(no subject)

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Böll was a "normal" soldier in the Wehrmacht during the war, and he wrote a  
diary which was published a few years ago. I would say he had an inner 
distance  to the regime ("innere Emigration"), but not more. His political 
development was  influenced by the "Group 47" (and of course by his Catholic 
confession), and  there he changed his attitude step by step. In the early days of the 
Federal  Republic of Germany, especially in the fifties, a diffuse 
anti-militarism and  anti-war-attitude was so to say "fashionable", and this was expressed 
in the  vehement reactions against Adenauer's plans to introduce the 
"Bundeswehr" in  1957. Also  my father who was in the Waffen-SS as a very young man was 
 against the so called "Wiederbewafffnung" (re-arming).
 
In the Group 47 itself, the relationship between the emigrants who had come  
back to Germany or Austria and the authors who "stayed at home" was very  
complicated. Of course, an anti-nazi-attitude was consense, but there were  hidden 
reservations against the emigrants; I would call it  the "Marlene Dietrich 
syndrome" - an inner ambivalence of those who didn't  emigrate. For example as 
Celan read his "Todesfuge" the first time in front of  the Group 47, the 
reactions were not very good. He wasn't taken for serious.  They didn't understand 
the text, too unusual. Not political correct, as we would  say today.
 
The "pacifism" in Germany after the war was only the other extreme, it was  
more "instinctive", not really motivated politically. And so the resistance  
against the re-introduction of a Germany army failed - and not to forget: it was 
 not in the interest of the western powers and the NATO in these  days.    

kwp  

kwp


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