University of Warwick
BA Hons. Film and Literature
FR 1090 Aspects of Modern German Literature in Translation
Stephen Lamb, Coming to terms with Germany’s past: placing Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader in its historical context.
In 2003 leading analyst of German memory culture Aleida Assmann published an article in which he sought to define the major ways in which Germans’ attitudes to their twentieth-century past, and in particular the legacy of National Socialism (1933-45) have changed since the end of the Second World War [1].
His conclusion is that sixty years after the holocaust, after a long and at times tortuous process, Germany has finally managed to develop a positive and constructive approach to its understanding of the past, and that this approach is now firmly embedded in all areas of German society, from its political establishment through its education system to its culture, both high and popular.
Assmann’s critical but positive assessment of contemporary German memory culture is one that I share, based as it is on my own involvement as an observer of, and participant in, the student generation born soon after the Second World War.
So I want to document that complex development of Vergangenheitsbewältigung[2], so that we can place the significance and impact of the final text in our half of the module into its appropriate historical context. Schlink’s The Reader has had a major, if not the most significant impact nationally and internationally, of any German-language novel published in the last two decades. The novel’s worldwide impact derives primarily from its unconventional reading of Germany’s past, as exemplified by its portrayal of a fictitious relationship between a young boy and a former guard at Auschwitz. As we will see, the novel can be read as humanising a holocaust perpetrator, an effect, if not an intention, that for many is unacceptable, given the immensity of the holocaust. The release in 2008 of a Hollywood film version featuring major stars Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes merely served to extend and intensify the range of the debate occasioned by the novel’s publication a decade earlier. In sum, Schlink’s novel has both reflected and shaped attitudes to Germany’s past and its present culture, as well as the science of memory culture.
My hope is that this lecture will enhance your understanding of German memory culture and indeed encourage you to want to know more about the country’s past and present. Reading and discussing Schlink’s The Reader is one important first step in addressing the memory culture issues outlined here; another, arguably more enjoyable, as well as intellectually stimulating way, is to visit Berlin, in many ways the prime site of German memory culture, and a living memorial to Germany’s positive engagement with its problematical past.
The following lecture is based in part on an article I published in 2006 on the significance of a range of cultural events staged in Berlin in 2005 [3], the sixtieth anniversary of the end of world war two.
The basic premise of the article and of this lecture is that we can’t appreciate where we are now unless we understand where we come from. This applies in my view to all cultural study of the kind you and I are involved in: literature, film, fine art, architecture etc.
A recent survey by a UK scholar of memory culture, Graham Jackmann, [4] has shown how Germany’s attitude to its Nazi past has progressed since the end of the second world war in 1945 from virtual silence for the first two decades, typified by the notion that 1933 - 45 was a time of “alien rule” when Germany was occupied by a criminal gang, (i.e. the Nazis, who were not ‘real’ Germans) [5] to, by the 1980s, gradual acknowledgment of the notion of Germany as a nation of guilty perpetrators of monstrous crimes against humanity.
This gradual acknowledgment of German so-called ‘collective guilt’ for its Nazi past was the result of a number of developments in the mid-to-late 1960s. These included:
1. Firstly in the mid 1960s the trials of the main architect of the holocaust Adolf Eichmann and of prison guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The fictional trial of Hanna in The Reader belongs in that context.
2. Secondly the student movement post 1968, in which the student generation born immediately after 1945 began to question their parents’ generation’s role in National Socialism. My schoolboy visits to Germany in the mid 1960s and my year as a student in Berlin 1968-69 when I met both contemporaries of the Nazis and their offspring, who were my German peers, first aroused my interest in the personal ramifications of 20th century German history, which was clearly far more complex, both politically and emotionally, than British history.
3. Thirdly the nationwide debate in 1960s and 70s about the so-called Statute of Limitations, which was concerned about whether it was legally, and, more importantly, morally right for there to be a time limit on culpability for the holocaust, i.e. whether the state should drop charges against former Nazis and SS members after a certain period of time. There is now no time limit on Nazi crimes.
[A case in point is the trial of 89-year-old Ivan Demyanyuk from the Ukraine, which started Nov 30 2009 in Munich. Demyanyuk was accused of complicity in the murder of 28,000 prisoners in the Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek death camps, where he was a guard during world war two. In the 1970s, it became known that the concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible, was in fact John Demyanyuk. In 1986 the United States sent him to Israel where he was sentenced to death for his crimes against humanity. However eight years later the Israel Supreme Court had to withdraw the charge for lack of evidence. The Americans continued their investigation, which produced evidence, including Demyanyuk’s SS ID card, showing that he was a guard at Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek camps during WW2. The prosecution case was supported by a witness, 82-year-old Sobibor prisoner Toman Blatt. On 12 May 2011 Demyanyuk was convicted pending appeal and sentenced to 5 years in prison. He died in Germany before the appeal could be heard – which means he is technically legally innocent.]
These developments in German ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ were followed in the 1980s and 90s by a further series of factors that brought about another shift of emphasis in the debate: These included:
1. Firstly the so-called ‘Historikerstreit’ or ‘historians’ dispute’, of the late 1980s. This was a debate about whether it was right to continue to believe that National Socialism and the holocaust were uniquely evil historical events without parallel in twentieth-century European history, and which therefore should never be compared or equated with any other similarly horrendous crimes. A consequence of Germany’s belated acknowledgement of its war guilt after the Second World War was the notion that the extermination of six million Jews and up to 30 million others, including 20 million Russians, was unparalleled, both in terms of its sheer scale and in terms of its moral severity. But the ‘Historikerstreit’ started to shift that view: National Socialism and fascism, the debate claimed, weren’t the only criminal political movements around in the first half of the twentieth century. Communism, claimed some German historians, was an ideology equally as evil as National Socialism, and in its Soviet Union version, under Joseph Stalin, had been responsible from the 1920s to the 1950s for some horrendous crimes, including mass murders, of both its own citizens and of those of others in Eastern Europe whose opposition Stalin could not tolerate. The consequence of this major historians’ debate was that some people interpreted the outcome of the debate as a desire on the part of some German historians to relativise or minimise Germany’s sole guilt by suggesting that other countries were evil too, that Germans weren’t the sole perpetrators, that Stalin and Hitler were equally evil dictators, that there is no substantial qualitative difference between the extreme right of the political spectrum and the extreme left. The ideologies of left and right might be different, but if judged by their inhumane outcomes and effects, the numbers who died as a result, they amount to the same thing.
2. The second significant chapter in the long story of Germany’s dealing with its recent Nazi past started in 1995 when a highly controversial exhibition toured major cities in Germany. It was controversial because it dealt with the role of the ‘Wehrmacht’, the name the Nazis gave the German army under their regime. This was a highly sensitive topic, because the prevailing orthodoxy amongst post-war German military historians was that the German army were a disciplined organisation that merely carried out its orders, and was not to blame for the atrocities carried out across Europe between 1939 and 1945 in the name of Germany. The blame lay, this orthodoxy claimed, firmly with the Nazi party and particularly with the SS, Hitler’s elite troops that ran the concentration camps and were primarily responsible for the implementation of the holocaust following the Wannsee conference of January 20 1942 The 1995 exhibition sought to challenge that orthodoxy and implicated what was for many Germans of that generation an honourable institution that had been abused by Hitler and dragged into a war it didn’t want. The film Valkyrie starring Tom Cruise as the German officer Graf Stauffenberg, executed for his role in the abortive July 20 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, is an example of this view of the German army under Hitler, as is, to a degree, Downfall. The German army, the exhibition proclaimed with a series of shocking photographic images, were just as responsible as the Nazi party and the SS for the holocaust. Two other films which engage with this question of complicity are The Wannsee Conference (1984 German TV movie) and Conspiracy (2001)
3. A third chapter started in 1996 the American-Jewish historian Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners whose basic premise was what it said on the tin, namely that when it came to allocating responsibility and guilt the German people themselves were far from innocent parties. Goldhagen’s book reinforced the notion of collective German responsibility. [6]
4. Chapter 4 in the evolution of Germany’s changing attitude to its Nazi past came in 1998 and featured the distinguished novelist Martin Walser, a man with a long-standing reputation as champion of progressive liberal and left-wing causes and a critic of Germany’s consumerist society, and who for 40 years had repeatedly proclaimed that Germany had a moral responsibility to acknowledge its war guilt, surprisingly did a volte-face and proclaimed that the time had come for the German people to draw a line under the past, stop beating itself up about past guilt and move on. [7]
5. Chapter 5 featured two controversial publications in 1999 and 2002 by the writers Jörg Friedrich and W.G. (Max) Sebald, the latter the author of the international best-sellers The Emigrants, Austerlitz and Ring of Saturn. Sebald published a work on the effects of British and American bombing raids on German cities during the second world war [8]. These publications were significant because they signalled a willingness, a desire, on the part of Germans to proclaim that it wasn’t just the Jews and other nationalities who suffered during the second world war, the Germans did too, at the hands of the British and the Americans, for example in the fire bombing of cities such as Dresden.’ (Anyone who has read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five will know what happened in Dresden in April 1945, when hundreds of thousands of refugees were killed in raids that had no military significance, given that he war was already won and lost). The Germans, these publications implied, were victims as well as perpetrators. This might not sound much of an issue to us now, but in the context of Germany’s engagement with its guilty past, this was a bold step, which some particularly outside Germany, interpreted as a desire to minimise, if not deny, German guilt as perpetrators.
6. Chapter six of the Germans’ continuing, indeed never-ending determination to analyse their twentieth-century past was provided by an exhibition which ran from April to October 2005 at Germany’s equivalent of the British Museum, its Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin, entitled “The end of the war and memory politics in Germany” (‘Kriegsende und Erinnerungspolitik in Deutschland’). Its aim, according to their website, was to “investigate the treatment of Nazi crimes in both German states [i.e. the Federal Republic of West Germany and the Communist so-called ‘German Democratic Republic’ of East Germany] and to confront the relationship of Germans to war and the military in general.”
The effect of all of the developments detailed above has been to broaden and intensify the debate n understanding Germany’s past, a debate that has had an overwhelmingly positive outcome in the last 20 years.
Summing up the development of memory literature we can establish the following broad outlines:
In the 1950s and early 1960s the attitude and approach slowly developed from initial wilful ignorance or (worse still) denial of the Nazi past to a grudging acceptance in the late 60s of the reality of guilt and shame. This produced a ‘perpetrators and victims scenario’ with a black-and-white view of a whole generation of Germans as either perpetrators or passively complicit onlookers.
By the 1980s attempts to portray some Germans as victims of Nazism as well as innocent bystanders or perpetrators, previously total taboo, had started to become acceptable, although this was still highly contentious, with some equating such a position as tantamount to holocaust denial.