Harald Jähner, Aftermath:
Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955, trans. Shaun Whiteside.
London: W.H Allen, 2021. xvii + 382 pp. Originally as Wolfzeit (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2019).
When the Nazi Regime surrendered and collapsed in 1945,
Germany was a land of destruction and desolation. The monstrous dream of a
Thousand Year Reich proved a mass delusion and forty million people wandered
back and forth homeless, confused and disillusioned searching for a way home or
a bite to eat: not only Wehrmacht prisoners of war and demobilized troops, but
displaced persons of many kinds: the forced slave labour Hitler brought in to
run his war machine, the incarcerated prisoners in concentration camps, the
remnants of Jews from extermination camps. Whole neighbourhoods were flattened
and burnt out by Allied bombing raids. Millions of Germans were dead or
injured—or insane. If the author of this book, Harald Jähner, did not keep
reminding us of what the Hitlerite Stormtroopers and Nazi gangs did at home and
abroad in the name of the Volk, one
might almost fall into the trap of feeling sorry for them.
So desperate were people to find somewhere to shelter
and something to eat, that they spoke of themselves as living in the Wolfzeit, the time of the wolves.
Mothers sent their children out to scavenge and steal what they could, while
they themselves, finding they were the only ones able to do venture out into
the streets to bargain, trade or steal what they could, while their confused,
disorientated husbands, if they came back at all, sat at home and stared at the
walls. The period of everyone for himself or herself: Homo hiomini lupus, each one a ravaging wolf to the other. It is a
feeling Thomas Mann makes the narrator in his Doctor Fauistus (1947) describe in terms of being sucked into a
black hole, or a maelstrom of disorientation and unknowing:
My ideas tumble
topsy-turvy and go astray because of the excitement that comes with recalling
the period I am describing, the period after the collapse of the German
authoritarian state, which brought with it that radical loosening of discourse
that also dragged my thoughts into its vortex and stormed my staid worldview
with new ideas it did not find easy to digest.[1]
Yet Mann was not there:
he had gone into voluntary exile in Switzerland and then moved to the USA,
where he observed from the beaches of California was gazing upon in his former
homeland. Jähner quotes from and shows photograph taken in the midst of it all.
Without law, without order, without a functioning
economy, for at least a decade, Germans did not recognize who or what they
were. The old Nazi slogans lost all substance. The arrogance and the
aggressiveness turned in on itself. It was the fault of the others, they would say,
the conquered and crushed peoples, not themselves. They virtually never
mentioned the Jews or the Holocaust or any of their enormous crimes again
humanity and civilization, They would, if they said anything, claim that they too
were the victims of the Nazi regime. The worst of the worst criminals were put
on trial by the four Occupying Powers—America, France, Britain and the Soviet
Union—and a few were hanged, while many escaped to South America or the Middle
East; and yet most members of the National Socialist Party made appropriate
noises to pass through the weak process of “dc-nazification” and returned to
their old jobs in government, commerce or education. Mostly they stayed shtumm.
Drawing on contemporary personal diaries, newspaper
essays, magazine articles and a few films, Harald Jähner describes the state of
mind in the post-war Germany. It was as though the whole of the dreams and
illusions for the previous twelve years evaporated and the world had slipped
into a state of mindless prehistory. Officially, the Four Allies started to
rebuild a New Germany to fit their own purposes, especially as the Cold War
took shape. The three Western Occupiers tried to set up a democratic government
and rebuild the once proud and powerful German economy, hoping to create a strong
ally in their struggle against Communism in the East. The Russians concocted a socialist
or communist state that would stand as a buffer between themselves and the
West, pretending that all the bad things that happened during the Great Patriotic
War were the responsibility of the newly framed Federal Republic. The Shoah, as an unheard of crime against
the Jewish people, did not appear as such. It was the international workers and
farmers who were the victims, and Joseph Stalin their savior.
For West Germans, from the 1950s onwards, there was an
effort to reclaim their normal place in Europe, to concentrate on recreating a
middle-class society and joining with the United States, Britain and France in
protecting their side of the Iron Curtain. As the generation that had grown up
during the war and who endured the Wolfzeit
came to maturity, and the next generation of young people became adults, they
looked back with horror and disbelief at what their parents and grandparents
had done. They began to examine the formal documents, to unearth the secret
policies and to rebel against the attitudes that were still barely hidden in
home, school and civic life.
Harald Jähner’s approach is one of a histoire de mentalités (though he calls
it “an anthropology of culture”) and thereby enfolds within it a history of
emotions and the small matters that make up everyday existence—food, shelter,
hygiene, fashion and social relationships. This way of working from the bottom
up, from the needs of the individual and family up to the re-creation of civil
society comes about by default. The normal concerns of formal history, such as
it used to be called, with a focus on great men doing great deeds in the
homeland and abroad, virtually ceased to exist after the Allies won the war and
occupied the territory of the Greater Reich. Virtually all the institutions and
their concrete places of operation and the ruling elites disappeared either
literally—through death, arrest or escape; b ut also in emotional, aesthetic
and intellectual ways He is concerned
with showing how the mental healing of the German people came about, that
rather than the usual subjects of political history or even cultural history.
His book is therefore about what Lloyd deMause called “the emotional life of
nations,” how they brought up their children, learned to make friends and lovers,
and experienced life as individuals and members of a family: how they saw the
world as a place of imaginings and dreams.
Before the miraculous change in mentalities ( not just
in economics and politics), however, before there could be a real reckoning
with the ugly past, there had to be a wild, meaningless release of pent-up
frustrations. As Wolfgang Borchert wrote in 1947, cited in a caption to a photograph
of young men and women jitterbugging with American soldiers:
Our
whooping and our music are a dance above the abyss that gazed at us. And that
music is jazz because our hearts and our brains have the same rhythm of hot and
cold: agitated and crazed and hectic, uninhibited.
Before the miracles could be made, there had to be a
shaking up of the pieces, a twisting of the kaleidoscope, a descent into
craziness. Unwanted immigrants from one part of Germany or Europe wandered
aimlessly to another, children thus growing into adolescence without control
and rebelling against their parents, young adults moving away from the family
homes and villages into new communities and houses in unknown regions wanted
new styles and developed trendy tastes in the televised versions of the
West—old customs, traditional ties and tastes broke down and were replaced with
something, though often superficial, was strong enough to generate the so-called
German Miracle. Popular songs and light theatrical shows arose with roots
neither in the Weimar Republic’s satirical skits or the older literature of
classical times
Despite a few
pockets of resistance and hide-aways of the Old Guard (e.g., SS men and women
and party hacks of all ages), what emerges—and Jähner is very persuasive—a kind
of society unlikely to slide into the deep cesspool of Nazism ever again:
Within
a few years the national identity of the Germans had been profoundly
transformed. What had been warmly celebrated under National Socialism as a
racially unified Volksgemeinschaft was
transformed in the post war years into an enforced association of unloved
ethnic groups. This in turn, during the boom years, turned into an
unsentimental compromise-based society in which everyone felt only tolerably
well treated.
In this new uncomfortable Germany hovering over the fetid
abyss—even with the Eastern Democratic Republic being imposed wherein the crazy
mix of peoples brought together under a socialist banner and looking enviously
on at events in the other part of itself—almost everything can be seen as fake:
fake people denying and masking their past, phony reasons for doing things that
never came to grips with the real motives that were suppressed, false domestic
and community harmony on the street,, yet slowly mellowing out; again, except
for the disgruntled and the hateful who still lurked in dark corners—or carried
on their own civil service or institutional jobs, albeit with a slightly muted
jargon.
If not fakes, they were ghosts. Fathers home from the
war who did not speak of their experiences, former minor Nazi officials who said
nothing, and women and children who had lived by breaking the law in the anarchic
early post-war years who now sat in the shadowy corner silently. For a decade
or more, Harald Jähner write, there was as much inner as outer devastation, as
well as secret alliances between those who worked to build the new Germany and
those who gazed through a mist of incomprehension. Streets and minds formed “a
jumble of contradictory feelings” and “a tangled mass of myths and imaginings.” This “spiritual demobilization of the
Germans” seems to have been a necessary process of catharsis to drain away as
much of the lies, indifference and greed that had been the soul of the Third
Reich.
But hardly ever, in the private letters Harald Jähner
has combed through, the women’s magazines (copied ffom American models) he has
read from cover to cover (for the covers and the advertisements often tell us
more than the editorials and opinion pieces) there is nothing about the Jews
who disappeared, where the food and furniture came from that replaced bombed
out apartments, and who were the strange workers in the factories that replaced
the millions of husbands and sons who went to war. The Law of the Jungle, the
Theatre of the Absurd, the Time of the Wolf—and the average woman or man in Deutschland could not understand why the
rest of the world had so little sympathy for them.
The degree to which they had repudiated themselves as a nation was
apparent only to those Germans had emigrated. Within the country, it was not
clear even to opponents of the Nazis, those had been ashamed of the regime,
just how far they had fallen in the eyes of the world
If people “had apparently once more become wolves
towards their fellows,” as the historian Malte
Zierenberg writes, they didn’t know why, and they wanted to blame it on
someone else. At best, they thought and felt, they would have “to start over
from the beginning.” But this was not to slip back into real innocence or to
purge themselves of past guilt. “Hardly anyone could escape the magic of this
carefully stage-managed beginning.”
Magic and showmanship, that was the miracle of the new
West German economy; run by fake people who denied their past, ghosts who were
more dead within themselves than alive. In the Eastern land, there were only automatons
and zombies, living the big lie of the Russian-dictated controllers, and the
gnawing envy of their compatriots across the newly-built wall, the Iron
Curtain, with once again the concentration camp guards on duty, as though, they
felt, they deserved what the other Germany had. Both sides lived out a freak
show observing the other as a mockery of the other.
Children who emerged from
the fog of war into the rubble of peacetime often did not know their own names
and grew up in a kind of perpetual anome, with parents denying their own past,
and having only one goal: to find food, shelter and sympathy. The occupying
powers imposed new sets of rules, different in the various zones and then in
the different pseudo-nations that emerged. Those intellectuals and politicians who had fled or been expelled came back and
wanted to tell their former fellow-citizens how to live. However, the Germans, so-called
good and so-called bad, didn’t want to hear those voices. Nor did they want to
watch the films produced out of documentary footage of the death camps when
they were first opened. When they were
forced to attend the showings:
Many viewers simply looked away, or else spent the
whole film staring at the floor. Some
who had seen the mountains of corpses on the screen vomited or collapsed in
tears as they left.
A very few could grasp or accept what they saw. They
had to find out for themselves who they had been and what they will need to
become. Then a new cohort of children grew up and started to fossick in their
parents’ and communities’ behavior during the Nazi regime, and then gradually,
with a different kind of suffering and psychological dysfunctionality, they
began to understand—and to understand what had to be done.
All too soon, unfortunately,
the voyage of self-discovery foundered, The Cold War, from both sides, ensured
that new propaganda films were made, new illusions foisted on people and new
sensibilities blurred the real memories that needed to be brought out into the
light of day. For example: there is a
film made a few years ago in which a young artist in East Germany grows
desperate about the strict imposition of Socialist Realism on his creativity. After
he watches his mural whitewashed out of existence because he had painted the
working class struggle to become free even in his own time, he manages to cross
over into West Berlin. He enrolls in an art school there and discovers, to his
dismay, that not only the students pushed into painting meaningless
abstractions and rewarded for pointless displays of their own narcissistic
ramblings, but that the tutors have no interest in passing on the traditions of
classical or modern art, aesthetics and technology. The West appears as empty
of thought and real feeling as the East.[1]
In other words, it was not only the shock of waking up
one day to find the whole structure of German power relations and the
institutions of repression were gone, crushed beneath years of bombings and
cannon fire, but to feel a great emptiness inside, having fallen into or been
pushed down an abyss, “the historically unprecedented maelstrom” of
history.
Perhaps it was not without precedent, though, for as
one can hear in echoes of the Wagnerian Gõtterdammerung
or the Thirty Years of religious and iinternecine wars and the Bismarkian nationalist
fighting between the myriad of little principalities, city-states and electoral
districts of the Holy Roman Empire, with all their disparate customs, dialects
and ethnic compositions. After being compressed and concentrated since 1870
into an incomplete Second Reich, an amalgam of peoples, when the Third Reich
imploded, one commentator cited by Jähner sums it up in a bizarre and
outrageous cri du coeur of a people
utterly blind to their own crimes against humanity and against the Jewish
people:
The lurching unconsciousness into which the German people were plunged by
the mendacious lunacy of the sub humanity that had risen to power was followed
was followed by the inevitable collapse, the most shocking physical and mental
hardship that any people has been forced by fate to endure. The soul of no
other people has ever been deeper and more often and thus better prepared for
the seed of the new spirit than that of the Germans.
Tsk-tsk. As though they didn’t deserve what they got,
as Walter G. Sebold sets it out, when he says that he was a little boy when the
destruction of Germany by the Allies went on, and he didn’t understand it
until, as a young man, he learned about the Blitz,
the mass destruction of the Wehrmacht
in one conquered nation after another, and the Holocaust. Another more recent
author, Gõtz Aly shows how in Europe
Against the Jews, 1880-1945, the grounds were laid that made possible what
he reveals in Hitler’s Beneficiaries,
and also in Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s
Willing Executioners. Jähner keeps
his sights clear on the hardship of the Germans after the war, their time of
hunger and confusion, their economic recovery—never really the miracle it was
presented as, since the Western nations helped in no small way, for their own
strategic reasons, The author does not pull any punches as to the awakening of
a moral conscience and the sense of responsibility, in the Federal Republic at
least. Neo-Nazis politic actions and occasional criminal attacks against
Guest-Workers, other immigrants from the Middle East and always the Jews,
remain a worry, though so far they have been more a painful annoyance than a
danger. It remains to be seen whether the wolf-packs will come back.
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