11 - The Political Legacy of the German Resistance: A Historiographical Critique

Summary

It seems significant that the historiographical interest in the German resistance movement against Hitler lost much of its impetus in the early 1960s, years before the influence of the Critical Left in West Germany substantially altered popular preferences in historical subjects. Previously the legacy of the resistance had served as a source of secondary legitimization for the democratic restoration of the Federal Republic, but the growing self-consciousness of the West German political elites and the country's obvious political and economic success after the Korean War made it less desirable to refer to the resistance as a precursor of postwar German democracy. Moreover, critical evaluations of the national-conservative resistance had gained increasing prominence. Although pointed attacks by Hannah Arendt, George Romoser, Henry Pächter, and others did not affect the official state-sponsored interpretation of the resistance - an interpretation ritually repeated at annual commemorations of the Twentieth of July assassination attempt - their contributions initiated more careful and systematic study of the resisters' political and social philosophy. Works such as Gordon Craig's German History, 1866- 1945 and Sebastian Haffner's Anmerkungen zu Hitler suggested that the original portrait of the resisters as unambiguous proponents of mainstream democracy fell quite far short of the mark. They argued convincingly that the national-conservative resistance was not - as originally depicted in pioneering accounts by Hans Rothfels, Eberhard Zeller, and Fabian von Schlabrendorff - an internally consistent and “unpolitical” movement, informed largely if not exclusively by ethical values.