Introduction: German Suffering?

Summary

THE MERE MENTION OF THE Third Reich and the Second World War is sufficient to conjure up thoughts about the Holocaust and crimes against humanity. The stories that have filtered into public memory depict racial genocide, civilian and military losses in the Soviet Union, resistance and partisan movements throughout Europe, and heroic Allied battles at Stalingrad and Normandy. However, in the late 1990s the focus on the victims and heroes in Germany began to shift from these internationally recognizable points of reference to examine how Germans “suffered,” or how they might be presented as “victims” during and in the aftermath of the war. With the publication of W. G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (On The Natural History of Destruction, 1999), Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), and Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–45, 2002), along with the four-part special on “Deutsche als Opfer” (Germans as Victims) in the weekly national news magazine Der Spiegel, popular documentaries by the TV historian Guido Knopp, and countless feature films and TV miniseries, it seemed that the story of previously “taboo” topics could at long last be told, from the fire-bombing of German cities and the mass rape of German women by soldiers of the Red Army, to the treatment of German POWs and the plight of the twelve million people expelled from the previously German regions east of the “Oder-Neisse Line.”

As has been well documented, this was not, in fact, the first time these issues had been addressed. Robert Moeller, for example, makes the point that in the early postwar years “a past of German suffering was ubiquitous” across German culture, the specific emphasis being, to a degree at least, contingent on the ideological system articulating the story. In the West official gestures of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) emphasized atonement and reconciliation, but popular memory nourished the sentiment of German victimization, first perpetrated by the Nazis during the Third Reich and then by the communists after the war. In the East the official rhetoric of socialist solidarity and integration promoted the idea that only those who were willing to identify with the suffering of the antifascist resistance and with the Soviet losses in the war could reinvent themselves as victims of fascism, understood to be an extreme form of capitalist exploitation.