Jörg Echternkamp. Nach dem Krieg: Alltagsnot, Neuorientierung und die Last der Vergangenheit 1945-1949. Zürich: Pendo Verlag, 2003. 288 S. $13.17 (paper), ISBN 978-3-85842-432-7.

Reviewed by Alexander Peter d'Erizans (Department of Social Science, Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY))
Published on H-German (July, 2005)

A Fragmented World

In recent years, scholars have increasingly challenged the notion that Germans were unable to "master" their past following the end of the Second World War.[1] Taking issue with the idea that they wished to focus exclusively on constructing a future in order to avoid a confrontation with Nazism, these historians have alerted us to the often energetic manner in which Germans actually harnessed the past and present in order to weave a narrative in which they emerged first and foremost as victims.[2] Their studies have principally focused on the mustering of memories for action and the mental, cultural, and political reformulation of German identities in the late 1940s and 1950s. For the most part, writing on the immediate post-war years has focused upon structural and institutional changes, economic development leading to eventual stability, and Allied occupation concerns. For Jörg Echternkamp, though, the years 1945-49 mean so much more. They were not just years of rebuilding. The uncertainty and flux endemic to the immediate post-war years represented a fragmented world, one in which often resilient past values confronted new norms. Amidst the chaos, traumatic experiences of war intermingled with fervent hopes in constructing a new future. Rather than merely representing a time of occupation following war, the political, social, and cultural developments of the period laid the basis for two distinct societies. For most contemporary Germans, the period epitomized defeat and continuing suffering rather than liberation and a final end to war violence. Ultimately, one must zero in on these years in order to truly discern the multifaceted manner in which identities were being forged. Inhabiting a terrain in which former boundaries of familiarity and foreignness were questioned, Germans were already re-imagining themselves as they sought to make the world "whole" again.

In order to lay out the multiple dimensions of this "collapsed society" (pp. 8-9), the author divides his work into three sections. The first part depicts the concerns and uncertainties of everyday existence within a strange and unstable world in which everything was in flux. The material and financial damage from total war had been immense. In large and medium-sized cities especially, a "picture of devastation" (p. 19) awaited all. Living accommodations, industries, businesses, streets, bridges, and utilities all bore the full brunt of Allied air attacks, street fighting, and Hitler's "Scorched Earth" policy. For a variety of reasons (war damage, transport difficulties, reparations, German division), policies in all the Allied zones proved ineffectual in fundamentally combating the chronic scarcity of goods and services. Taking matters into their own hands, Germans increasingly engaged in a thriving black market and undertook countless foraging trips in order to insure their own survival. They increasingly lost faith in Allied promises of improving the situation, a disillusionment which often quickly turned into anger and resentment as well. These material uncertainties ultimately fostered hopes for the security that a social welfare state would offer.

The world had become terrifying and strange in other ways as well. Worries about material survival were coupled with fears of sexual violence perpetrated by Allied troops. Throughout the immediate postwar period, anxieties of German women in this regard were most notably directed against soldiers of the Red Army. Full of hate and seeking revenge, Soviet troops had violated an estimated two million during the final months of the war. Rape traumatized, engendered uncertainties as to whether such "foreign" babies should be brought to term, and exacerbated concerns of a populace already threatened from an increased spread of venereal disease. Feelings of vulnerability and insecurity also plagued the approximately twelve million exhausted German expellees and refugees from the east whose arrival overstrained already shattered cities reeling from the war. Although eventual long-term integration took place, initial relations between natives and incoming refugees were often hostile. Incessant competition took place in the acquisition of prized goods and services. Differences in culture, dialect, and habits led to chronic tensions. Germans viewed the eight to ten million DPs in the Reich at the end of the war as a dangerous and criminal "other," revealing that war had not vanquished past prejudices. Returning exiles felt shame at having left their homes. As a result of the loss of friends and property, interruptions in study and career, and the need to maneuver through often formidable and complex bureaucracies, they experienced innumerable uncertainties as they sought to rebuild their lives in a land that had become unfamiliar.

A frightening and devastated world, inhabited by a disoriented populace, provided the backdrop to the many political, social, and cultural developments that took place in the immediate post-war period, the subject of the second section of the book. Echternkamp begins this part by discussing the political transformation of the occupation zones into two independent states. With ever-increasing Cold War tensions, one could clearly discern that the Allies were moving in diverse directions in their policies. In the west, foundations were laid for the establishment of democracy. The early authorization of varying political parties (SPD, CDU/CSU, FDP), the municipal and countrywide elections from 1946 onwards, and the licensing of multiple press organs all enabled the development of increasingly free political decision-making. Although a wide array of parties again made their appearance in the Soviet zone, all were eventually compelled to join in a united "antifascist Block." The Soviet Occupation constantly meddled in the affairs of this exclusively authorized Socialist Unity Party (SED). By 1948-49, the SED had become "Stalinized" and consistently promoted centrally directed economic policies as one of its primary aims. By the end of the decade, two separate states had developed, characterized by irreconcilable political, social, and economic systems.

Political reform occurred simultaneously with social and cultural re-education efforts. The Allies were especially concerned with German youth, the portion of the populace that Nazi ideology had perhaps most influenced and for whom the destruction of the Third Reich and utter defeat in war had led to a widespread "crisis of meaning and orientation" (p. 133). Both the Western and Soviet zones sought to impact youth through schooling and the establishment of various youth organizations. Ultimately, though, Soviet efforts were more ideologically rigid and did not provide the extent of freedom that existed in the west for youth to work through their trauma. In both zones, re-education through the mediums of theater, magazines, newspapers, and art not only reinforced such efforts with youth but ultimately sought to transform society as a whole.

Political, social, and cultural reforms were first and foremost goals to denazify society. To the question of how Germans evaluated these Allied efforts as well as how they confronted their own, often personal, pasts in the immediate post-war period, Echternkamp turns in his third and final section. Concerning Allied policies of internment and denazification, the populace often questioned the competency of the officials in charge and believed that the "big fish" got away or received light sentences, while many less culpable individuals received unjustified sentences. Most people believed that the trials of prominent Nazis merely represented "victor's justice" and lacked credibility since Allied "crimes" against the Germans were not considered in the proceedings. The attempt by the Allies to reveal the consequences of the "Final Solution" through graphic visual images often failed to obtain the desired result. Rather than engendering remorse and "collective guilt" on the part of Germans, the depictions often just revealed camps that were replete with nameless corpses or the machines of industrial killing, a world which was cut off from past experiences of most Germans. Since no perpetrator of violence was clearly present in the images, Germans were able to maintain a distance from the concentration camps and those who died there. Tensions between disoriented and traumatized veterans, many of whom had to spend months or years in POW camps during and following the war, and civilians challenged past conceptions of gendered differences. Physically and psychologically broken men confronted increasingly assertive and independent women, leading to a rapid increase in marital tensions and subsequent divorce. Although former soldiers were able to remain patriotic and fundamentally decent in the eyes of their countrymen, total war had ultimately destroyed the veneration of the hardened Kämpfer at the front and his exclusive status as war hero and victim. Through various ways, all Germans, soldier and civilian alike, sought to forge their own "collective innocence" (p. 206). By attributing Nazi crimes to Hitler and a small band of criminal Nazis, emphasizing their own victimization as a result of practically unavoidable, nameless, and "catastrophic" events (a "suffering" which started well before 1945 and continued into the occupation years) and forgetting about the suffering which Nazi victims underwent, Germans aimed to wash their hands clean of any complicity in past crimes in order to build their own "society of fate and victimization."

In an organized and straightforward manner, Echternkamp provides a vivid, often frightening, glimpse into a shattered world. His book highlights the importance of the immediate post-war years as a time when Germans confronted an often uncomfortable past, chaotic present, and uncertain future. The author convincingly argues that one must scrutinize this period in order to understand the many factors which contributed to the forging of German identity following World War II. Echternkamp could have breathed more life into his arguments by providing the reader with more German voices on the "ground." In what manner, for example, did Germans voice misgivings, disappointments, and anger at Allied policies? How did they specifically articulate notions of victimization? The addition of such voices "from below" would have only enhanced an already valuable study pointing towards the vital need to sift through the ruins of 1945-49 in order to uncover the reformulation of German identity in the aftermath of total war.

Notes

[1]. Theodor W. Adorno, "What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?" in Bittburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 114-129; and Hannah Arendt, Besuch in Deutschland, trans. Eike Geisel (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1993).

[2]. Robert Moeller, "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany," American Historical Review 101 (1996): pp. 1008-1048; Elizabeth Heineman, "The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany's 'Crisis Years' and West German National Identity," American Historical Review101 (1996): pp. 354-395; Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte: Die nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in den Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag 1999); Norbert Frei, Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York.: Columbia University Press, 2002); Thomas Kühne, "Zwischen Vernichtungskrieg und Freizeitgesellschaft: Die Veterankultur der Bundesrepublik (1945-1995)," in Nachkrieg in Deutschland, ed. Klaus Neumann (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001); Jay Lockenour, Soldiers as Citizens: Former Wehrmacht Officers in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1955 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); and James M. Diehl, The Thanks of the Fatherland: German Veterans after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

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Citation: Alexander Peter d'Erizans. Review of Echternkamp, Jörg, Nach dem Krieg: Alltagsnot, Neuorientierung und die Last der Vergangenheit 1945-1949. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10784

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