February 6, 2015

Historians understand that language is not a benign force.  It has tremendous power to radically alter our perception of the “truth.”  Those in power who control the dominant cultural narrative can create an accepted historical reality that never existed, or one that integrates multiple perspectives in an attempt to be accurate and fair.  Historians can also silence and ignore those who challenge them, as the West German historians did to their Jewish colleagues who returned soon after the Nazi war to document the Holocaust alongside them.  Nicolas Berg’s startling new book, “The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretation and Autobiographical Memory” (University of Wisconsin Press, translated and edited by Joel Golb), examines closely how most West German historians behaved after the war.  It is an ugly story.  They were defensive and evasive and refused to address their own complicity or that of the German people.  They carried on with arrogance and a shocking lack of empathy or moral reckoning that is both disturbing and revealing about the ingrained mindset that probably led to the rise of National Socialism in the first place.

Their testimonies are chilling in their opaqueness.  Instead of relying on critical thinking and self-reflection to guide their scholarly analysis, they seemed almost immediately caught up in a cover-up of sorts.  They downplayed the Final Solution or ignored it entirely, and attempted to assemble ‘evidence’ to defend their belief that there was considerable resistance to Hitler’s rule even when the evidence proved otherwise.  Most of them preferred to see National Socialism as a perverse aberration in history that could have arisen anywhere.  They refused to look at the decades of violence, hatred, and aggressiveness that had become entrenched in their culture; along with vitriolic anti-Semitism, and they left these observations out of their work.  Many of these historians had been members of Hitler Youth groups.  Some were Nazi Party members.  They all seemed insistent upon finding a way to uphold German honor and pride in spite of what had just happened.   They seemed immune to Jewish suffering and dismissed the personal testimonies of Jewish historians as unreliable.  A few of them sought solace in Protestant theology that offered them Biblical passages that spoke about evil and sin and the wonders of forgiveness. 

The reader finds themselves looking desperately for some sort of remorse that never surfaces.  There was no mass repentance like the world witnessed in Turkey in 2009 when 100,000 people took to the streets to protest the Turkish political orthodoxies that refused to recognize the Armenian genocide.  These protestors held up signs of contrition that read “We are all Armenians!  My conscience doesn’t accept the denial of, and the insensitivity toward the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subject to in 1915.  I reject this injustice and share the pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters.  I apologize to them.”  But in West Germany after the war, and even now, there remains a defensive silence. 

Germany still seems tone deaf when it comes to the pain inflicted upon the Jews.   In 2005, a memorial was opened that was meant to commemorate the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis.  Peter Eisenman was the architect of the site and explained that he purposefully meant for it to be abstract so that interpretation would be left open to the viewer.  His original blueprint did not even include an information center and when one was belatedly added it was placed underground so that most visitors are unaware of its existence.  A reporter for the newspaper Berliner Zeitung was left feeling cold by the memorial site adding that he could not find “the special emotion related to the Holocaust in this concrete field.”  This obtuse and clouded approach seems similar to the way the majority of West German historians worked; their focus was abstract and riddled with gaping holes so that essential truths about the Nazi travesty remained hidden.

But the mounting evidence made maintaining this delusion difficult.  Even their own random comments betray them.  Hans-Guntr Zmarlik said in 1968 that “before 1945….I knew nothing of the mass murders.”  But then he added “Perhaps I did not wish to know.   Afterward it is hard to say whether one had not sometimes decided not to hear when something of it seeped through in the anonymity of a furlough train heading back from the front.  For many knew of it.  In a trip through Upper Silesia in 1944, my sister, who could only tell me this after the war, heard a woman whisper to her neighbor; ‘You see the smoke over there?  People are being cremated there.’  But for me in the summer of 1945….Auschwitz did not exist.”

Werze-Conze had the audacity to write during the 1960’s that he believed Germans were victims themselves of Hitler’s tyranny, and he also believed they were victimized again at the end of the war by the relentless Allied bombing assault. 

Herman Heimpel did admit some guilt for his initial support of the Nazi regime.  He felt upset by the fact that the teaching position he acquired was a result of his professor Siegmund Hellman being deported to Therienstadt in 1942 where he was murdered.  But he fell in line with most of his colleagues when it came to characterizing the Nazi massacre as some sort of anomaly.

Nicolas Berg’s book was originally published in 2003 to much controversy in Germany for what it revealed.  It is now available in English for the first time and sheds an invaluable light on a little known area of Holocaust scholarship.  Berg has written a new introduction and made other revisions that focus more attention on the work of Polish historian Joseph Wulf and his distinguished collaborator and fellow Holocaust survivor Russian French Jewish historian Leon Poliakov.  Berg claims that their work, “The Third Reich and its Thinkers,” which was published in 1959, was invaluable and different from what had come before.  Wuf and Poliakov place the destruction of European Jewry at the center of their interpretation of Nazism.  They spoke candidly of the role of Germans in the war and weaknesses they saw in the German character which included their over willingness to march in rank and file, and conform to authority without questioning it.  They asked bluntly “How could it be that the annihilation of European Jewry could be planned and carried out in the twentieth century and in the center of the civilized world?”

Both Joseph Wulf and Leon Poliakov suffered greatly.  Wulf was in Auschwitz and lost his mother and brother during the war.  He then left for Poland, and then Paris, and returned to Berlin in 1955 determined to record what he had experienced firsthand.  But, by the 1970’s he had grown despondent and wrote to his son that “I have published eighteen books about the Third Reich here, and all this to no effect.  You can document yourself to death for the Germans, the most democratic government can preside in Bonn-and the mass murderers walk around free, have their little houses and cultivate flowers.”  Wulf jumped to his death in 1974.

Only the courageous writer W.G. Sebald seems to have had the courage to confront head-on what so many other Germans couldn’t.  He did so with relentless passion.  He wrote about what it felt like to grow up in the shadow of such a heinous legacy with words that burn.  He defined modern Germany as “strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition.”  He added that the generation that followed the Nazis of which he was a part were unable to feel “any passionate interest in our earlier way of life and the specific features of our own civilization, of the kind universally perceptible, for instance, in the culture of the British Isles.  And when we turn to take a backward view, particularly to the years 1930-1950, we are always looking and looking away at the same time.” Just like Nicolas Berg’s group of West German historians.

Elaine Margolin is a frequent contributor of book reviews to the Jewish Journal and other publications.