Generations, violence and collective identities

in twentieth-century Germany

Mary Fulbrook (UCL)

Remembering war in Germany• ‘Great War’ - defeat, radicalisation of Left and

Right, cultures of violence, rise of Hitler• World War II unleashed by Germany -

responsibility for over 50 million deaths• Over 6 million murdered in the Holocaust• Germany totally defeated: nationalist and

racist ideologies of Nazism discredited• Germany divided: two very different post-war

states; ‘remembering’ in Cold War competition• Yet people want also to remember their own

suffering, mourn their own dead

Remembering War in divided Germany: ‘official’ views

West GermanyHeroes: July Plot, but

also ‘innocent’ ArmyVillains: Hitler, Himmler,

SS, othersPeople: largely innocent

‘bystanders’Defeated, not ‘liberated’Responsibility: sense of

national shame

East GermanyHeroes: Communists,

their alliesVillains: Hitler, NSDAP,

Capitalists, JunkersPeople: workers and

peasants innocent‘Liberated’ by Red Army‘Anti-fascist state’: sense

of pride

(Western) guilt trips?Plaques,

‘Stolpersteine’

(Communist resistance)GDR national hero:

Ernst Thälmann

‘Auschwitz’: historians’ viewsNot only the decision-makers at the top:• also key professional elites and Army• proactive enactment of racism in everyday life;

benefiting from racist policies• widespread knowledge of and participation in everyday

violence - particularly ‘Hitler Youth generation’ (born c. 1914-1924); older generations tend to disapprove of physical violence

• convenient concentration on ‘evil’ as primarily a matter of Hitler, Himmler, SS, concentration camps - but Nazi system sustained by functionaries and wider population, particularly from ‘war youth generation’ (born c. 1900-1913)

‘Private memories’ and generations

• All ‘private memories’ participate in collective discourses - different in East and West

• West: heroism, ‘always against it’, but difficulties• East: possibilities of conversion narrative• Strategies: silencing or selective story-telling• ‘1929ers’: shame and new opportunities after 1949

good communists, good democrats• ‘War children’ and those born later: major

differences between East and West Germans

Remembering war in united Germany since 1990

• New confidence in Federal Republic - democracy with sense of responsibility and shame but not guilt

• But dealing with double past - also Cold War and legacies of East German dictatorship

• Three-generational explorations of past • Continuing controversies: eg Holocaust memorial,

Goldhagen debate, Wehrmacht exhibition, representations of GDR

• Still a ‘past which will not pass away’?

(Western) identification with victims: Holocaust memorial, Berlin

‘Triple’ memorials (Nazism, post-war Soviet occupation, GDR):

Sachsenhausen

The Wall as icon of Berlin: Cold War and beyond