Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys

by Jeffrey Herf

What has Germany made of its Nazi past? A significant new look at the legacy of the Nazi regime, this book exposes the workings of past beliefs and political interests on how--and how differently--the two Germanys have recalled the crimes of Nazism, from the anti-Nazi emigration of the 1930s through the establishment of a day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in 1996. Why, Jeffrey Herf asks, would German politicians raise the specter of the Holocaust at all, in view of the considerable depth and breadth of support its authors and their agenda had found in Nazi Germany? Why did the public memory of Nazi anti-Jewish persecution and the Holocaust emerge, if selectively, in West Germany, yet was repressed and marginalized in "anti-fascist" East Germany? And how do the politics of left and right come into play in this divided memory? The answers reveal the surprising relationship between how the crimes of Nazism were publicly recalled and how East and West Germany separately evolved a Communist dictatorship and a liberal democracy. This book, for the first time, points to the impact of the Cold War confrontation in both West and East Germany on the public memory of anti-Jewish persecution and the Holocaust. Konrad Adenauer, Theodor Heuss, Kurt Schumacher, Willy Brandt, Richard von Weizsacker, and Helmut Kohl in the West and Walter Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck, Otto Grotewohl, Paul Merker, and Erich Honnecker in the East are among the many national figures whose private and public papers and statements Herf examines. His work makes the German memory of Nazism--suppressed on the one hand and selective on the other, from Nuremberg to Bitburg--comprehensible within the historical context of the ideologies and experiences of pre-1945 German and European history as well as within the international context of shifting alliances from World War II to the Cold War. Drawing on West German and recently opened East German archives, this book is a significant contribution to the history of belief that shaped public memory of Germany's recent past.

Genres: History, Germany, Nonfiction, European History, Holocaust, World War II, Politics

558 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Jeffrey Herf is a professor of history at the University of Maryland. His specialty is in 20th-century European intellectual history, especially in Germany. He won the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize in 1998; in September 1996, he was awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History by the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London. He has also published political essays in Partisan Review and reviews in the New Republic, as well as in Die Zeit, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt, and he has lectured widely in the United States, Europe and Israel. He was a contributing editor to Partisan Review and is a member of the editorial board of Central European History.

Reviews

[Andrew]

I'm at a bit of an impasse. Sometimes certain things get in your craw, and it ruins the whole book.

Let's start with the good, which to be fair, constitutes the core argument of Divided Memory -- West Germany did a far better job than the East, largely due to pressures from the West German center-left as led by the SPD, especially after the state-led anti-Semitism (against "rootless cosmopolitans") that reached its culmination in the Doctors' Plot conspiracy theory in Stalin's Russia (which isn't covered) and which found a receptive audience among East German leadership (which is, thoroughly).

But why does he not hammer home the degree to which the CDU government perpetuated the repulsive myth that Nazism was the result of Western man forgetting God? And why does he ignore the vital role that anti-Marxism and anti-modernism in general played in the formation of Nazi ideology, centering anti-Semitism to the seeming exclusion of all else? How does he completely ignore how capital created the pre-conditions of fascism to begin with, especially given how many parallels can be drawn with other anti-modernisms?

The real weakness for me was the way that Herf seemed to equate support for Israel with preserving the memory of the Holocaust. While you could make the argument that supporting the Zionist ideal in the wake of World War II was one of the few ways Germany could make reparations, especially given how unaware the rest of the world was of the displacement of Palestinians at the time, he carries this line of reasoning into more recent decades. A bit of research into Herf's recent essays on the subject reveal him to be firmly in the "Israel does what it needs to" camp, making me pretty damn suspicious of any of his claims on the subject.

So I'm left with the realization that this is a half-good book of history. By all means, read Herf's Reactionary Modernism, it's a brilliant study of "intellectual" anti-Semitism that's worth reading now more than ever. But I hesitate to recommend Divided Memory.

[Will]

This interesting book sets out to ask the ways in which anti-Nazi leaders formulated their conceptions of Nazism during the Second World War, and the ways in which this shaped the subsequent development of memory in the two Germanys.

7 Interesting Arguments:

1. Focus is on politics and political leaders: “The history of politics and the history of beliefs, ideas, ideology, discourses, narratives and representations are inseparable from one another. By writing about politicians and the discourses and memory they construct, I hope to illustrate the importance of politics for shaping the way a society thinks about its past while at the same time drawing attention to the autonomous weight that traditions and interpretative frameworks exert on political life.” (9)

2. Post-1945 Germany saw the resurrection of indigenous traditions rather than the imposition of new foreign ones: “Postwar memories rested on interpretations of Nazism which its German opponents had begun to develop in the Weimar Republic." (5) This concept is refereed to as: "multiple restorations. The term refers to continuities that link German political traditions of the Weimar era and the anti-Nazi emigration to the period after 1945.” (3)

3. In the West, the government sought at first to move on from the crimes of Nazism in order to strengthen democracy, but this came at a price: “The price for postwar integration of those Germans compromised by their beliefs and actions in the Third Reich was silence about the crimes of that period. Memory and justice might produce a right-wing revolt that would undermine a still fragile democracy. So democracy had to be built upon a shaky foundation of justice delayed- hence denied- and weakened memory.” (7)

4. Importance of the role of wartime exile is heavily discussed: “Exile placed the German political emigres in proximity to the Jewish and non-German victims of National Socialism, be they the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union or Jewish refugees in New York or Mexico City... The experience of exile made their postwar memory less provincial, self-centred and self-pitying, and made them more aware of what the Germans under the Nazi regime had inflicted on others.” (375)

5. The SPD are a driving force in calling for recognition of the crimes of Nazism: “Before 1933 the Social Democratic Party was the fiercest defender of German democracy and of the Jewish minority in Germany... In the 1950s, German Social Democrats were the strongest supporters of a sharper judicial confrontation with the Nazi past, restitution to Jewish survivors, and close relations with Israel. Adenauer’s prominence has diverted our gaze from the central role played by Social Democrats in putting the memory of the Holocaust on the national agenda of West German politics and policy.” (377)

6. “The historical significance of the 1960s was that the relationship between memory and democracy began to change. This was part of the significance of the election of Willy Brandt in 1969 and the Social-Liberal era that extended until 1982 under Helmut Schmidt. For the first time a nationally elected majority emerged that was in favour of more public memory and more justice for the Nazi past.” (390)

7. As for the GDR: “The anticosmopolitan purge of winter 1953, the arrest and imprisonment of Paul Merker, the purging of those Jews and their sympathizers who supported restitution or opposed East Germany’s active antagonism toward Israel, the flight of Leo Zuckermann and of the leadership of the tiny Jewish community all irrevocably broke those bonds of solidarity which had emerged between some Communists and some Jews during the war.” (385)

[Anne Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important book about how East Germany sought to depict the Holocaust without fully acknowledging the Jewish dimension. (The East German propagandists claimed that Nazi persecution was based on "class," not "race." This sometimes facilitated their own anti-Semitic measures.) Herf's research is impressive.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Supremely helpful and fascinating look at the way East and West Germany (and various shades of the spectrum in each) dealt with, remembered, and used commemorative ceremonies to further their narrative of the Nazi past. Extremely useful for my thesis research, and well-written.

[Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for comps