Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

by Harald Jähner

The Holocaust played a shockingly small part in the consciousness of most Germans in the post-war period.

The Jews were not even explicitly mentioned in the much-debated admissions of guilt by the Protestant and Catholic Churches in August 1945.

The fact that even well-intentioned people refused to think about what would happen to their deported neighbours has left trust in the human species severely shaken even into the present day. And the majority of Germans at the time were guilty of this.

The survival instinct shuts out feelings of guilt—a collective phenomenon that can be studied in the years after 1945 and must be deeply unsettling to anyone with faith in humanity.

Even those who experienced the war, who witnessed massacres, who saw fields full of dead bodies and mass graves brimming with corpses are unable to comprehend the true scale of the killing that took place in Europe across the war.[8]

We are the generation without ties and without depth. Our depth is an abyss. We are the generation without happiness, without a home and without farewell. Our sun is narrow, our love cruel, and our youth is without youth.[9]

We are a generation without a homecoming, because we have nothing that we could come home to. But we are a generation of arrival. Perhaps we are a generation filled with arrival on a new star, in a new life. Filled with arrival under a new sun, to new hearts. Perhaps we are filled with arrival to a new life, to a new laughter, a new God. We are a generation without farewell, but we know that all arrival belongs to us.

members

It was true that the first uncoordinated rubble clearance operations were not especially effective. Often the rubble clearers had simply thrown the rubble into the nearest underground train ventilation shaft, from which it later had to be removed again with great difficulty.

“We had never been so ripe for redemption,” Ruth Andreas-Friedrich had rejoiced in her diary.

The journalist Ursula von Kardorff saw the misery in Halle railway station in September 1945: Terrible images. Rubble, amongst which wander creatures that seem no longer to be of this world. Homecomers in ragged, wadded uniforms, covered with boils, creeping along on makeshift crutches. Living corpses.[2]

The police statistics for crimes of theft leapt by 800 per cent; because people saw little point in reporting crimes the real numbers will likely have been much higher.

Years of slavery in the camps had induced severe behavioural problems among many DPs. Their trauma manifested itself in outbreaks of violence, aggression and rebellion, even directed at people who were trying to help them. Because of this destructive behaviour, Allied soldiers often lost their respect and sympathy for the DPs.

Of Munich’s 11,000-strong Jewish community before 1933, fewer than 400 had survived.

This division meant that the part of Poland from which most of the Jews came was now Russian. If they were deported to their place of origin they would remain displaced, because eastern Poland no longer existed. They were consequently homeless forever.

Let them in! They are folk of our blood who have lost their homes and everything, they are German people, they are our children, their husbands were our soldiers. Open up your homes, open up your doors![37] It was in vain. The Zuzügler (incomers or immigrants), as the authorities called them at the time, encountered a wall of rejection.[38]

In 1946 the writer Walter Kolbenhoff reported from a village in Upper Bavaria: These farmers have never been stuck in air-raid shelters when the bombs rained down and the lives of their loved ones were extinguished. They have never trekked, shivering and hungry, along foreign country roads. While the others greeted as a gift each new day that life granted them, they sat in their farms making money. But that fate has not made them humble. It is as if none of it had happened and it had nothing to do with them.[39]

Some believers, torn between romantic love and loyalty to the Church, remained excluded from the community for the rest of their lives.

Today it is hard to imagine the depth of the discord among the Germans. The Allied military authorities, particularly the British, often warned of a threatening civil war.

Some people felt that it was not appropriate to celebrate and dance so close to death¸ while others wanted to dance even more wildly in the presence of death and sorrow.

And our girls have the same hot pulse in hands and hips. And their laughter is hoarse and brittle and clarinet-hard. And their hair that crackles like phosphorus. That burns. And their hearts beating in syncopation, wistfully wild. Sentimental. That is what our girls are like: like jazz. And the nights too, the girl-jingling nights: like jazz: hot and hectic. Agitated.[4]

It must have felt strange to them, that only a few months previously they had been old enough to be sent to their death with the Volkssturm (the people’s militia established during the last few months of the war), but were now not adult enough for a glass of wine.

In the extremely depopulated city, in which at the end of the war only 40,000 residents were left out of 770,000,

The typical Heimkehrer was bad-tempered and ungrateful. He lay around sick on the couch, if there was one, and even though his family members had looked forward to seeing him again for so long, he made their lives hell. He was in pain, of course, but every day he let his family know just how much pain he was in. Very

“Not a single kind word ever issued from his mouth. All he ever did was growl and curse. I tried to overlook some things that were really insensitive. In fact I never really got him back emotionally.”[3]

all. Most returnees had hardly seen their

compromising and establishing fragile peace treaties. Many marriages with Heimkehrer

experiences

The Russians understood the Germans very

Hildegard Knef behind the camera. “German men lost the war,” she said, “now they want to win it again in the bedroom.”

Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.[7]

Now you know both the self-sacrifice of which mankind is capable, and the terrible depths of depravity to which he can plunge. You know destruction in all its forms. You have stared death in its empty eyes time and again. You have experienced how insignificant and lost a man can feel as he stumbles through the world’s darkness. You have eradicated human lives, and strengthened your own a hundredfold by taking it to the edge. You have been more of a master than you ever were before or ever will be again. And time and again you have been driven harder than any slave.

As one so changed, so deeply changed, you have returned home and turned up in front of your wife.[8]

they really meet,” the magazine Die Frau—ihr

In 1946 the Süddeutsche Zeitung published a photograph showing the actual available daily ration of the average consumer spread out on a table: half a tea-spoon of sugar, a piece of fat the size of a fingernail, a cheese portion the size of half a match, an eraser-sized piece of meat, a drop

certainly by the time of the gigantic food supply of the Berlin Airlift (which continued for over ten months beginning in 1948), that the grumbling fell silent and made way for lasting gratitude in the Western zones. In

which Pollock was the most striking example—American art had liberated itself from the great shadow of Paris and become a leader in the international art scene. With the outsized amount of attention that artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman attracted in Europe, America could easily fight back against its clichéd image as a nation without culture. The United States was now actively assuming a pioneering role. This led to a paradoxical situation: “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot,” President Truman had said in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947, confident of the thunderous applause this statement would receive from the majority of Americans. That didn’t prevent his Cold War strategists from seeing that very same art as the best way of putting America effectively on the world stage. Certain that Congress would never authorise the funds required to export that art, the CIA turned abstract expressionism into a clandestine operation. So it was that artists who were mocked in the US Congress as heretical daubers were deployed by American foreign policy experts for aesthetic propaganda. Rothko, Pollock and Motherwell might have seen themselves as homeless radicals and lonely individualists at home, but abroad a concerted exhibition effort turned them into ideal representatives of America. The task was delightfully paradoxical

Some people overcame the past through interior decoration. Anyone who sees reason as the only valid agency of denazification may think this impossible. But perhaps one can alter oneself a little by altering one’s surroundings. Design determines consciousness, one might argue.

the Germans slipped into a way of life which later, in the West at least, made it very hard to grasp how such a peaceful people could have allowed the Nazis to flourish for 12 years and taken such terrible guilt upon their shoulders.

The widespread indifference, the general lack of emotion and the obvious heartlessness were only the “most striking outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn and sometimes brutal refusal to face up to what actually happened and come to terms with it.” A shadow of deep mourning had settled over the whole of Europe, but not over Germany.

“Burn your verses, say nakedly what you must,” wrote the poet Wolfdietrich Schnurre. If, as Adorno famously stated, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” then what of speech? Not many people were prepared to lay themselves bare. One was loquacious or one was silent. Very few found the appropriate words. The right words were a sheer impossibility.

Nazism appeared to the post-war Germans as a drug that had turned them into willing tools. Hitler had “abused the German capacity for enthusiasm” was one popular phrase which made it possible for even the most devoted Hitler-worshippers to feel duped rather than guilty.

The writer Wolfdietrich Schnurre, for example, took guilt as his main subject. He felt guilty because as a soldier he had not rebelled but had instead unthinkingly obeyed. Three years after the war he still felt himself, deep inside, to be the hypocritical Muschkote (squaddie), with authoritarian traits:

Many saw themselves as victims not only of Hitler, but also of their parents. In the magazine Benjamin, as part of a discussion on the question “Are our parents guilty?”

Only in Germany, where the trial was conducted, was the reaction broadly one of indifference.

Already we inevitably have foreign observers saying of us that the attitude of the average German towards the Nuremberg Trial is quite markedly one of indifference, or at best of scepticism. Unfortunately, that is true.

The “communicative silencing” of the past, as the philosopher Hermann Lübbe described the process in 1983 with an appropriate degree of paradox, made it possible for tens of millions of still devoted Nazis to integrate themselves into a society that had made a consensus out of anti-fascism, in terms of both its constitution and self-image.

Adenauer responded to the enraged reaction to Globke’s appointment to the Chancellery office: “One does not throw out dirty water while one does not have clean.”

At a distance of decades my judgement has softened under the realisation that the old Adenauer had a huge task to perform. He was faced with a state that had six million Nazi Party members, and expellees from the East among whom the proportion of Nazis was no smaller. He had to ensure that this explosive mixture did not detonate. That is statesmanship.[34]

In the summer of 1945 the Nazi membership card files fell into the hands of the US Army: 10.7 million cards, one for each Party member. The news gave many Germans sleepless nights.