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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