HISTORY: ROBERT GERWARTHreviews Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi PastBy Neil Gregor Yale University Press, 390pp. £25
FEW GERMAN cities were left more damaged by Nazism than Nuremberg. Hitler chose the city as the venue for his annual Nazi party rallies, a powerful display of Nazism’s apparently invincible determination and strength.
One of the best-known propaganda films of the Nazi era, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, chronicles the 1934 party rally and opens with a panoramic view of Nuremberg, shot from the plane in which the Führer descends into the city to the tunes of Wagner's Meistersinger.
Even more damaging for the city than the party rallies was its close association with Nazi anti-Semitism. It was here that the infamous anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws were announced, and here that the most radical anti-Semitic journal of the Third Reich, Der Stürmer, was published. Given its multiple associations with Nazism, it is not particularly surprising that after 1945 the Allies chose Nuremberg as the city in which to hold their war crime trials of the Nazi leadership.
Nuremberg paid dearly for its affiliation with Nazism. The final year of the war in particular brought spiralling military losses and unprecedented destruction to German cities. Allied carpet bombing in the final phase of the conflict turned Nuremberg into a smouldering pile of rubble, killing thousands of civilians and leaving up to 400,000 of its citizens homeless. The expulsion of millions of dispossessed ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945 and their forced propulsion into West German communities already struggling to rebuild themselves added an additional material burden. The war that Hitler started in 1939 had returned home.
In Haunted City,a meticulously researched book that deservedly won the prestigious Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, Neil Gregor explores how the citizens of post-war Nuremberg, bitterly divided between former Nazis and non-Nazis, victims and perpetrators, confronted the Nazi past in general and the genocidal crimes of the Third Reich more specifically.
Gregor’s compelling account of the painful process of remembering the Nazi past in 1950s and 1960s Nuremberg – of acknowledging the Holocaust, but also of making sense of an unprecedented set of personal traumas – offers valuable insights into post-war German memory.
Gregor's book is not the first study to address Germany's difficult and protracted process of confronting the Nazi past. But Haunted Cityis a study of rare perceptiveness, one that offers a nuanced analysis of how post-war German attitudes towards the darkest chapter in their national history changed over time.
Gregor’s careful examination of city council files, memorials and newspaper articles suggests that the Nazi past, far from being driven to the margins of public concern or subjected to collective amnesia, was omnipresent in post-war West Germany.
It featured prominently in post-war German political and cultural life, from war crimes trials and public scandals over former Nazis that remained in influential positions, to arguments over the reintegration of Nazi party members into German society, and negotiations for restitution, pension entitlements or compensation. The diverse actors of West German political and cultural life not only dealt with the legal consequences of the Nazi past, but also engaged in a complex process of imparting meaning to an experience that contained a whole range of interlocking histories of aggression, persecution, murder, destruction, and suffering.
The most convenient (and indeed the most common) way of dealing with the Nazi past in 1950s Germany was to portray oneself as a victim – of Hitler’s propaganda, Gestapo terror, Allied bombing or Soviet ethnic cleansing. The more obvious victims of the Nazi dictatorship, the Jews of Europe, were, however, hardly mentioned in public debates over the fascist past. While such behavioural patterns of acquiescence did not altogether disappear in the later 1950s, a younger generation, born during the war years, began to ask difficult questions about their parents’ role in the Nazi dictatorship.
As the political culture of the Federal Republic became more liberal in the 1960s, traditional types of war commemoration were increasingly challenged by this younger generation. If the total defeat of 1945 had left West Germany no other option than to establish a political system based on democratic legal and political norms, it took the democratisation of West German society, which occurred from the later 1950s onwards, to ensure that active contemplation of the genocidal crimes of the Nazi past became part of the Federal Republic’s critical self-understanding.
However, the extent to which this had occurred by the end of the 1960s should not be overestimated: the activists who pushed through this shift in the focus of West German memory did so in the face of considerable opposition in a climate in which nationalist residues were still strong.
It is a pity that the book ends here. A more long-term perspective stretching to the present day, even a brief epilogue of some description, would have allowed for discussion of more recent trends in Germany’s active engagement with the Nazi past, the Allied bombing campaigns, and the expulsion of ethnic Germans after 1945. That the public discourses about German crimes and German victimhood have changed fundamentally since reunification is obvious to astute observers of the political scene in Germany, but a more thorough scholarly analysis of these recent developments would have been of interest to a general public.
For those primarily interested in the immediate post-war period, however, Gregor has produced an excellent study that is both scholarly and, ultimately, even uplifting. With an indirect reference to other post-war societies traumatised by extreme violence, Gregor concludes his study by arguing that it may be asking too much to insist that members of war-torn communities reflect immediately upon the effects their violent actions had on others.
The example of West Germany, Gregor suggests, provides grounds for the hope that if a dictatorial regime, however violent, can be successfully supplanted by a vibrant democratic political culture, then that same democracy may, with time, begin to ponder those crimes and think critically about them for themselves.
Robert Gerwarth teaches modern European history at UCD and is director of UCD's Centre for War Studies. His recent publications include The Bismarck Myth, as well as Twisted Paths: Europe 1914-1945,and Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain, all published by Oxford University Press