6 - Educating Germany: Der Funke Leben and Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben

Summary

IN SPITE OF THE UNDENIABLE causal links between the end of the First World War and the conditions that led eventually to a new war, the Second World War was different from the First, not a barely comprehensible universal bloodletting, but a concentrated war against National Socialism. Remarque himself had written in 1944 (in a piece that survives in a typescript in English) on how Germany was to be educated after the Second World War, pointing out that the full horrors of the Nazi regime would need to be laid open. His comments are in a sense those of an outsider, but of course he was not an outsider, but a German. Coming to terms with the immediate past — Bewältigung der Vergangenheit — would be one of the hardest tasks faced by postwar Germany, and the attempt took and still takes many forms, from revisionism or even the denial of historical events to a full confrontation with the associated guilt for a war that this time involved civilians as much as soldiers on a universal front line, and embraced not just military deaths, but the tortures and mass murder of civilians in the concentration and extermination camps. Remarque contributed two novels to a documentation of the war and the camps, and thus to the questioning of the way Nazi policies were accepted. They are German novels, written in German and published in Germany. However, both appeared first in English, one was published in German only with difficulty, and the other was available for some time in German only in a cut and significantly amended version. These two works are just as or perhaps even more significant than Im Westen nichts Neues. Once again they are historical in setting, have a particular function for the time in which they were written and for later generations in Germany, and carry for the world at large perhaps even more clearly the message that although events of unbelievable barbarity could and did happen, they must not happen again. Der Funke Leben was published in 1952, Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben two years later in 1954.