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A central challenge of understanding 20th-century Germany can be summarised in one word: Auschwitz. What were the deeper roots, and how was it made possible? How have people from different communities coped with the legacies and selectively remembered this past? What were the wider implications of war and division for different generations of Germans - and what are the continuing implications of a 'past which refuses to pass away' for notions of German national identity, even into the 21st century? From the Remembering War Symposium at Wellcome Collection www.wellcomecollection.org
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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