward the end of the war, were not as tabooed and silenced. However, the information often remained abstract and intangible. A number of my interviewees confirmed that, growing up in the East, they had no real awareness of German civilian or military casualties. Daniel remembered how around the age of twenty he visited a war memorial and was stunned by the sudden realization that in fact “a lot of German civilians had perished, and not just Wehrmacht soldiers. Suddenly it became clear that this was not just a case of the ‘bad Nazis’ and the ‘good Russians’ but that this was my own history too.”
In summary, at the time the Kriegsenkel went to school and started to read books and to watch TV in the 1970s and 1980s, what they learned about the war, National Socialism, and the Holocaust was quite uniform and prescriptive in both German states. Looking back thirty years later, people from either side of the wall said that they had largely accepted and internalized the narratives about World War II they were presented with. While different messages were relayed in terms of German perpetratorship, both parts of the country were united in that most aspects of German wartime suffering were either excluded from the curriculum altogether or marginalized to an extent that they did not leave any lasting impressions. This erasure did not encourage students to integrate aspects of German victimhood in their understanding of World War II history. Most of my interviewees, whether they were born in the East or in the West, had no awareness of that at all. This lack of knowledge explains the surprise about the discovery of the Kriegsenkel topic in recent years.
OPENING THE SPACE: THE REEMERGENCE OF GERMAN WARTIME SUFFERING IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the GDR in 1989, the era of state antifascism expired as well. From 1990 the memory culture of the newly reunified Germany continued in line with the established West German precept without much public debate.
One significant event of the 1990s was the War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition, which was touring Germany and Austria from 1995 to 1999 and then again from 2001 (Heer and Stiftung Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1997). The exhibition gave rise to heated debates because it showed that responsibility for the mass murder of the Jewish population did not simply lie with an inner circle around Hitler and the special units of the SS but that the regular soldiers of the Wehrmacht had taken an active part in these crimes. Millions visited the exhibition or read about it in the media, and many were shocked by its message. A second milestone was the debate surrounding Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Goldhagen suggested that antisemitism had been widespread among ordinary Germans and that they had killed Jews willingly, rather than under compulsion. Both of these events stressed German perpetratorship, widening its space within the broad population rather than allowing the crimes to be externalized to a small clique of Nazis.8
While the general focus and tone of official commemorations remained the same, with the beginning of the new millennium a flood of memories of German wartime suffering suddenly appeared in the media, books, movies, and TV documentaries. The main works setting this new trend include Günther Grass’s novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), which tells the story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a passenger ship carrying German refugees in 1945. Five thousand people lost their lives when a Russian submarine torpedoed the ship in the Baltic Sea. There were also Winfried G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (2001, published in English in 1999 as On the Natural History of Destruction) and Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire, 2002), both turning public attention to the carpet-bombing of German cities and its devastating effect on the population. Lastly, the anonymous diary Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin, 2003) gives a painfully laconic autobiographical account of the systematic rape of German women by Russian soldiers in occupied Berlin in 1945. In Crabwalk, Grass claims that tales of German wartime suffering had long been excluded from a mainstream commemorative culture, allowing Germans to express collective shame only for what the Nazis had done to others but leaving them no space to mourn their own losses. Aleida Assmann (2006b) argues that while the exclusion of the victim narrative was never as complete as Grass stated, the emotional intensity of these accounts and their wide social resonance across different generations were indeed unprecedented.
One major contributing factor was that with the German reunification in 1990, the Cold War era had come to a conclusion. The new, less antagonistic international political landscape allowed for a move beyond the entrenched victim-perpetrator dichotomies (Moeller 2005). Simultaneously, worldwide reconciliation movements and truth commissions in countries such as South Africa, Peru, and Chile also aimed to transcend these narrow definitions and treaded new paths in an attempt to heal past violence. Besides, it was also a time when members of the war generation were retiring from their professional careers and were starting to look back on their lives. Memories that had previously been pushed aside reemerged with unprecedented emotional intensity. Social memory, as Aleida Assmann (2006b) notes, follows biological rhythms: where one generation is superseded by the next and in the liminal phase, memories can assert themselves with great emphasis. As the last generation of eyewitnesses came closer to passing away, personal memories of wartime survival and hardship that had been confined to the space of private conversations were swept into the public sphere and mediatized on a large scale. While the appropriateness of speaking of German suffering continued to be debated among historians and intellectuals (see, for example, Diner 2003), there was a clear sense that the taboo that had surrounded the topic in previous decades had been lifted. A space had cautiously opened up, in which it had become more acceptable to publicly discuss the traumatic impact of World War II on the German majority population without immediately causing suspicion of minimizing the Holocaust.
DISCOVERING THE ENDURING PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF THE WAR: THE “WAR CHILDREN” AND THE “WAR GRANDCHILDREN” MOVEMENTS
In the early 2000s Germans first started to systematically reflect on the possible long-term impact of traumatic war experiences on the majority population. In the late 1990s psychoanalysts and psychotherapists had increasingly noticed occurrences of burnout, depression, flashbacks, panic attacks, and other anxiety disorders among their elderly patients. These people had been children at the time of World War II, and many of them were already in their