Selective Amnesia? The Extent to which West Germans Chose to Forget the Atrocities of World War II

Book Essay on: Robert Moeller, War Stories:
The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany
(Berkeley: University of California, 2001), 329 pages.
UCSB: D820.P72 G526 2001

by Sean Murray
December 5, 2008

for Prof. Marcuse's lecture course Germany, 1945-present
UC Santa Barbara, Fall 2008

About Sean Murray

I am a senior political science major studying public administration and local government. I am currently writing a senior thesis about the interaction between the Supreme Court and public opinion. Before taking History 133c with Professor Marcuse, I only knew German history from the American perspective of both world wars. Studying German history this quarter has deepened my understanding of German politics and culture. I elected to read Robert Moeller's War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany to enhance my knowledge of the social and political development of Germany following World War II.

Abstract (back to top)

In this book Robert Moeller explains how West Germans came to remember the events of the Second World War during the 1950s. Moeller seeks to elucidate the ways individual memories of the war collectively shaped how the Second World War was portrayed in West German popular culture throughout the 1950s. To make his case, Moeller draws heavily on the West German political discourse during the 1950s, with a special emphasis on chancellor Adenauer's rhetoric. Moeller also utilizes press releases, West German historical studies, and an in-depth survey of 1950s German film to analyze West German collective memory of the war. Moeller argues that individual memories of the war produced a collective memory that permitted West Germans to acknowledge the war as part of their history while distancing themselves from the National Socialist state. In my book review, I argue that Moeller accurately assesses the West Germans tendency to overemphasize their own suffering and underplay their responsibility for the war, but, in his analysis, he fails to adequately address counterexamples in which West Germans accept responsibility and acknowledge the losses of their victims.

Essay (back to top)

The question of how Germans dealt with the Nazi past and chose to remember the Second World War has been a matter of highly contentious debate among historians for several decades. The question is a complex one which necessitates the consideration of myriad factors. The most obvious of these factors is the contrast between East and West Germany: the people of the GDR quickly cast themselves as the “antifascist” state while, many historians contend, the “economic miracle” and cold war imperatives made it convenient for West Germans simply to forget the atrocities of the Second World War. Beyond the simple East – West dichotomy, factors such as religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, and political affiliation influenced how individual Germans remembered the Second World War. This wide array of factors and influences make it clear that the question of how Germans chose to remember the war is far too broad and complex to be studied in any depth in a single work.

In his book, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Robert Moeller narrows his focus to how West Germans came to remember the events of the Second World War during the 1950s. Moeller seeks to elucidate the ways individual memories of the war collectively shaped how the Second World War was portrayed in West German popular culture throughout the 1950s. To make his case, Moeller draws heavily on the West German political discourse during the 1950s, with a special emphasis on chancellor Adenauer's rhetoric. Moeller also draws on press releases, West German historical studies, and an in-depth survey of 1950s German film to analyze West German collective memory of the war. Moeller argues that individual memories of the war shaped a collective memory that permitted West Germans to acknowledge the war as part of their history while distancing themselves from the National Socialist state. He asserts that by telling stories of the enormity of their losses, West Germans were able to reject charges of “collective guilt” and claim status as heroic survivors (3). It is my assertion that Moeller accurately assesses West Germans' tendency to overemphasize their own suffering and underplay their responsibility for the war, but, in his analysis, he fails to adequately address counterexamples in which West Germans accept responsibility and acknowledge the losses of their victims.

Moeller attempts to distinguish himself from what he believes to be the vast majority of historians in characterizing the West German memory of World War II. He takes issue with the notion that, after the war, the citizens of West Germany largely avoided all memories of the years of Nazi rule. Moeller cites philosopher Theodor Adorno's argument that “West Germans had attempted to ‘master' the past – to put it behind them and lay it to rest – not ‘come to terms' with their accountability for the horrors of National Socialism” as paradigmatic of theme among historians that West Germans simply chose to forget the years of World War II (15). In a similar vein, Fulbrook appears to echo the sentiments of Adorno in her assertion that the economic miracle coupled with weak allied denazification programs and the pressures of the Cold War contributed to a “collective amnesia” among West Germans about the events of World War II (123). Throughout his book, Moeller convincingly advances a nuanced critique of the Adorno paradigm in that he argues that Germans passionately and vividly remembered much of the 1940s. He argues that rather than forgetting the War, Germans chose to remember their own trials and suffering while failing to acknowledge their responsibility for the war.

Moeller begins to elaborate on his argument with a detailed analysis of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's opening address to the newly elected German parliament in September 1949. Moeller argues that while Adenauer mentions the suffering of the Jews in the concentration camps, his address is far more concerned with German suffering throughout the war. Moeller contends that “the chancellor had even more to say about those Germans who, according to his account, were apparently persecuted simply because they were German. His allusions to the crimes of Nazi Germany were made in the context of a far more detailed and explicit reckoning of non-Jewish victims of the war” (21). Through this analysis, Moeller convincingly makes the point that West Germany did not suffer from “collective amnesia,” but, rather, the West German people characterized the war in terms of their own suffering. Moeller identifies early opponents of Adenauer's rhetoric including the communist party and Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher who expressed “skepticism that Adenauer's government would ever adequately acknowledge the obligations of Germans to compensate those persecuted by the Nazi regime” (23). Nevertheless, Moeller's analysis of Adenauer would be more convincing if he cited criticisms from those who were not his political opponents.

West German politicians, Moeller illustrates, were able to accentuate the suffering of the German people and downplay their culpability in World War II by equating the plight of the Germans with that of the Jews. An illustrative example of Moeller's point is a statement from Hans-Christoph Seebohm, Adenauer's minister of transportation: “the methods that were used by the National Socialist leaders against the Jews and that we most vehemently condemn are on par with the methods that were used against the German expellees” (32). Seebhom's statement accomplishes two things: it separates the Nazis from the German people, thus insulating them from guilt and also equates the hardships of the Jews with those of the Germans. Through this type of rhetoric, Moeller contends, German politicians were able to transform Jews into one group of victims among many (33). In the German political world, Nazi atrocities were used to describe what happened to the Germans in the East. Moeller notes that, “In parliamentary debates over restitution for the war, Germans and Jews were rhetorically equated” (79). In the West German collective conscience, the German people were victims of the war just as the Jews were, and the German people certainly were not the aggressors. Through this memory, Moeller again demonstrates that West Germans did not choose to forget the war; they simply cast themselves its victims.

The German myth of victimization was most apparent in the discussion of West German POWs in the media and the political realm. Moeller suggests that German POWs are the ultimate example of how the German people recast war criminals as victims: “For West Germans, POWs became not war criminals but victims of injustice and of a criminal communist regime” (39). In the early 1950s, the German POWs held in the Soviet Union were portrayed as heroes, and their plight was used by the media and politicians alike as evidence of the brutality of communism. Depictions of POWs being victimized by the communists were widespread throughout West Germany, and German POWs were the subject of weeks of remembrance, public demonstrations, community efforts, and silent prayer (41). The vast outpouring of support for German POWs, according to Moeller, illustrates that the war was not forgotten by West Germans. Rather, memories of the war were at the forefront of the German consciousness and occupied a high profile position in the German media. Germans had not chosen to forget the war, but they remembered it selectively: “The high visibility of POWs and expellees in the political limelight contrasted drastically with the general tendency of the West German state to refer to victims of Nazi persecution in understated terms” (41). Moeller's discussion of the returning POWs is perhaps his most compelling evidence for his critique of the mainstream Adorno paradigm suggesting that Germans attempted to bury the past.

Moeller devotes a significant portion of his narrative to a discussion of the experiences of German expellees from East-Central Europe in the closing months of the war and how German historians portrayed them in the 1950s. In his discussion, Moeller focuses on the work of Theodor Schieder, whom he describes as a conservative historian with a Nazi past. Schieder, along with a number of others, compiled an extensive, and ostensibly objective, collection of personal testimonies detailing the expulsion of Germans from Central-Eastern Europe by the Red Army. The defining characteristic of this 1950s West German historical work is that it focuses exclusively on German civilians victimized by the Red Army. It makes no mention of the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe or the war crimes committed by the Germans. Indeed, Moeller highlights that, “The arrival of Communism, not fascism, in Eastern Europe marked the beginning of the “contemporary history” outlined in the documents” (71). Schieder's historical work made the Germans the victims of the war in the East.

Scheider focused on the most emotional and personal subjects, outlining in graphic detail the worst crimes committed against the German people. Most notably, the Schieder project focused heavily on evidence of mass rapes committed by the Red Army. Moeller argues that, “Stories of rape in the documentation amounted to a moral balance sheet in which women's violated bodies took on an enormous emotional value, and women's suffering came to symbolize the victimization of all Germans” (67). The focus on rape of German women in Schieder's project reinforces Moeller's thesis that, far from forgetting the war, West Germans in the 1950s vividly remembered many of its painful moments in which they were the victims. Moeller further argues that Schieder's project may have been motivated by a desire to cast Germans as victims on the international stage. Schieder reasoned that his documentary record might “influence a change of heart in the United States in favor of the German people” and aid in the fight to win back the “German East” (62). While Schieder's work is compelling evidence of Moeller's thesis, Moeller does not address the work of any other prominent West German historian. It may well be the case that Schieder's work is representative of West German historians during the 1950s. However, Moeller's argument would be stronger if he provided further evidence that Schieder's project was typical of the work of German historians during the 1950s.

Moeller completes his argument with an in-depth, and at times tedious, survey of how German film during the 1950s reinforced the “Germans as victims” conception of the war emphasizing the notion that abstract Nazis, not Germans, were culpable for the war. Moeller focuses on seven films that fall under the category of “Papa's Kino,” a label attributed to these films by the Young German Cinema (125). Moeller asserts that, overall, West German film “dramatized parts of the past that West Germans wanted to see” (127). He characterizes 1950s West German film as abandoning any concern of guilt and complicity about the war, instead depicting fanciful and melodramatic confrontations between heroes and villains (127). In 1950s German film, when Nazis were mentioned, they were depicted as foreign, fanatical, and corrupt. The films typically presented an image of the idealized German man who wore the uniform of the Nazis because he had to, and sought to outsmart his commanding officers at every turn (148). This depiction of the typical German reinforced the notion that the German people were the victims of the Second World War, a war that was perpetrated by the real Nazis. Moeller identifies this pattern in several West German films from the 1950s.

In particular, Moeller's discussion of a film he dubs “Anne Frank Behind the Urals” simultaneously highlights the strengths and weaknesses of his argument. The film, titled Der Teufel spielte Balalaika, directed by Leopold Lahola and released in 1961, tells the story of a Russian POW camp that houses German and Japanese soldiers. The film is particularly striking to Moeller because in it a Jewish woman comes to the camp as a translator, and, through her experiences, equates the German POWs with Jews in concentration camps. Moeller identifies a rather poignant line from the film where the woman says, “I dreamed this barbed wire is my barbed wire, this imprisonment is my imprisonment. Brown or red, barbarism is barbarism” (161). Moeller highlights two key points in the discussion of the film: that the Jewish woman in the film was created to give Germans solace and that “Communism, at least its Stalinist variant, was no different from Nazism” (163). The film highlights the strength of Moeller's argument because it is a perfect example of how the German media attempted to make Germans the victims of the war. The fact that the film equates former Nazis in POW camps with Jews in concentration camps makes this example even more poignant. However, Moeller only briefly mentions the real Anne Frank film (1955) and does not discuss its impact on German memory of the war. His omission may be due to the fact Anne Frank did have a substantive impact on German memory and can be seen as a powerful counterexample to Moeller's thesis.

Bibliography and Links (back to top)(links last checked 12/x/08)

Book Reviews

• Langenbacher, Eric. “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. (book review).” German Studies Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Feb., 2002), pp. 183-184.
  Lagenbacher unequivocally expresses his enjoyment and appreciation of Moeller's contribution to German history. He argues that Moeller's interpretation of West Germany's remembrance of the war is a “long overdue corrective” to the dominant notion that West Germans chose to forget the war altogether. He summarizes Moeller's argument that what West Germans were remembering in the early postwar period were not the crimes many of them had committed under Hitler, but their own personal loss and suffering. Following his analysis of Moeller's thesis, Langenbacher lays out a wholly positive summary of the book.
• Kapczynski, Jennifer. “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. (book review).” The German Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 3 (Summer, 2002), pp. 341-342.
  Kapczynski begins her review by explaining the dominant historical assertion that the immediate post-war period was a “dead zone” in which Germans did not attempt to deal with the National Socialist past. She argues that many historians believed that Germans did not begin to account for their past until the late 1960s. However, Kapczynski highlights that a new group of historians, including Moeller, have begun to reexamine German memory of the war before 1968. Kapczynski enthusiastically praises Moeller's book as a clear and engaging study of the West German discourse on the Nazi past as it developed in the 1950s.
• Schissler, Hannah. “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. (book review).” The American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No. 5 (Dec., 2002), pp. 1659-1660
  Schissler gives Moeller's work high marks in every category. She, like many other reviewers, praises Moeller's ability to augment the staple of historical research that suggests West Germans suppressed all memory of Word War II during the 1950s. Rather than forget the past, West Germans selectively remembered it. Moeller contends that West Germans chose to remember the suffering of non-Jewish Germans, expellees, refugees, and POWs. Schissler concludes with a detailed and laudatory summary of Moeller's work.
• UCSB Hist 133c review by Jeffrey Mercado (2008)
• UCSB Hist 133c review by Graham Fisher-Ortiz (2007)

Web Sites

• Bischof, Günter, “The American 'Good War' vs. the German 'Bad War': World War II Memory Cultures” (May 31, 2004) http://hnn.us/articles/5419.html.
  An interesting discussion that contrasts how the war was remembered in the U.S. and West Germany. In the United States, World War II has been remembered as the “good war” that Americans can be proud for fighting. Bischof stresses that, for the past fifty years, Germans have remembered the war as the “bad war.” Bischof hypothesizes that the negative memory of World War II has led to a German political culture which abhors war in any form.
• Wikipedia, “German exodus from Eastern Europe.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union.
  This Wikipedia article is a thorough and informative discussion of the German exodus from Eastern Europe during Germany's defeat in World War II. The article is especially useful because it describes the legacy of the German expellees and the impact on German memory of the war. The events of the exodus are central to Moeller's thesis that Germans chose to remember their own suffering in the decade after the war.
• Rees, Simon, “German POWs and the Art of Survival” http://www.historynet.com/german-pows-and-the-art-of-survival.htm.
  This article is a long and detailed narrative about the experiences of one particular German POW in a Russian POW camp following the war. The article, while critical of the Nazis, goes to great lengths to sympathize with and illustrate the fate of German POWs. Stories like this were widely circulated in West Germany during the 1950s. German POWs were central to the West German selective memory of the war in which they cast themselves as victims.
• WWII Multimedia Database, “German POWs in Allied Hands” http://www.worldwar2database.com/html/germanpow.htm.
  The website includes a short article about German POWs after WWII, but this is most valuable for the wealth of pictures and links it provides. On the left side, the site contains links to a number of videos and slides about German POWs. The site also contains a laundry list of links to various sites about German POWs.
• Harvard Film Archive, “ Topics in Film, After the War/Before the Wall: German Film 1945–1960” http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2003marapr/afterwar.html.
  This section of the Harvard film archive details a series of films that were shown at a film exposition. The site is valuable because it describes and analyzes many films of the “Papa's Kino” genre that are central to Moeller's thesis. Moeller argues that German films of the 1950s reflect the German desire to focus on idealized aspects of their culture and remember themselves as the tragic victims of World War II.

Books and Articles

• Herf, Jeffrey . Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 527 pages. UCSB: D804.3 .H474 1997.
  Herf's discussion of the memory of World War II in Germany analyzes how the war was remembered in East and West Germany. The work also includes how German memory evolved in the 1950s and 1960s. Herf focuses mostly on how the war was portrayed in high level political discourse. Where Herf's work covers a wide breadth of topics spanning East and West, Moeller chooses to provide an in-depth analysis of West Germany in the 1950s.
• UCSB Hist 133c review by Catherine M.D. Fishman
• Shroeder, Gregory F. “Ties of Urban Heimat: West German Cities and Their Wartime Evacuees in the 1950s.” German Studies Review, Vol. 27, No. 2 (May, 2004), pp. 307-324.
  In this article, Shroeder analyzes the role of Heimat in helping Germans cope with the aftermath of the Second World War. Heimat allowed Germans to connect with their historical, idealized roots. Shroeder argues that those who were evacuated from cities employed a notion of urban Heimat to maintain a connection with their former homes. Schroeder's argument builds on Moeller's discussion of the role of Heitmatfilm in the 1950s.
• Kansteiner, Wulf. In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television and Politics after Auschwitz. ( Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 438 pages.
  Kansteiner explores the memory of World War II across various media. The book focuses on memory in West Germany and examines its development over several decades. The book appears to operate within the traditional historical framework of collective amnesia about the war, as opposed to Moeller's "selective remembering" of the war.

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Any student tempted to use this paper for an assignment in another course or school should be aware of the serious consequences for plagiarism. Here is what I write in my syllabi:

Plagiarism—presenting someone else's work as your own, or deliberately failing to credit or attribute the work of others on whom you draw (including materials found on the web)—is a serious academic offense, punishable by dismissal from the university. It hurts the one who commits it most of all, by cheating them out of an education. I report offenses to the Office of the Dean of Students for disciplinary action.

• For more information, see:
  • Screenshot of Integrity Pledge on GOLD that all UCSB students must acknowledge.
  • UCSB Judicial Affairs has an FAQ for Parents and Students; pdf brochure for students
  • UCSB Office of Instructional Consultation: Promoting Academic Integrity
  • UCSB page on academic dishonesty (html version of brochure; see also updated pdf))
  • Princeton plagiarism page with 3 commented examples.