Vergangenheitsbewltigung II Bernhard Schlinks Der Vorleser the Student

Vergangenheitsbewältigung II Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser, the Student Movement and the Legacy of National Socialism

Nazi Victims • Holocaust (6 Million Jews, Sinti & Roma, Homosexuals) • Death camps in Poland (Todeslager) • Konzentrationslager in Germany (KZ) with 1. 6 Mio detainees and 450. 000 documented deaths • ‘Vernichtung durch Arbeit’ • ‘Euthanasia’ – ‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens’ • Political prisoners (communists & socialists)

Issues arising for Germany • • • Guilt (individual/ collective) Responsibility (individual/ collective) Denial & Repression (Avoidance) Damages - ‘Wiedergutmachung’ ‘Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit’ Vergangenheitsbewältigung

German deaths - Civilians • Luftkrieg – every city over 50. 000 bombed - estimated deaths: 450. 000 - 600. 000 • Flight from East & Expulsions: • Estimated 300. 000 deaths during flight from advancing German army in East Prussia 1945 • Estimated 14 mio expellee Germans between 1945 and 1950 • Estimated 2 mio women raped mainly by SU soldiers • Estimated 140. 000 women die as consequence of rape

German deaths - Soldiers • Estimated 3. 2 Million dead soldiers • 11 Million POW’s (3. 3 in SU, 42% of whom die)

German expellees after WWII (‘Heimatvertriebene’)

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, 30 Jan 1945 • Ex cruise ship marked as military vessel • Transporting refugees from East Prussia • Sunk on Baltic coast by Soviet submarine • Over 9000 dead

Issues for Germany • • ‘Opfer’: Victim Sacrifice Who is a victim? Who is a perpetrator? What is a victim? What is a perpetrator? Is victim a psychological or political category? Remembrance: How do nations remember their war dead?

Alexander & Margarethe Mitscherlich • Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (1967) • Question: Why Germans so little empathy with Nazi victims? • Thesis: Germans loved Hitler – should have mourned loss of Hitler • Germans failed to mourn Hitler – instead withdrew emotional energies from themselves and their past and channelled them into Wirtschaftswunder • Result: emotional distance towards their own past as responsible actants involved in Nazism (‘de-realisation’). • Insistence on innocence and own suffering in 1950 s and 1960 s.

A. & M. Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern • ‘Instead we Germans should extend the empathy with ourselves, so that we can at last recognise ourselves in such scenes […] and on those appalling occasions when one hundred, five hundred, or one thousand bodies lay in front of us, bodies of people we had killed. This would imply a compassionate and poignant acknowledgement of the victims long after the time of horror. ’

Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ • Mourning • Process of working through loss • ‘erinnern, wiederholen, durcharbeiten’ (Freud) • Letting go – • Ability to re-cathect • Melancholia • Refusal to acknowledge loss • Denial, repression • Internalisation of lost object • Melancholic subject remains frozen in time • No letting go

Two Paradigms of Holocaust Remembrance • Adorno’s ‘paradox remembrance’: • Intellectual task is to keep memory of Holocaust as rupture in history open; ‘gaze onto the horrors’. • Mitscherlich’s ‘inability to mourn’: Freudian paradigm of ‘Bewältigung’ • Günter Butzer, Fehlende Trauer, Munich, 1998.

Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern • Reflexion in Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun? • Reflexion in Schlink’s Der Vorleser? • Michael’s relationship with Hanna: • Dependency relationships (Hörigkeitsbeziehungen): • Narcissistic love object

Student Movement • Shock of Auschwitz-trial 1963 • Große Koalition (Kiesinger and Lübke: ex-Nazis) • Come to see older generation as ‘perpetrators’ – breaking off of dialogue • ‘Trau keinem über 30’ • RAF: ‘Ihr könnt nicht mit Leuten reden, die Auschwitz gemacht haben’ (G. Ensslin) • Post 1968 German Left: focuses on Nazi perpetration and Nazism’s victims

Politicisation of German Memory Discourse • Denial and Repression in 1950 s/60 s • Trauma: de-historicises political issues • Political instrumentalisation of traumatic experience by right wing (Bund der Vertriebenen) • Kollektivschuld as instrument of denial • ‘Aufrechnung’ – Settling of Accountsmentality (‘The Germans suffered just as much as the Jews’)

Bund der Vertriebenen (Bd. V) • • Founded in 1957 Represents expellees Political pressure group with own ministry until 1969 Refuses to acknowledge the loss of Eastern territories Argues expulsions after 1945 against international law Ex-Nazis in high positions (but also SPD-members) Willy Brandt’s ‘Ostverträge’ 1970 effectively sidelines Bd. V • 1990 settlement with Poland re: Polish Western border • Since 2000 lobbies for ‘Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen’ to be built in Berlin • 2005: Angela Merkel’s government decides to build ‘Zentrum’

Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen • At heart of ‘Berlin Republic’ – like Holocaust Memorial • Modelled on Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington • Claims to be about all expulsions of 20 th ct (e. g. Turkish. Armenian genocide 1915, Turkish-Greek expulsion 1920/21, German expulsions after 1945) • German expulsions separated spatially from others • Effectively a ‘national’ memorial for German expellees • Highly controversial with Poland & Czech Republic • SPD-government said no, Merkel said yes

Holocaust as ‘memory paradigm • Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) • Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt (1963) • US TV series Holocaust (1979) • Holocaust as ‘negative myth of origin’ of post-war Western world (Avishai Margalit & Gabriel Motzkin)

Victim-centred approach to history of NS • ‘The approach oriented toward the perspective of the victim in no way represents either a purely subjective or even a complementary way of viewing things. Rather, it is the more comprehensive perspective and the one more appropriate to the totality of the phenomenon, because it proceeds from the absolute extreme case. ’ • Dan Diner, ‘Between Aporia and Apology’, in: Peter Baldwin (ed. ), Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the historians’ debate (Boston/Mass. , Beacon Press, 1990), 135 -45.

Different traumatisation • ‘what was traumatic for one group was obviously not traumatic for the other’. • ‘victims cope with a fundamentally traumatic situation [. . . ] many Germans have to cope with a widening stain, with political shame or guilt’. Saul Friedlander, ‘Trauma, Memory and Transference’, in: Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed), Holocaust Remembrance. The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge/Mass. , CUP), 1994, 252 -63.

Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser, p. 100 • ‘Was sollte und soll meine Generation der Nachlebenden eigentlich mit den Informationen über die Furchtbarkeiten der Vernichtung der Juden anfangen? [. . . ] Sollen wir nur in Entsetzen, Scham und Schuld verstummen? Aber zu welchem Ende? [. . . ] Aber daß einige wenige verurteilt und bestraft und daß wir, die nachfolgende Generation [. . . ] verstummen würden – das sollte es sein? ’

‘Memory Contests’ (Anne Fuchs): Public vs. Private Memory of NS in Germany • Public • Commemorations of Auschwitz • Holocaust memorial • Speeches in Bundestag • Focus on Responsibility • • • Private (family) Stories of hardship Suffering Heroism Skeletons in closets? • Welzer, Moller, Tschuggnall, Opa war kein Nazi, Ff. M, 2002

Political instrumentalisation of traumatic experience • Victim discourse in hands of (far) right – inflated numbers of ‘German’ victims (e. g. Dresden) • Discourse of responsibility for NS and Nazi victims in hands of (liberal) left (Gruppe 47, Student movement) • Neo-Nazi Party NPD in Germany active with success in early 1960 s (9. 8% 1966 -69) and • After 1990 NPD successful in East and West German Länder (Niedersachsen, Sachsen) • 2005: NPD leaves Landtag in Saxony during minute’s silence for Holocaust in protest • NPD: ‘Bombenholocaust’ with respect to Dresden

The German Historians’ Debate (1986 -89) • Circles around issue of ‘Historisation’ of National Socialism • Contrahends: Ernst Nolte and Jürgen Habermas • Andreas Hillgruber: Zweierlei Untergang (1986) • Attempts to de-centralise the Holocaust • Martin Broszat’s and Saul Friedlander’s exchange of letters regarding historisation and ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ • Dan Diner: victim perspective is ‘more comprehensive, more appropriate to the totality’ of NS

Institutionalisation of NS Memory in 1990 s • Debate about Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s willing executioners (1996) • Controversy about exhibition ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 -44 (199599 and 2001 -04) • Controversy about Berlin Holocaust Memorial • Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past (2001)

The ‘Germans as Victims’ Debate of the 2000 s • Follows decade of ‘Institutionalisation’ of Holocaust Memory • Focus on ‘German’ experience of war and traumatisation (e. g. the Luftkrieg, the expulsions) • ‘Germano-centric’ memory of NS • Emotive approach to history (‘Gefühlte Geschichte’, Norbert Frei) • Focus on long-term legacies of trauma within families (transgenerational traumatisation) • ‘Histotainment’ (merging of history and entertainment) • Increasing shift into entertainment and ‘heritage cinema’ (Der Untergang, Das Wunder von Bern, Dresden, Unsere Mütter unsere Väter)