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Stalingrad / Volgograd 1943 / 2003
Memory - Remembrance
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Introduction
by
Wigbert Benz, Germany
While the fighting
at the battle of Stalingrad in 1942/43 itself, the facts of which
and the military-strategic consequences appear to have been to a
great extent explored in relevant studies by German and Russian
historians, [1] the different forms of commemorating the war in
East and West only gradually lead to a process of mutual understanding.
Hitler’s
“Unternehmen Barbarossa” cost the former Soviet Union
more than 20 million lives. Stalingrad itself caused the death of
more than 250.000 German soldiers; the human sacrifice of the Soviet
Union is estimated at half a million. This incomprehensibly great
number of destroyed life-histories with its devastation in the individual
memories of millions of relatives, the trauma of the German attack,
the appalling devastation by the Wehrmacht were not able to develop
a strong Soviet identity in accordance with the wishes of the rulers
of the state. They relied upon the final triumph: the defeat of
Fascism. Heroic commemorating instead of painful and paralyzing
remembrance of the victims should enable the state to act internally
as well as externally. Stalingrad as a place of remembrance represents
the core of this heroic remembrance: a heroic memorial complex,
one kilometer long, and crowned by a 90 meter-tall statue of Mother
Homeland. 438 objects of remembrance, i. e. plaques, obelisks, mass
graves, and moments, were counted by Sabine Arnold when carrying
out research for her doctoral thesis. [2] The combination of hero
worship and Stalin worship was followed after Stalin’s death
by a mass heroism: a veritable flood of publications built up ordinary
men and women into heroes, be it heroic female gunners, heroic female
medical orderlies etc. “At some point in time”, writes
Michael Jeismann, “it (=Stalingrad) was something mainly for
the metal plate wallpapers of medals on the breasts of Russian heroic
veterans.” It was only Gorbachev’s Perestroijka that
opened the eyes to a (self-)critical reflection, [3] which however
until today appears to be broken in many ways, e. g. in the instrumentation
of the old cult of heroic commemorating for the war against Afghanistan.
Here the gap between the official heroic statements and the stories
of the soldiers who returned from the war opens wide. Until today
the traumatic experiences with their split into collective and individual
remembrance weigh heavily on the different generations of post-Soviet
society.
In view of the
total defeat in 1945 the myth created by Goebbels of the “heroes
of Stalingrad”, whose “sacrifice” must not have
been in vain, so that enduring and holding out in the war became
an end in itself and any thought of a German capitulation a betrayal
of the fallen heroes, had no chance of surviving the Nazi Regime.
The German society saw itself confronted with accusations of having
supported, by active participation or toleration, a criminal regime
in the Holocaust and the war of extermination. While the society
in the German Democratic Republic attempted through identification
with the Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland and the Red Army beating
back the fascist war of conquest to present itself as the “better
Germany” after 1945, the society in the Federal Republic of
Germany needed a different form of exoneration from the assessment
as a society of evildoers. The defeated 6th Army, abandoned by a
criminal government and left to die of cold, hunger, or by the hand
of the enemy, mutated in its character as a conquering army pushing
deep into the attacked Soviet Union into one of a pure community
of victims. Novels published in unbelievable mass-editions brought
together the selective individual memory of destitution and misery
with the social needs of a society of evildoers. “In the sectorally
limited look at the suffering of the soldiers in the war in the
East (…) the society of culprits (evildoers) became, in the
way it saw itself, a society of victims, while the people of the
attacked Soviet Union again and again were represented in a mixture
of anti-communist stereotype and pejorative anti-slavic images of
man so that the own role as a victim was elevated. [4] “Which
other cipher (than Stalingrad, W.B.) in connection with a merciless
war of extermination unleashed by Hitler could have offered them
(=the Germans) a better chance to take on the role of the victim,”
asks with relevance to current affairs the editorial of a great
German news magazine. [5] In contrast, the attempt by the Hamburg
Institut fuer Sozialforschung in its first Wehrmacht-Exhibition
to trace the bloody trail of the 6th Army during its advance on
Stalingrad lasting for months, and to deal also with its crimes,
enraged not only the surviving veterans of the Wehrmacht. [6]
60 years later
it appears to be the more urgent to focus on the paradigms, demanded
already ten years ago, of an appropriate culture of discussion and
remembrance of the battle of Stalingrad: [7]
- the hopeless
suffering of the ordinary man, who was squeezed into a military
system of government and could not escape;
- the loss of the human perspective among the political and military
leadership of the Nazi Regime;
- the extreme questionability of absolute military obedience;
- the destructive laws of movement of a “Volksgemeinschaft”,
which for its social life adopted the military system of rules;
- the escape from the realities into an illusory world created by
the propaganda of the “heroic epic” and the alleged
defense of the values of the Occident against Bolshevism;
- the character of extermination of the German war of conquest against
the Soviet Union.
These
and other questions will be discussed at an academic conference
of Russian and German historians at the University of Volgograd
from April 3 – April 6, 2003. The broad subject is: “Stalingrad
– What have Germans and Russians learned 60 years later.”
On the German side will take side: Norbert Frei (Bochum), Hans-Heinrich
Nolte (Hannover), Manfred Messerschmidt, Wolfram Wette, Gerd R.
Ueberschär, Julia Warth (all Freiburg), Winfried Vogel (Bad Breisig near
Bonn), Detelf Bald (München) and Wigbert Benz (Filderstadt).
The exact program of this international academic conference will
be published here as soon as it is available as will be a report
on the essence of the given lectures.
Notes
1) Wegner, Bernd:
Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1942/43. In: Das Deutsche Reich
und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Bd.6. Der globale Krieg. Die Ausweitung
zum Weltkrieg und der Wechsel der Initiative 1941 – 1943,
ed. by the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Stuttgart
1990, p. 761-1102; this book include further literature.
2) Arnold, Sabine: Stalingrad im sowjetischen Gedächtnis. Kriegserinnerung
und Geschichtsbild im totalitären Staat, Bochum 1998.
3) "Wiederentdeckung einer Schlachterfahrung. Sechzig Jahre
nach Stalingrad. Eine vorbildliche historische Dokumentation in
der ARD zeigt den Krieg und die Menschen", in: Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 20.12.2002.
4) Jahn, Peter: Russlandbild und Antikommunismus in der bundesdeutschen
Gesellschaft der Nachkriegszeit, in: Quinkert, Babette (Ed.): "Wir
sind die Herren dieses Landes". Ursachen, Verlauf und Folgen
des deutschen Überfalls auf die Sowjetunion. Hamburg 2002,
p. 223-235, p. 234.
5) "Hitlers Stalingrad. Vor 60 Jahren: Der Anfang vom Ende
des Dritten Reiches", in: DER SPIEGEL, 16.12.2002, p. 50-74,
p. S.53.
6) Boll, Bernd /Safrian, Hans: Auf dem Weg nach Stalingrad. Die
6.Armee 1941/42, in: Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht
1941 bis 1941, ed. by Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, Hamburg 1995,
p. 260-296.
7) Stalingrad. Mythos und Wirklichkeit einer Schlacht, ed. by Wolfram
Wette and Gerd R. Ueberschär. Frankfurt/Main, p.11.
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