Introduction

Summary

The bestselling book in West Germany during the 1950s was an 800-page memoir written by a fanatical right-wing nationalist and convicted criminal.² Ernst von Salomon’s 1951 Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire) sold a quarter of a million copies in its first year alone.³ The densely written autobiographical novel is a literary assault on the American military occupation, which had begun in 1945, and a scathing critique of the Allied nations’ messianic campaign to “ideologically cleanse” the defeated population of National Socialism. The “Fragebogen” itself was well known to von Salomon’s readers; this was the widely distributed and much despised political screening instrument used by the occupying armies to identify, categorize, and punish Nazi Party members and sympathizers. The questionnaire asked for information on family, education, military service, and most importantly, membership in Nazi-affiliated groups. As a prerequisite for employment in jobs deemed influential, including most civil servant positions, millions of German civilians and returning soldiers completed the form. With a hyperbolic tone, von Salomon uses the questionnaire as a synecdoche for the entire denazification project and employs it for the narrative framework of the book – he recounts his life story by “responding” to the survey’s 131 questions, while intermittently denouncing the force-fed politics of defeat. He describes the form as an absurd bureaucratic blunder and a self-righteous “examination of conscience” (Gewissenserforschung).⁴