... the Germans also Suffered

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, January 18, 2003
In Their Side of World War II, the Germans Also
Suffered
By PETER SCHNEIDER

BERLIN, Jan. 17 — My earliest memories are of endless
journeys in overcrowded trains that made sudden halts
in open country. Then we would hear the droning of
dive bombers that dropped their loads and veered up
again only to return and drop more bombs. Once, we
were told to get off the train and seek shelter in a
nearby pine wood. As we ran toward the wood, we heard,
I heard — it is impossible to distinguish now between
what one experienced oneself and what was told
afterward — that there were 300 charred bodies lying
in the wood, making it not a good place to seek
shelter.

[...]

W. G. Sebald's brilliant essay "Air War and
Literature" ("Luftkrieg und Literatur") brought back
that trauma. When I put down his book, I could feel
the astonishment he describes in ever recurring
phrases as his own starting point: "The destruction,
on a scale without historical precedent, entered the
annals of the nation only in the form of vague
generalizations as Germany set about rebuilding
itself. It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain
behind in the collective consciousness. . . . This is
highly paradoxical in view of the large numbers of
people exposed to the air campaign day after day,
month after month, year after year, and the length of
time — well into the postwar period — during which
they faced its real consequences, which might have
been expected to stifle any positive attitude to
life."

Only in the past three years or so have German writers
and historians begun to tackle a topic previously
taboo: the sufferings of the German civilian
population in the last years of World War II. (The
Sebald essay, which was excerpted in The New Yorker in
November, is being published by Random House in the
United States next month under the title "On the
Natural History of Destruction.")

At least one reason for the almost complete avoidance
of this topic would appear to be self-evident: the
critical authors of postwar Germany considered it a
moral and aesthetic impossibility to describe the
Germans, the nation responsible for the world war, as
being among the victims of that war. 

But there have suddenly been several attempts to throw
new light not only on the "taboo topic," but also on
the reasons for the taboo. Sebald was followed by
Günter Grass, who published a novella titled
"Crabwalk" ("Im Krebsgang") that recalls a historical
tragedy: the fate of the refugee ship Gustloff, which
was sunk by a Soviet submarine in the spring of 1945,
together with its 9,000-odd passengers, most of them
female naval auxiliaries and children. 

More recently the military historian Jörg Friedrich
published a lengthy study titled "The Fire" ("Der
Brand"), which in the space of a few weeks became a
best seller. Mr. Friedrich's book chronicles the
effects of the carpet-bombing of German cities with
the painstaking accuracy of a historian and the
eloquence of a novelist. He does not hesitate to
declare that the "strategic bombing" of German cities,
which cost about half a million civilian lives, did
not bring the Allied victory over Nazism recognizably
closer and was morally unjustifiable. The book, which
has touched off major controversies in both Germany
and Britain, poses the question whether a war crime is
legitimate if it is a response to a fascist aggressor
who first set the logic of war crimes in motion.

These books were soon followed in Germany by
television documentaries and newspaper series that
disclosed other aspects of the same topic, like the
fate of the 15 million Germans who were expelled from
the former eastern territories in Czechoslovakia and
Poland, millions of whom died or were killed. 

Faced with this extraordinary media attention, one
cannot help but feel that this is a case of delayed
collective recall. The Germans, after a lapse of over
50 years, seem to be recollecting a devastating
experience that had left little trace in the written
chronicles of the nation.

[...]

Sebald, in particular, insists on the question of why
the experience has made so little impression on
postwar literature. To show the dimensions of the
silence and the forgetting, he feels compelled to
retrace the whole extent of the horrors experienced
and then suppressed by the German civilian population.


The strength of his presentation is that it
concentrates entirely on the progress and consummation
of the catastrophe — on the direct experience of those
whom it killed and those who survived it. By narrowing
the perspective to that of many individual pairs of
eyes, that catastrophe acquires the force of a horror
in the face of which all questions regarding the
causes and military results of "area bombing" are
silenced.

[...]

The apologists of a "just war" will hardly be able to
read Sebald's essay without asking themselves whether
the adjective in this euphemistic phrase should not be
replaced by a more modest word like "justified."

As for Sebald's point of departure — the question of
the suppression of this trauma in our literature — he
comes to a clear conclusion. The source of the psychic
energy of German postwar society, he explains,
consisted "in the secret kept by all of the corpses
walled up in the foundations of our state . . . a
secret that bound the Germans together after the war —
and still binds them today — more closely than any
positive goal, such as the realization of democracy,
ever could." 

It is obvious that Sebald does not share postwar
authors' political fears of a "myth of German
victimhood." He accuses them point-blank of "failure
and self-censorship." "The true state of the material
and moral devastation in which the whole country found
itself could not be described because of a conspiracy
of silence that applied equally to all." 

At this point I would like to turn Sebald's question
against him and myself. Why did we screen out the
sufferings of the civilian population from our version
of history for so long? Indeed, why did it take Sebald
himself so long to write his book? 

Like Sebald, I belong to the generation that declared
war on the Nazi generation with its rebellion in 1968.
The student revolutionaries of 1968 simply banished
from their version of history all stories about
Germans that did not fit in with the picture of the
"generation of perpetrators." It was the frantic
attempt of those born after the war to shake off the
shackles that bound them to the guilty generation and
regain their innocence by identifying with the victims
of Nazism. 

The fact that some Germans who belonged to the
"generation of perpetrators" had ended up as its
victims, and that some Germans had even shown civil
courage and rescued Jews, seemed to weaken the force
of the indictment. As far as I can remember, we never
said a word about the Germans who were expelled. 

The same taboo applied to the civilians who were
burned to death in the German cities; it applied to
Stalin's resettlement of the Volga Germans; to those
Germans who were interned after the end of the war in
the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, often for
arbitrary reasons; to the deportation to Siberia of
the opponents of the forced merger between the German
Social Democratic and Communist parties in the Soviet
zone to form the East German Socialist Unity Party;
and to the victims of the mass rapes during and after
the fall of Berlin. Years later, when Helke Sander,
one of the first German feminists, made this the
subject of a film, she found herself branded a
"revisionist." 

However absurd these taboos may appear today, I still
think there were powerful reasons for this more or
less unconsciously observed list of forbidden topics.
It was too much to expect our generation to identify
the perpetrators of the Nazi generation on the one
hand and to consider the fate of German civilians and
of those who were deported on the other. 

The costs of this one-sided historiography and its
omissions were, however, evident even then. Of course,
there were many sons and daughters of survivors and
witnesses of the Allied carpet-bombing and of the
expulsions among the activists of those years. I
cannot remember any of them ever talking about the
fate of their parents. Not that there was an explicit
prohibition; it just wasn't done to volunteer
biographical details.

For all my admiration for Sebald's essay, I feel he is
unjust in giving the authors of German postwar society
such short shrift. He could seemingly justify his
daring project (describing the Germans as victims)
only by accusing his predecessors of failing to do
what he did. As he puts it: the Germans never wanted
to know about their annihilation. By accusing the
German postwar society and its literature, Sebald
might have felt that he could never be accused of
creating a myth of German victimhood. Of course, he
was wrong about this. But I think he didn't need the
whole detour. Still, he wrote an important book at the
right time.

Probably it is only possible now, after the
realization of the terrible things that the Germans
did to other nations, to remember the extent to which
they themselves became the victims of the war they
unleashed.

That this is happening now seems to me to be a gain.
It turns out that the belated recollection of
suffering both endured and culpably inflicted in no
sense arouses desires for revenge and revanchism in
the children and grandchildren of the generation of
perpetrators. Rather it opens their eyes to and
enhances their understanding of the destruction that
the Nazi Germans brought upon other nations. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/18/arts/18SCHN.html

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