Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

eastern Europe were effectively frozen. In domestic affairs, in addition to devoting considerable resources to helping the refugees, returning prisoners and their families integrate into West German society, the governments of the nineteen-fifties encouraged a distinctly uncritical approach to Germany’s recent past. In 1955 the Foreign Ministry formally protested against the showing at that year’s Cannes Film Festival of Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog. With the Federal Republic about to enter NATO as a full partner the film could harm West Germany’s relations with other states: in the words of the official protest it ‘would disturb the international harmony of the festival by its emphatic reminder of the painful past.’ The French government duly complied and the film was withdrawn.17 This was no momentary aberration. Until 1957 the West German Ministry of the Interior banned any screenings of Wolfgang Staudte’s (East German) film of Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan (‘Man of Straw’, 1951)—objecting to its suggestion that authoritarianism in Germany had deep historical roots. This might seem to confirm the view that post-war Germany was suffering from a massive dose of collective amnesia; but the reality was more complex. Germans did not so much forget as selectively remember. Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and had been properly punished.