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Exhibit Review, October 2006 |
Die Stunde Null. Überleben--Umbruchzeiten 1945. An Exhibition of the Museum Europäischer Kultur in Berlin-Dahlem. 8 May 2005--26 August 2007. Free Admission. Reviewed for H-German by Eric Kurlander, Department of History, Stetson University Belated Normalization or New Revisionism?
The process of normalizing the German past began at least twenty years ago, when the pronouncements of politicians and intellectuals like Ronald Reagan, Richard von Weizsäcker and Ernst Nolte helped spark the so-called Historikerstreit. It picked up in the wake of reunification and the staging of German troops in Kosovo. In recent years it has been exemplified by the generally positive reception--in Germany at least--of Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand, the emergence of Ostalgie and the unabashed patriotism of German football fans during the 2006 World Cup [2]. At first glance, Die Stunde Null. Überleben--Umbruchzeiten seems to fit comfortably within this new Normalisierungswelle, seeking to historicize Germany’s own suffering in the wake of the Second World War without excusing her crimes. Emphasizing German victimhood without relativizing Auschwitz represents a delicate balancing act, however, one that has evoked considerable criticism over the past quarter century. [3] Hence, as I approached the Museum of European Cultures, I was particularly interested in the curators’ efforts to place Germany’s “zero hour” in a wider European context. With whom would the German experience be compared? In what ways would the exhibit deal with the emerging differences between Soviet and American occupations zones? How would the exhibitors negotiate the obvious tensions between German perpetration and victimhood, and the fact that many Germans were both victims and perpetrators? [4] Upon entering the museum’s spacious foyer, one is confronted by three immense movie screens replaying the first days of “liberation” in Warsaw (February 1945), Paris (July 1944) and Berlin (April 1945). The striking incongruity between images of jubilant Parisians dancing in the streets and scenes of destruction in Warsaw and Berlin suggests the divergent trajectories of the three European Großstädte after 1945. Adjacent to these screens one reads, in German and English, that the 8th of May, 1945 “not only marked the end of the Second World War in Europe but also the liberation from the National Socialist dictatorship and its policy of annihilation … persecuted individuals, slave laborers and Holocaust survivors could now breathe a sigh of relief. But the peace so urgently desired … also brought with it great fear of an uncertain future.” “Millions were still fleeing,” we are reminded, and thus “Berlin served as a melting pot for the massive migrations of the period.” This caption does little to illuminate the situation in Warsaw or Paris, however, or to contextualize the German experience in a wider European context, so one reads on. “They all streamed into the city: war veterans who frequently had not only lost their homes but also their families, displaced persons and refugees from everywhere, … former forced labourers, individuals returning from exile [Germans, we assume] and freshly released prisoner-of-war.” How many of these refugees were Jews, one wonders? Who were the forced laborers? Although implied, the comparative element has yet to emerge. Approaching the first display one is confronted by a stark caption, “Living with Death.” The text is illuminating, reminding us that 55 million died in the Second World War, including 6 million Jews, 500,000 Sinti and Roma and 25 million Soviet citizens. Of course 7.6 million Germans also died, “including 3.65 million civilians and about 2 million refugees and displaced persons within the collapsing German Reich. The survivors were condemned to live on with their memories of all the dead and their own experiences of loss, grief and guilt.” There are a few vignettes of Germany’s victims: a Polish woman executed after being accused of arson; stock photos from the Warsaw ghetto. But the bulk of this first section focuses on the lives of German Berliners, like the soldier’s spouse who waited twenty years to find out how he died, the house wife incinerated in an Allied bombing attack or the Luftwaffe pilot whose first son was born just weeks he was shot down over the Mediterranean. Adolf Reichwein, a Socialist assassinated in the wake of the 20 July plot, left four children behind.
The next stage of the exhibit, “The War’s End in Berlin”, emphasizes the ruthless nature of Hitler’s dictatorship, which urged Germans to fight or face the death sentence. But a potentially fruitful discussion of coercion versus consent during the last months of the war is glossed over in favor of the Allied bombing campaigns, “50,000 tons of incendiary, explosive, phosphorous and fragmentation bombs, air mines and time bombs were dropped on the city in over 300 air raids … The heaviest air raid occurred in the daytime [i.e. visibility was good enough to avoid civilian targets] on February 3rd, costing 3,000 lives. On this day alone more than 100,000 Berlin residents lost their houses.” Scenes from the film Der Weg in Zweiten Weltkrieg und sein Ende (1995) play as one surveys letters from children lamenting their lack of water, gas, and electricity. The section titled “Forced Journeys” follows a similar pattern. It intersperses one or two tangential anecdotes about Jewish displaced persons--including a quaint photo of young Jews playing football in a DP camp--with its primary focus on the 20 million people, mostly Germans, affected by forced migrations. Not only the Nazis, it seems, but “the Soviet leadership also increasingly relied on the instruments of deportation …massive migration of Germans ensued.… The sum total of German refugees and exiles is now estimated at 14 million, of whom around 2 million lost their lives.” This caption, suggesting important similarities between Soviet and Nazi nationality policy, is accompanied by a map indicating that five of the nine largest migrations (more than 1.5 million) were undertaken by German Vertriebene. One sympathizes with Silesian children deported from their homes and a young Berlin woman who fled to Austria to escape the Allied bombings only to find herself in a Berlin DP camp in the wake of the Soviet invasion. The exhibit also places Soviet orders regarding the handling of refugees, written in German, directly alongside or following similar Nazi orders directed toward Poles and Jews. Sooner or later, the exhibit seems to argue, Germans, Poles, and Jews all suffered a comparable fate. But the timing, causes, and relative severity of their quite different “migrations” are hardly discussed. Here again one wishes for more explicit comparisons between Germans and other victims. By the time we read the caption, “Hunger Was Our Constant Companion,” our subjects have become exclusively Germans. In surveying ration orders and calorie tables from the Soviet occupiers, however, we notice a pattern of privileging the experiences of those in the Soviet zone. Is this because it is easier to sympathize with East Berliners than their western counterparts? We are distressed, in any case, by numerous images of starving women and children cooking turnips amid the rubble, and encouraged by photos of the thriving black market in the Tiergarten, makeshift cooking utensils, and the knowledge that Louise Seiffert and her three attractive children were able to obtain a farm plot in front of the Reichstag. Publications like The next stage, “Children’s Worlds,” begins with the caption, “There Was Only Mommy to Take Care of Us.” “Since most men were either dead, injured, or incarcerated in POW-camps … families usually consisted of grandparents, women and children.” Fair enough. But one is struck by the irony of a display introducing this stage of the exhibit, which includes young Hans-Joachim’s children’s book, Deutsche Heldensagen bedecked with a medieval knight, sword drawn, and no doubt facing east. After surveying posters warning against diphtheria and typhus and viewing a teddy bear rescued from the ruins, one comes to the cornerstone of the exhibit, a selection of 1358 school essays from children describing their personal experiences. The letters are repetitive, mostly lamenting the lack of water, gas, electricity or food (“Wir wollten nicht hungern”). All 1358 are collected in an inexpensive volume, “… ich schlug meiner Mutter die brennenden Funken ab [I beat the burning sparks off my mother]”, available for purchase at the end of the exhibit. Children and their mothers lacked clothing, of course, which is the subject of the next The last part of the exhibit focuses on reconstruction, “The End that Was the Beginning.” The main protagonists are once again the 60,000 _Trümmerfrauen_ working to build their children “eine neue Heimat.” One of the final stages, “Documenting Daily Life,” centers on images taken by two photographers, Hildegard Dreyer and Herbert Hensky, who attempted to capture “the determination of the survivors to make a fresh start.” The photos are well done, though focused, typically, on the “women of the ruins”. The next stage, “Cultural Reawakening,” puts together a collage of new theatre productions (“Cavalleria Rusticana”), reopened cinemas (“Kino Kaiserplatz”), film clips and periodicals from the period 1945-48. The closest we come to non-German victims are excerpts from performances by Shostakovitch’s Symphony Number 9 (1965), Krzysztof Penderecki’s Oraterium zum Gedanken an die Opfer von Auschwitz (1967), and Schönberg’s Ein Überlebende aus Warschau (1947). Since only one of these works stems from the period under investigation, however, their inclusion appears rather artificial. The penultimate stage, “Artistic Reflections”, includes some rare sculptures by unidentified Polish artists representing life in the concentration camps. One nonetheless wishes for some works of Jewish remembrance as well. The exhibit concludes with a section titled “Wider das Vergessen” (translated into English as “Lest We Forget”), which elides much of what happened before 8 May 1945. Rather, it admonishes us to remember the period of German suffering and redemption directly thereafter, “1985: Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech--for the very first time speaking of liberation instead of defeat … 2005: The older generation has largely passed away--later generations do not share its sense of loss--they have a chance of viewing 1945 as liberation.” We began with an ostensibly comparative look “zero hour” 1945 and we conclude with a clean slate. Germany must no longer look at the war with feelings of shame and regret, but with the sense of “being born again.” If this weren’t enough to make the historian uncomfortable, on the way to the last room one may notice a small display with a quote from a 1945 article describing the 200 bomb craters in Berlin’s Olympiastadion. A picture of the jubilant 1974 German World Cup winners lies below the quote. The caption reads, “Spätestens mit der Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1974 war der reale Krieg wieder ganz weit Weg und die Sprache des Spiels bei sich selbst angekommen.” The claim that the euphoria of the 1974 football Weltmeisterschaft replaced painful memories of Germany’s earlier failure to achieve “world mastery” is historically dubious, to say the least. But the ethical implications of equating football contests with the Second World War are perhaps even more problematic. In focusing primarily on German suffering, this exhibit follows the first line of Weizsacker’s quotation above without acknowledging the last. Given the “acute distress” of the immediate postwar months, the philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote in 1945, it is certainly understandable that the population had “become insensitive to discussion.” Yet the guilt question must be answered, and “the way we answer it will be decisive for our present approach to the world and ourselves.” [5] Stunde Null never answers this question. Just as importantly, it fails to contextualize German victimhood within a wider historical trajectory that includes thousands of German perpetrators and millions of non-German victims. Indeed, by the end of the exhibit, I longed for the open revisionism of an Ernst Nolte or Jörg Friedrich. Their work might relativize German crimes, but it does not ignore them. This exhibit is more disconcerting. For one cannot exit without feeling that Germany’s crimes really are history; it’s Germany’s remarkable renewal that deserves our attention. Notes [1]. Exhibit flier. [2]. See Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: der Zerschlagung des deutsches Reiches und das Ende des europäisches Judentums (Berlin: Siedler, 1986); Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917-1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Berlin: Propyläen, 1987); Nolte, Das Vergehen der Vergangenheit (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1987; Jürgen Habermas, Vergangenheit als Zukunft: das alte Deutschland im neuen Europa? (Munich: Piper, 1993); Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (London: Tauris, 1989); Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 2002); W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur (Munich: C. Hanser, 1999); Wolfgang Becker, dir., _Goodbye Lenin_ (2004); H-German bombing forum http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/WWII_bombing/WWII-bombing_index.htm. [3]. “Die Ausstellung widmet sich aus alltagsgeschichtlicher und kunsthistorischer Sicht dem Kriegsende in der Stadt Berlin vor europäisch-vergleichendem Hintergrund. Damit soll eine Zeit in Erinnerung gerufen werden, die gleichermaßen von Entbehrungen und Umbruch, von Verlusten und der Kraft des Neubeginns nach dem Ende der Diktatur.” See Exhibit flier. [4]. See, for example, Andrew Bergerson, Ordinary German in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Alf Lüdtke, “The Appeal of Exterminating ‘Others’: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance” in The Third Reich, ed. Christian Leitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). [5]. Excerpted from John Pomfret: Orville Schell, “History Majors,” New York Times Book Review ( August 6, 2006): p.10.
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“Sparrezepte,” “Wildfrüchte, Wildgemüse” and “Der Haushalts-Brief: eine laufende Sammlung zeitgemässer Ratschläge für sparsames kochen und wirtschaften” helped the Trümmerfrauen (“women of the rubble”) in converting scarce victuals into nourishing meals. Housing remained an issue, however, especially since the Germans were “forcibly managed” by the authorities, “Diese Belege lassen den alltäglichen Konfliktstoff nur erahnen, der sich aus Wohnraum beschlagnahmen und Umquartierungen ergab.” And we read about the everyday tragedy of having to replace “Broken window panes … with cardboard or plywood.” But where are the photos of the KZ-Lager, the images of starving, hollow-eyed inmates, the piles of corpses? Might such images quell our sympathy toward Germans living without electricity or using ersatz kitchen utensils? Once again, the exhibitors seem to have compromised their comparative framework in the interests of evoking German suffering. 