The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method

The Sins of the Fathers

CHICAGO STUDIES IN PRACTICES OF MEANING

A series edited by Andreas Glaeser, William Mazzarella, William Sewell, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, and Lisa Wedeen

Published in collaboration with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory

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The Sins of the Fathers:

Germany, Memory, Method

Jeffrey K. Olick

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38649-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-38652-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226386522.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Olick, Jeffrey K., 1964– author.

Title: The sins of the fathers : Germany, memory, method / Jeffrey K. Olick.

Other titles: Chicago studies in practices of meaning. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. |Series: Chicago studies in practices of meaning | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016032598 | ISBN 9780226386492 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226386522 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Collective memory—Germany (West)—History. | Nationalism and collective memory—Germany (West) | Guilt and culture—Germany (West) | Germany (West)—History. | Germany (West)—Politics and government—1945–1990.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface

Part 1  Introduction

1  Placing Memory in Germany

2  The Sociology of Collective Memory

3  Prologues: The Origins of West German Memory

Part 2  The Reliable Nation

4  Bonn Is Not Weimar

5  Expiation and Explanation

6  Germany in the West

7  The Return of the Repressed

8  The Reliable Nation

Part 3  The Moral Nation

9  Seeds of Change

10  The Grand Coalition and the Wider World

11  Social-Liberal Guilt

12  The Moral Nation

Gallery

Part 4  The Normal Nation

13  West Germany’s Normal Problems

14  The New Conservatism

15  The Politics of History

16  Beyond Bitburg

17  The Normal Nation

Part 5  Conclusions

18  Epilogues: Berlin Is Not Bonn

19  History, Memory, and Temporality

Appendix

References

Index

Preface

It is quite common for authors to claim in prefaces that their books have been a long time coming. Suffice it to say that no one can accuse me of exaggerating when I claim this for the present book. I first began thinking about the issues addressed here more than twenty years ago, and I have been continually preoccupied with them even when other projects took me in rather different, though rarely entirely unrelated, directions. My continued preoccupation is due to the fact that the issues I am ultimately addressing through this case study are of the most general and significant sort: What responsibilities do nations bear for their histories? How much memory, and what kind, is appropriate, particularly when the past contains so much that is profoundly regrettable? How should we stand toward such pasts, both individually and collectively? These questions take on different contours in different times and places, but they are surely among the most durable we humans face as we try and try again to figure out how to live with ourselves and one another. Trying to answer these questions is a lifelong project indeed, or at least it has been so far.

This book enjoys the benefit of other recent historical and interpretive scholarship on German memory. There are, for instance, numerous works that focus intently on memory in a particular period of German history (most often the Fifties—e.g., Moeller 2003; Brochhagen 1992; Frei 1996; Kittel 1993; and perhaps not least an earlier book of mine [Olick 2005]). There are also other studies in addition to this one that investigate the operation of memory in particular social institutions, such as business (e.g., Wiesen 2001), historiography (e.g., Berg 2003), the diplomatic corps (Conze et al. 2010), intellectuals (e.g., Moses 2009; Müller 2000), and the media (e.g., Naumann 1998). Still others have expanded our knowledge by comparing National Socialism’s legacies in West Germany to its legacies elsewhere—usually in East Germany (Herf 1997), but often also in Austria (Art 2006; Bergmann et al. 1995) and sometimes Europe more broadly (Lebow et al. 2006; Echternkamp and Martens 2010). This book seeks to add to those excellent works with a study of official speech and what I call the field of the state.

In some ways, however, this accumulated scholarship has allowed me to dare something perhaps riskier than many monographs: namely, a reading of a record over a full fifty years (though in this, too, there are other examples—e.g., Kielmansegg 1989; Bude 1992; Jarausch 2006). My reading, moreover, has been motivated by my desire to address at least three relatively distinct literatures: cultural and historical sociology, the developing field of memory studies, and the historiography of Germany. As a sociologist, for instance, I have been particularly interested in arguing for the importance of the phenomena I study—namely, commemoration and political symbolism—against those inclined to dismiss these practices as epiphenomenal, as an older vocabulary used to put it. I have also sought to enhance sociology’s commitments and capabilities as an historical enterprise, and this has led me to an emphasis on mnemonic processes, and to a somewhat unusual strategy of presenting speakers’ struggles to make and remake meaning over time in all their discursive richness.

As a memory scholar, I have of course also thought about the role of the past in the present in very particular ways, which I address using Jan Assmann’s term mnemohistory. This perspective from memory studies, moreover, has led me to see memory as being essential to answering the questions I have raised about history and meaning-making within sociology. Being a memory scholar also entails a nearly continuous struggle with the continuities and discontinuities between history and memory, and with the different kinds of work involved in studying each. This is one more way in which the narrative of German speech I present differs from other historical work on these issues. To borrow from Assmann’s description of mnemohistory, I am as interested in the actuality as in the factuality of the past, though I am also interested in how each of those things feeds into the other.

Given my multiple audiences, I have thus undertaken not only a broad reading but also quite a bit of theoretical and methodological reflection, which will surely interest some readers more than others. But, again, it is the fascinating story of German memory itself and the moral issues it raises that have kept me working. All other aims aside, my main motivation has been to recount the fascinating story I have found in my data: the actual words spoken by a state’s political leaders over the course of that state’s history, as they struggled to make sense of their past and to specify what obligations it entailed.

Like any project with a long gestation, this one has benefited from conversations with many individuals, and from presentations in many institutional contexts. The most important of the latter was a 2006 manuscript workshop at the University of Chicago’s Wilder House with, among others, the editorial board of the Chicago Studies in the Practices of Meaning. That conversation redirected much of my work, and undoubtedly saved me from numerous errors. Thanks to Andreas Glaeser, Bill Sewell, Lisa Wedeen, Andy Abbott, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and several others for their helpful advice at and after that meeting; I am particularly proud to have this book included in this important series. The other significant institutional context that has enabled my most recent efforts to complete this book is that of the sociology department at the University of Virginia, which has, over the past decade, been a nurturing scholarly home for me. I am grateful not only to my colleagues in the department, but to many friends around grounds, as well as to the administration of the college, for providing a climate that values old-fashioned scholarship, even when it comes slowly.

While there are surely many individuals I should acknowledge were my memory better, I am hesitant to try to include everyone, because of the risk of accidentally missing some among the many with whom I have discussed my work over so many years. Instead, here I would like to single out just a few crucially important individuals who affected this book most directly—without, of course, holding them in any way accountable for any of its weaknesses. As already mentioned, Andreas Glaeser led the Chicago workshop and helped this book toward publication. I am grateful for his support and inspiration. In the realm of steadfast champion, there has been none greater for me than the wonderful Barry Schwartz—mentor, friend, exemplar. Daniel Levy is by now one of my very oldest and closest friends; he was there at my first job talk in 1993 and through my entire career as a comrade-in-arms, and he has continuously helped me with this book and so many other things. More recently, though by now also for quite a while, my former student and now coauthor, colleague, and friend Christina Simko has read and reread the manuscript countless times, and has given me essential courage when it was desperately needed, for which I am profoundly grateful. Others whose counsel has helped this project in various of its incarnations include Guenther Roth, Priscilla Ferguson, Allan Silver, Wendell Bell, Juan Linz, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Robert Moeller, Krishan Kumar, Kai Erikson, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Nachman Ben-Yehuda, and Dirk Moses, among so many others. Thanks go as well to Claire Maiers and Daniel Wurzer for excellent research assistance.

Last but not least, like so many others, I have benefited from the tireless support and advocacy of the inimitable Doug Mitchell, without whom American sociology would surely be a much lesser enterprise than it is, just as surely as I have set records for trying his patience. Thank you, Doug! The entire team at the University of Chicago Press has helped enormously on the long road of, as Doug puts it with a wink, bookmaking. Doug’s assistant, Kyle Wagner, was a great help with crucial details. Very significantly, anyone holding this book should be even more grateful than I am—and I am extremely grateful—to Renaldo Migaldi, whose careful and sympathetic editing not only has saved me a great deal of embarrassment, but has made your experience as the reader much more felicitous than it might have been otherwise.

I am lucky to say that this short list of people to whom I am grateful for their direct influence on this book barely scratches the surface of the group of people whose work and generosity has affected me in important ways over the years.

As important as scholarly and professional context has been to my work on this book, nothing would have been possible or meaningful without my wife, Bettina Winckler, and my children, Hannah and Benjamin, who have played roles that cannot be put into words. Because of my children’s complex family heritage—half Jewish and half German—this is in so many ways their book, even if it was begun before they were.

* Part 1 *

Introduction

Chapter 1

Placing Memory in Germany

On November 10, 1988, the West German parliament assembled for a rare special commemorative session. Fifty years earlier, Nazi thugs had systematically rampaged through the streets of German cities and towns.¹ With the bogus justification that a Jew had assassinated a German official in Paris, they looted, burned, and otherwise vandalized German-Jewish businesses, homes, and places of worship, arresting many Jews, beating and killing others. Official anti-Semitism was certainly not new in 1938 Germany, but the events of the so-called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) were a portentous demonstration of the regime’s brutal hatreds and violent potential. No longer could ordinary Germans honestly dismiss National Socialist rhetoric as a mere tactic or deny its human consequences. While perhaps nothing before the Holocaust could have led one to imagine such an eventuality, in retrospect (even noting all the distortions of hindsight) Kristallnacht appears as a major moment in an historical trajectory consummated in the gas chambers.² Fifty years later, its anniversary provided an important opportunity for West Germany to symbolize its distance from that world long past.

The ninth of November in 1938 was not, of course, the only one marked in German history. November 9 was also the anniversary of the revolution of 1918, as well as that of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923; in 1989 it would be the day the Berlin Wall opened. Nor was 1988 the first time the events of 1938 had been commemorated in West Germany, though it was the first time that such a commemoration was to be stamped with the import of a ceremony in the Bundestag. Indeed, the previous few years in the Federal Republic had seen a number of important debates about the meaning of the Nazi past, and this 1988 commemoration of Kristallnacht succeeded several notable fortieth anniversaries of other events and preceded a flurry of fiftieths. However singular, commemorative events are always but moments in continually unfolding stories, and the context of the 1988 Kristallnacht ceremony included ongoing controversies about the present and future role of commemoration in German politics.

While the governing Christian Democrats³ had originally opposed a special commemorative session of the parliament for the occasion, East German plans for a major ceremony led the West German conservatives to acquiesce to opposition proposals. One lesson of the contentious debates of the previous years—indeed, of the entire history of the Federal Republic—was that the West German leadership could not appear unwilling to acknowledge the Nazi past, to say nothing of letting the East Germans seem more willing to do so. But the Christian Democrats did not go so far as to accept a proposal of the Green Party, supported by a number of Social Democrats, to invite Heinz Galinski, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland), to speak. The Christian Democratic president of the Bundestag, Philipp Jenninger, wanted very much to deliver a major address, aspiring to match Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker’s worldwide triumph three years earlier, on the fortieth anniversary of May 8, 1945, the day of Germany’s surrender.⁴ Despite the wrangling, Jenninger had every expectation of success. He was an experienced—and previously unchallenged—speaker about the Nazi past, was well respected as a politician and leader, and was seeking to extend rather than to question the critically acclaimed commemorative solutions von Weizsäcker had offered in 1985.

The 1988 ceremony opened with a song, featuring cantor and chorus, from the Kracow Ghetto Notebook by Yiddish poet Mordechai Gebirtig, followed by the Jewish actress Ida Ehre reading the poet Paul Celan’s Todesfuge. Jenninger then began his address: Today we have come together in the Bundestag because not the victims, but rather we, in whose midst the crimes occurred, must remember and give an accounting for what we did; because we Germans want to come to an understanding of our past and of its lessons for our present and future politics. Almost immediately, the catcalls began. Jenninger pleaded that he be allowed to continue, that this dignified moment be allowed to take place in its planned form. As he tried desperately to continue and grew ever more flustered, however, the challenges increased. Members of the Bundestag began to leave the chamber in protest. Others remained transfixed in their seats, some covering their faces with their hands. As Jenninger pushed ahead to detail the hopes and failures of ordinary Germans in the 1930s, one of the most spectacular disasters in the history of German commemoration unfolded. Within hours of the ceremony, Jenninger submitted his resignation and retreated from public life.⁵

Outraged cries asking how this could have happened quickly gave way to more perplexed questions about what exactly had occurred. The deputies who had stormed out of the chamber expressed their outrage, but were hard pressed to specify what had caused it. As hours turned into days and weeks, commentators reflected on the actual text of Jenninger’s speech, and began wondering what had gone wrong. Jenninger had said nothing substantively new about German history, nothing others had not already said in other contexts, though he had addressed German motivations in an unusually direct manner.⁶ It was members of the Greens and of the Social Democrats who left the chamber—not conservatives, who were more commonly associated with avoiding direct attention to German perpetration (though the left was always more likely to condemn what it saw as inadequate commemoration). But even Jenninger’s own party wasted no time accepting his resignation, and did not challenge the challenge: they were eager to show that they had learned the lessons of three years earlier, when US President Ronald Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had faced severe criticism for appearing to wipe out historical differences during a wreath-laying ceremony at a military cemetery at Bitburg.⁷ Within several weeks, a loose consensus emerged that although something here had gone seriously wrong, it was not necessarily Jenninger’s fault, his poor oratorical performance aside.⁸

The Problems of the German Past

The Jenninger scandal is but one moment in the extraordinarily complex history of German public memory. Many pages from now in this book, I offer a richer description of the event itself, and venture a reading of it. Here, the anecdote serves merely to sensitize us to the difficult issue of German commemoration: one pitted with mixed motives, conflicting demands, and vexed themes even fifty years on. How do you speak for a nation held accountable not only for two devastating wars in one century, but for what many consider to be the worst atrocity in human history? This is the dilemma every leader of the Federal Republic of Germany has faced.⁹ To explain the solutions they have offered is this book’s central goal.

All nations, of course, have specific parts of their collective pasts they would prefer to pass over. The catalogue of failures, injustices, and horrors committed in the name of nations can create significant problems if openly acknowledged. National identity and political legitimacy always involve a precarious balance between remembering and forgetting. But nowhere has this problem been more potent than in the Federal Republic of Germany, where a difficult past has weighed heavily in virtually every moment and aspect of political life. As other nations face historical burdens from their past, moreover, they often look to Germany as a test of what happens when a society confronts difficult memories. Germany, one might say, has become the world’s canary in the mine of historical consciousness, and our benchmark of spoiled identity.¹⁰

Specifying the German Past

But why has the past been a problem for German politicians? The answer seems obvious: It is because of the Holocaust. Saying this, however, raises more questions than it answers. For instance, Holocaust is not an unproblematic term: it already implies an interpretation, one different in sometimes important ways from other terms such as Shoah, Final Solution, or Genocide of the European Jews. Each of these terms—as well as others—has its own history and its own distinctive historical, political, and even theological implications (see, for instance, Young 1988). This book is in part an examination of the origins and operations of these and other meanings in the German discourse. Obviously, some term is necessary for expository purposes, and I will indeed mostly use Holocaust (capitalized as the name of an event rather than being lowercased as a metaphorical description) because it is the term most commonly used in the historical literature and in popular culture. By doing so, however, I am not explicitly endorsing any particular interpretation—historical, political, or theological. Mostly, I am interested in which words Germans used with what implications. Holocaust, as we will see, was a relative latecomer to the German discourse.

This fact leads directly to another important caveat to seeing the Holocaust as the obvious problem for German politicians. As Tony Kushner puts it,

Historians and others have an enormous desire to believe that the liberation of the camps in spring 1945 exposed to the world the horrors of the Holocaust. In so doing they impose later perceptions on contemporary interpretations and provide a deceptively simple chronology on what was, in reality, a prolonged and complex process which is yet to be completed. The assumption that an immediate connection was made at the time of the liberation of the camps to what is known as the horrors of the Holocaust has rarely been checked by reference to detailed evidence. Surprise is therefore expressed when the reality turns out to be somewhat different from the expected pattern (1994, 213).

Why did Germans and others in the immediate postwar period not recognize what is now taken axiomatically as the most significant quality of the Nazi system—the extermination of the Jews? This begs the question, as Kushner points out, of how this belief became axiomatic. To inquire into that process is in no way to imply that the conclusion is incorrect, though assuming this axiom does block off other, often legitimate, areas of inquiry. The point is simply to avoid assuming what contemporaries did not, and to understand why they did not.

To show that the current focus on the Final Solution as the centerpiece of German history was not always obvious, moreover, is not necessarily to condemn those who failed to see it as such, though there is much to condemn in the self-centered focus that prevented many Germans from acknowledging great crimes and their complicity in them (Moeller 2003). The point is merely that the problems of the German past are indeed both older and broader than the Holocaust.

In the first place, the burdensome legacy of the Second World War includes political authoritarianism and military aggression in addition to genocide. While the Holocaust is today the obvious referent when one speaks of the German past, the destruction of the European Jews was only one topic among many (and often not a very important one) in discussions of the German problem during and after the war. In the German discourse, causal explanations of National Socialism have focused substantially on factors such as delayed modernization, problematic geography, legal inadequacies, economic crisis, nihilism, massification, secularization, and capitalism more generally, rather than on anti-Semitism (for detailed analyses of these explanations, see Olick 2005 and Ayçoberry 1981). Sometimes speakers have elided the issues; sometimes they have kept them distinct. The reasons for doing so are complex, dictated by changing interests, identities, circumstances, and traditions. One feature of German public memory that is especially striking in retrospect, however, is how obliquely German speakers often approached Auschwitz and anti-Semitism.¹¹ As we will see, this is partly because they used other issues to stand in for the Holocaust. But it is also partly because the problems of the Nazi past extend widely beyond industrial genocide and are often understood, more and less legitimately, in other terms.¹²

In the second place, in many popular as well as scholarly accounts, National Socialism and the Holocaust are seen as the end results of a long development running from Bismarck, if not earlier, along a preset historical track to the gates of Auschwitz.¹³ This kind of story, of course, risks misunderstanding the contingencies of history, the crucial turning points through which other outcomes were always possible. At very least, however, the questions of the German past are older than National Socialism, going back to the First World War and earlier. There has never been an American, British, or French question in the same way as there has long been a German question. Germany? Goethe and Schiller asked in Xenien as long ago as 1796 (and as writers on Germany have been quoting ever since). But where does it lie? I don’t know where to find the country (1833, 109). The enigma of German historical identity has rarely been easier in the years since then. Whatever special problems memory of the Nazi period has raised, they thus rest on an already problematic foundation of national history and collective identity.¹⁴ The Holocaust symbolizes much, but not all, from the German past that troubles its present.

As for whether the Holocaust is the worst atrocity in human history: This kind of claim makes sense from neither a social-scientific nor a moral standpoint. From the first perspective, all events are unique; they are also comparable in the technical sense that we can only understand them by identifying what they do and do not share with other historical moments. And morally, can we really say there are any definitive criteria for measuring the suffering of one person or group against that of another? Mine is always worse than yours. Whether or not one accepts these arguments, however, does not bear on the question of how claims of uniqueness or comparative judgments of nature or degree work in political discourse—which is my central topic here. When, where, and why do claims of uniqueness or relative horror emerge? Who advocates and who resists them? How are the claims discursively organized? On this last point, it is interesting to note that claims about the uniqueness of the Holocaust (which imply noncomparability) often go hand in hand with claims that the Holocaust is the worst. Can the Holocaust simultaneously be noncomparable and worse? Under what circumstances do such claims make sense? None of this, of course, is to discount concerns that efforts to deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust have often been part of arguments to avoid responsibility for remembering it. Comparison properly serves the task of understanding, but—as we will see—it can also improperly serve the goal of relativization (see Maier 1988).

Placing Germany in Memory

The question about which aspects of the past have been a problem for German politicians, however, leaves a deeper question unexamined: Why would politicians want to talk about the past in the first place? Why do national leaders use the past as a way to legitimate what they do? When, how, and why does historical imagery legitimate identity and policy? When and where are political leaders expected or even required to give an account of the past? Answering these questions is a particularly important prerequisite for understanding what happens when the past is more obviously toxic than useful, when the normal rules of commemoration—whatever they may be—do not seem to apply, as has certainly been the case in Germany since 1945. And lately it seems to have become the case in many other places as well (Olick 2007).

Because the problems of the German past are simultaneously contemporary and historical, specific and general, so too must be our approach to them. We know, for instance, that many different social groups—maybe even all social groups—define and legitimate their collective identities and activities by telling stories of various kinds (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Ricoeur 1984; Wolin 1989; Bruner 1990; Carr 1991). But they have done so in different ways at different times and places. Before outlining the tasks and theses of the book, therefore, it is worth spending a few pages developing some historical perspective on, and general theory about, these issues.

Memory and Identity

Storytelling about communal pasts appears to be an important feature of collective life generally. This is because communities, particularly those too large for every individual within them to interact with every other individual, are, as one well-known formulation provocatively puts it, imagined (Anderson 2006). But here, imagined does not take its conventional sense of bogus or wishful (imaginary). Rather, to call a community imagined in this way is to refer to how it is cultural rather than natural: the cohesion of a group is a matter of collective imagining, of how the group understands itself, rather than the direct expression of biology, geography, or some other feature of nature. And this is where historical narration plays its crucial role.

The legitimacy of institutions is often based on their capacity to sustain what the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1986) has called naturalizing analogies. Our sense of collective identity, that is, depends in part on our belief that the identity in question is inevitable—that it is a feature of the environment rather than a contingent human product, which seems to us so much more mutable and insecure. So we employ rhetorics that reflect our desire for permanence and security. Equipped with such an analogical base, Douglas writes, institutions appear as part of the order of the universe and so are ready to stand as the grounds of argument (1986, 52).¹⁵

One particularly potent form of naturalizing analogy is the organic metaphor of the social body, a style of reasoning that the Nazis promulgated, though by no means were they the first, or, unfortunately, the last. More common—and in many ways more versatile—than directly biological analogies are historical ones.¹⁶ Storytelling about collective pasts serves the same naturalizing purpose as organic metaphor because it places present arrangements at the end of a long process of development, making them just as unavoidable as natural facts.¹⁷ Although identity is a matter of shared interests at a particular time, that sharing depends in large part on a sense of common fate over time: interests always involve an understanding of the past and a projection of the future, and this is exactly what shared communal narratives provide (Gross 2000; Koselleck 1985). As one well-known work puts it, Communities . . . have a history—in an important sense are constituted by their past—and for this reason we can speak of a real community as a ‘community of memory,’ one that does not forget its past. In order not to forget the past, a community is involved in retelling its story, its constitutive narrative (Bellah et al. 1989, 153). In the words of another prominent theorist, Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past (Hall 1996, 213). This is just another way of saying that identities are projects and practices that individuals and groups undertake, rather than essential and unchanging properties they possess. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre concludes, all attempts to elucidate the notion of . . . identity independently of and in isolation from the notions of narrative . . . are [therefore] bound to fail (1984, 218).

All identities, personal and collective, are thus made in large part by telling and retelling stories. However, stories about the collective past are often even more compelling than this indicates, because they not only define our identities in relation to the past, but place us in the moral debt of previous generations. Not only does an historical narrative tell us that who we are is not a matter of present circumstance or personal choice; it tells us that we owe allegiance to that identity because it is an expensive gift paid for with the blood, sweat, and tears of preceding generations. Robert Bellah and his colleagues have thus written, The stories that make up a tradition contain conceptions of character, of what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such a character (1985, 153). Who we are depends on who we were, then, not only because we see ourselves as continuous with previous generations, but because the substance of that continuity provides us with moral lessons (though not necessarily those intended by the earlier generations).

Storytelling about the past is thus not merely something communities do; it is, in important ways, what they are. Rather than being a mechanism that underwrites cohesion, storytelling about the past per-forms the group by re-member-ing it (this is one reason why storytelling is so often highly ritualized). This explains why Germany’s difficult past makes for Germany’s difficult present: How do you generate legitimacy and identity when historical narrative—a normal and seemingly necessary source of national identity—raises more questions than it answers?

Recognizing the nearly universal role of storytelling in human societies is clearly the beginning of understanding how societies hold together and, by the same token, how they fall apart, as well as why leaders invest so heavily in such narrative work. Nevertheless, we need to be careful not to treat this phenomenon—collective storytelling—as itself lacking a history. For not only do the stories change over time; storytelling itself changes as well (Le Goff 1992; Leroi-Gourhan 1993; Matsuda 1996; Kern 2003). In order to understand the unique challenges Germany has faced and the ways in which it has shaped discourse elsewhere, it is thus important to place the German story within its historical context. For the apparent requirement that contemporary leaders address the past even when it is not a source of pride is the result of a set of developments long in the making. There are, of course, many aspects to the history of memory, and many determinants of the current forms that memory takes. Nevertheless, for my present purpose—namely that of understanding the work contemporary politicians do to frame the past—those forms connected with the rise of the nation-state are most directly relevant.

Memory and the Nation

In the modern period, the stories with which we motivate and legitimate our collective activities often appear as particular kinds of stories, namely histories: ostensibly veridical narratives about events in the past (real or imagined), whose legacies shape, are claimed to shape, or are hoped to shape contemporary identity. And nation-states—or at least their advocates or representatives—are among the major purveyors of such historical narratives.¹⁸ According to contemporary theories of nationalism (Smith 1986; Deutsch 1966; Gellner 1983; Niethammer 1994; Koselleck 1985), accelerating changes resulting from industrialization and urbanization, increased capacities for abstract thought accompanying the spread of literacy, the rise of empirical sciences, and the basic technology of print since the Middle Ages all contributed to a decline of religious worldviews and of traditional forms of authority, which depended on the uniformity of the past and on the potential immediacy of Final Judgment. The problem with this existential and institutional decline, these theories point out, is that church eschatology—the name for the doctrine of immediate or at least potentially immediate Final Judgment—had provided security to individuals and principles of legitimacy for political authority. Since there was no real future, there was also no real past, and no doubt about one’s ultimate fate. But what could take the place of these older certainties that gave meaning and form to life? And would what took their place be up to the challenges? The answer was national identity and its actual or hoped-for guardian: the nation-state.

According to Benedict Anderson (2006), the spread of print literacy and of capitalist commerce, combined with the decline of the religious worldview, led to the rise of historicizing national identities. Using terms from the literary critic Walter Benjamin, Anderson argues that print capitalism created an empty, homogeneous time, a time that was everywhere the same, creating felt communities of fate across wide territories (2006, 22, 24). The transformation of temporality and the associated rise of interest in the past, according to Anderson, thus made it possible to think the nation. Spread through newspapers, novels, and schoolbooks, common cultures developed among people who would never meet face-to-face (Anderson 2006). Within these common cultures, shared stories of the past—but stories that were general enough to appeal to the diverse experiences of everyone within a national territory—were especially important. As Anthony Smith puts it, nationalism thus became a surrogate religion which aims to overcome the sense of futility engendered by the removal of any vision of an existence after death, by linking individuals to persisting communities whose generations form indissoluble links in a chain of memories and identities (1986, 176). The modern state, which derived its legitimacy from its claim to embody the nation, thus took over a much more substantial responsibility for collective meanings than its predecessors had borne, and depended much more directly for its success upon doing so.

Indeed, nation-states in the nineteenth century sponsored a previously unimaginable variety of efforts to promote a sense of historical continuity. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm has argued in a landmark study of what he called invented tradition, particularly after 1870, in conjunction with the emergence of mass politics, post-Enlightenment political leaders rediscovered the importance of irrational elements in the maintenance of the social fabric and the social order (1983, 268). Many commentators therefore advocated the construction of new civil religions. With this goal of expanding moral commitments to the nation, successful leaders sought to imbue educational institutions with nationalistic content, to expand public ceremony, and to mass-produce public monuments. Nation-states thus not only invented traditions to reassure their populations in times of rampant change; they invented tradition itself—in contrast to the more automatic custom—as the self-conscious ideological commitment to pastness. These efforts produced the contrast Anderson has pointed out between the objective modernity of nations in the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists (2006, 5). Nationalist leaders often saw belief in the ancientness of identities as their deepest well of power and legitimacy.

The universal naturalizing analogies and constitutive narratives discussed above thus took on a unique form—and a particular urgency—in European modernity. At their height in the nineteenth century, European states supported a new kind of memory—a homogeneous memory of the nation—at the same time as this new kind of memory made possible a new kind of state. At this point, the past became a central occupation and preoccupation for the state, not only providing substance for shared allegiance to it but legitimating the empty, homogeneous time of the state over other, less progressive temporalities. In this so-called Age of Historicism, professional custodians of the past thus sought to ground identity through objective accounts of the way it actually was, as Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum for historians put it, while states and societies produced a wide variety of inquiries into and representations of the common past. In the nineteenth century, professional history worked in concert with the state to produce legitimating and motivating national identities, taking over many of the mnemonic functions previously performed by the priesthood. Not only did professional history supply collectivities with models from their pasts, but by narrating the past in terms of particular collectivities, such as German history or French history, it supported the idea that a single identity was paramount and unifying.

Crisis of the Nation

But history went through a decisive shift by the end of the nineteenth century. Since then, both nationalism and history have been in a fairly constant—yet nonetheless varied—state of crisis, if indeed it could really be argued that either had ever been in any other state. The nation-state’s hope for man-made foundations that could support the weight of existential insecurity in complexifying society was part of a developmental process already underway, a slippery slope entered upon with the first real challenge to the inviolability of natural law and the unity of individual and communal memory in oral cultures.¹⁹ From the Middle Ages on, Western society had become too complex to support one monolithic principle of legitimation.

Indeed, from the First World War on, the possibility of constitutive narratives—assertions of Bellah et al. notwithstanding—has been under duress. As Benjamin put it in the account on which Anderson’s theory of nationalism was based, Never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power (1968, 84). The cataclysm of 1914–18, in Benjamin’s account, left people not only without the conditions for telling stories but without communicable experiences to tell at all. According to many later theorists, the Holocaust produced an even more decisive crisis of representation in Western cultures. Saul Friedländer writes, We are dealing with an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational categories, an ‘event at the limits’ (1992, 3). There is also an oft-quoted remark of Theodor Adorno’s (2003) that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; doing so would in some way be to make it beautiful, no matter how melancholic the form. By extension, many have portrayed the Holocaust as challenging the validity of any totalizing view of history. What unifying meaning is to be found there, or in its wake? Which of the great metanarratives of Western civilization—be they of progress or decline—can contain such a horrendous set of events and experiences? How can one even begin to speak about such things, especially as a representative of the perpetrators’ nation? These sentiments have only increased in the contemporary era, in which our awareness of history’s complexity, as well as of the damage done in the name of nations, has proliferated, not least because of new commercial, communicative, and transnational formations.

Germany and the Politics of Regret

History’s challenges to German identity may thus be unique and powerful, but trouble with history, the foregoing makes clear, is part of the challenge of modern society more generally. The past must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, Friedrich Nietzsche warned (1983, 62). But we also have George Santayana’s now hackneyed apothegm: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it(2011, 172).²⁰ The crisis of memory that European societies have been experiencing has been taking place since at least the late nineteenth century, and arguably since the Renaissance. Our sense of progress has increased, and with it our sense of distance from the past; at the same time, we turn more and more to history for orientation. In the contemporary period, it seems, we are torn between being overwhelmed by the past and being hungry for more. The past is simultaneously our main source of identity and a foreign country, lost to us forever (Lowenthal 1985). And this situation has only gotten worse since the Holocaust, which for many observers has introduced or at least exacerbated a postmodern condition in which no received wisdom is beyond skepticism, and no truth claim is uncontested.²¹

We might quibble, of course, with the particular dating. The developmental pathways of contemporary justice norms, and of what I have elsewhere (Olick 2007) called the politics of regret, are indeed long and complex, and their history has been transformed through contingent events. Since at least 1945, I have argued in an earlier book (Olick 2007), and certainly since 1989, the question of how to deal with difficult pasts has clearly become a central issue on public agendas around the world. In recent years, many individuals and groups have demanded redress for perceived contemporary and historical wrongs against them. In the process, governments and societal elites have been forced to acknowledge collective historical misdeeds. The result has been a proliferation of apologies and other acknowledgments of regret (e.g., Celermajer 2009; Lind 2008; Nobles 2008). Since 1989 we have seen an exponential expansion in such discussions, and in the pursuit of novel legal mechanisms for redress, reparations, and other forms of transitional justice (e.g., Kritz 1995; Trouillot 2000; Olick 2003; Teitel 2000; Hinton 2011; Hayner 2002). For better or worse, the contemporary political landscape thus appears to have entered a new period, or at least level, of political introspection (Lübbe 2002).

Where earlier we celebrated our collective pasts and looked to them for models, today we appear to regret much of our remembered past, displaying an ever-growing willingness, even eagerness, to apologize and disavow. Ours is a guilty age, pervaded by a sense that we have much to atone for. This guilt, again, is not entirely new: Nietzsche already characterized the spread of Christian norms of regret culminating in the nineteenth century as a triumph of slave morality—a worldview in which noble action is hindered by the resentments of history’s losers. More positively, we speak of a distinctive post-Nuremberg ethos, and cite the Nuremberg tribunals as a landmark in the history of universal human rights, a notion that directs our attention to the legacies of historical injustice. But it does appear as if we have entered a new era for legitimacy, for memory, and for the relationship between them.

Such developments are indeed quite understandable in light of new structural realities, or at least with the recognition of previously unacknowledged ones. More than ever, for instance, memory now seems to overflow the container of the nation-state through processes of migration, multiplication, and dissent.²² Not everyone was a part, or a responsible part, of the nation, for instance, when the difficult history took place; alternate histories or perspectives on history demand equal or even greater attention than the story of the nation; and any unifying story must now begin from a recognition of difference rather than from a myth of common descent. To refuse to provide such acknowledgment can appear as an endorsement of earlier atrocities.

Whatever the many aspects of these developments, however, it should be clear that the German challenges this book describes are a product of the contingent process just described, as well as a particularly powerful source of its latest transformations. Indeed, much of the vocabulary for the politics of regret is, for obvious reasons, German, or at least has originated in the context of German memory.

How are we to evaluate the lessons of the German experience? For whom are they lessons? What kind of lessons are they? And in what sense are lessons really possible? These are questions every leader of the Federal Republic has been required to answer, and it is this book’s task to understand how they have done so. They have also become questions for the world at large, not least because of what happened in Germany and how subsequent leaders, there and elsewhere, have responded to it. In this way, the history of German memory has been both a model of and a model for our times.²³

The Organization of Official German Memory

The discourse of memory in Germany has of course been a many and varied enterprise, comprising a multiplicity of voices in numerous different contexts. Politicians, journalists, artists, intellectuals, clergy, teachers, soldiers, and ordinary people alike have produced, received, and evaluated images of the Nazi past. In doing so, they have also at least implicitly drawn on and expressed theories about what role the past—conceptualized as history, memory, tradition, heritage, culture, or otherwise—should play in contemporary life. As we will see, there are distinct stakes, patterns, and predilections in different social fields.

But despite awareness about the changing connection between memory and the nation, and despite the importance (which I outline in the next chapter) of recognizing how political memory is always in dialogue with other forms of memory, the purpose of this study is to understand how historical narration and imagery shape the work contemporary states do to legitimate themselves. This book will thus focus on official representations of the Nazi past in the Federal Republic of Germany, which have varied widely from leader to leader, occasion to occasion, and period to period. What have Germany’s leaders said about the Nazi past?²⁴ How have they characterized it? What terms have they used? Under what circumstances have they confronted difficult implications of the past, and when—and how—have they sought to minimize or avoid them? Which solutions have been offered on which occasions and in what contexts, and how have these solutions changed over time?

The pages that follow are the story of the official part of the German discourse about the Nazi past, which I treat as a problem of collective memory, a rather broad term that seems to have captured many people’s imaginations, both inside and outside of academia.²⁵ Unfortunately, we don’t even have recourse here to the charge that public commentators have misused or overused a precise operational concept, for even among social scientists, the term merely sensitizes us to a wide range of problems.²⁶ What parts of their pasts do different societies commemorate? What roles do these commemorations play in politics, and what roles does politics play in commemorations? How do personal memories (of leaders and of ordinary people) shape and constrain official accounts, and how do official accounts shape and constrain personal ones? These are very general questions for the sociology of collective memory, the methodological and conceptual challenges of which I address in the next chapter. In regard to the German experience, however, my basic scientific goal is to explain why that nation’s leaders said what they said about the Nazi past, and why what they said changed over time.

Before I develop a strategy for analyzing official or state-sponsored memory, it may help to preview the various solutions to the problem of German memory that are present in the German discourse, all of which involve assumptions about the nature of the past being commemorated and about the importance of commemoration in politics. Roughly speaking, we can divide the discourse into three broad positions, which include evaluations of the German past as well as usually more implicit theories of the place of the past in present politics. These kinds of assessments appear again and again throughout the history of the Federal Republic, both in politics and other fields, though with different inflections at different times and in different places. My goal, again, is to understand how, when, and where such assessments develop. History, as we will see, is inevitably more complex than this preview suggests.

1. One position is what I call the "rule of law argument. Advocates of this position argued that the Federal Republic of Germany did all it could, perhaps even more than could have been expected, with the legacy of the Nazi past. Early leaders of the Federal Republic, from this perspective, were right not to force ordinary Germans to focus too much on their own historical culpability, since doing so would have alienated wide segments of the population and thus undermined support for the fledgling democracy. Institutional reform, rather than symbolic gesture, was the appropriate way to prove that the Federal Republic was a worthy member of the community of nations. Such reform included consistent Western orientation, aimed to allay fears that Germany would be an unreliable partner; acceptance of the legal burdens of the Third Reich, intended to establish West Germany’s right to represent the entire German nation; solid protection of individual and human rights, which in several cases went substantially beyond the constitutional guarantees of other Western democracies; a massive system of restitution to many (but not all) victims of the Third Reich; a huge and unprecedented series of payments to Israel (called an indemnity, for the costs to Israel of absorbing European refugees); and sober" prosecution of selected individuals when the evidence was clear and the rights of the defendants could be protected, as the rule of law demanded.²⁷ All of these measures were seen—both by advocates at the time and by commentators afterwards—to have been major achievements of the West German government’s reorientation, and a vindication of early policies. Advocates of this position have praised the clarity of the government’s moral vision (and especially that of its first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer) by pointing to the fact that West German public opinion was consistently opposed to significant acceptance of responsibility for the past (see especially Merritt and Merritt 1970; Merritt 1995; and Moeller 2003).²⁸

Rule of law arguments have always figured prominently in official governmental narratives, though they were challenged by numerous factions in the 1950s, mainly by the New Left in the late Sixties and early Seventies, and by neoconservative relativists in the 1980s and following unification. This has also been a common view—though frequently expressed in softer tones than other positions—from middle-of-the-road commentators over many years.²⁹ Following this position, perpetual memory of the past is not an appropriate response to, or resource for, contemporary challenges as long as initial institutional residues have been dealt with. A little bit of memory, in this view, goes a long way. Symbolic gesture and ritual acknowledgment may be called for, but politics (even symbolic politics) is about the present and future, not about the past.

2. A second major position is summed up in the term "second guilt. Second guilt is a Talmudic concept for what happens when an individual fails to expiate a misdeed. Advocates of this position have argued that the morally essential confrontation with the past has been condemnably absent from the history of West Germany. Multiple failures to confront individual culpability and collective responsibility, according to this view, undermined West Germany’s purportedly democratic values and burdened subsequent generations with a legacy that has not been worked through, thus leaving Germany open to a return of the repressed. Versions of this position include a number of different accusations, among them the contention that the replacement of any serious antifascism with a Cold War antitotalitarianism blurred distinctions between Nazis and the Soviet Union, thus implicitly justifying Hitler’s anti-Bolshevism and vindicating the role of the German army (whose desperate fighting on the Eastern front in 1944–45 gave time and space for the Final Solution); and the argument that the lackluster denazification of German politics and society, reintegration of former Nazis in all levels of government, and failure to pursue and prosecute war criminals provided a shaky legal and moral foundation for the second German democracy. Following a Marxist-inspired fascism theory, many advocates of this position have viewed the relationship between the Nazi period and the Federal Republic as one of continuity rather than the claimed caesura that supposedly marked 1945 as a new zero hour" of German history.³⁰

While this position was a key feature of many New Left arguments in the late Sixties and early Seventies, it was a recurrent view throughout the history of the Federal Republic.³¹ Here, memory is both an obligation and a resource, an enduring trauma and guide for future action. Indeed, such historical insight, it is sometimes claimed, prepares Germany even better than other nations, which have not faced history in the same way, for moral challenges in the present and the future.³²

3. A third general argument—the "relativism approach—begins from the position that the overall behavior of Germany during the Nazi period was essentially no different from that of many other nations in history. The Second World War was simply the latest and most brutal installment in a European Civil War" (Europäischer Bürgerkrieg) which had been carried out across centuries. From this perspective, the systematic destruction of the Jews could be described as a kind of industrial accident (Betriebsunfall) of modern civilization. Consequently, any and all demands that Germany master (bewältigen) or work through (aufarbeiten) the past have been nothing more than attempts to hold German sovereignty in escrow.³³ Requirements for a careful treatment of Jewish issues, for prosecution of war criminals on the German side without equal attention to such Allied acts as the bombing of Dresden, and for worried observation of Germany’s military or of periodic outbreaks of ultra-right-wing violence were all nothing more than pure power politics by symbolic means, and as such were to be rejected.

While this view has had its proponents throughout the Federal Republic’s history, these have usually remained marginal voices, or have gained attention only momentarily in specific contexts. A purportedly newly virulent strain of this position—now often at the center rather than the periphery of discourse—in both academic historiography and national politics beginning in the 1980s (and gaining steam after unification) concerned advocates of the other theories, particularly the second guilt position.³⁴ Relativists are in a difficult situation with regard to the role of memory: they acknowledge, even celebrate, the power memory has to shape identity, but are therefore particularly concerned not to give undue weight to difficult pasts. In an age of declining legitimacy, challenged policy, and fissiparous solidarities, advocates of this position believe, memory must be positive to serve identity properly.

These rubrics, of course, are merely composite summaries based on numerous different arguments in numerous different contexts. Particular advocates—be they politicians, public commentators, or ordinary people—have selected some elements from a position and excluded others, have frequently adopted elements from more than one, or taken one position in one context and another in a different context. Often formulated polemically, moreover, the arguments share overgeneralization as a common feature, and anecdote as a favored rhetorical principle. These positions, additionally, did not form a static structure of choices that speakers recombined but never really developed; while versions of each were part of the discourse throughout the history of the Federal Republic, the order of events and reflection on them, as we will see, mattered a great deal.

Memory and the State

More than just to preview the pages to come, my immediate purpose in identifying these positions here is to define and motivate the analytical approach to follow. Indeed, these summaries reveal an important and challenging feature of most discourse on German memory: Debates about German memory always involve both descriptive and evaluative elements, asking simultaneously how Germany dealt with the legacies of the Nazi past and whether these were the right choices. The discourse of German memory is, in this way, always simultaneously a discourse on previous German memory and one on the German past. As I will demonstrate in the following chapter, this is because every image of the past is always a reaction to earlier images of that past. This is one of the basic insights from recent work on collective memory on which I draw, and which this book seeks to develop.

But how is the social scientist, rather than the moral philosopher or political commentator, to approach such questions? Social-scientific analysis of morally charged matters is, of course, always challenging. But the way description and evaluation have combined in German public discourse is particularly problematic. In Germany, as in similar discourses elsewhere, evaluation has often preceded description, and the description has rarely been more than sketchy, reproducing common myths about the record of German memory. Commentators have frequently offered broad generalizations about entire epochs and entire societies. These generalizations certainly have their uses, but they do not help the careful analyst make much sense of the historical record’s vast variety.³⁵ Nor do they underwrite an historically accurate basis for contemporary evaluations.

Time and again, for instance, commentators on the left (though not only on the left) referred to a repression of the past in the Fifties, and commentators on the right referred to a national self-flagellation in the Sixties.³⁶ Terms such as repression and self-flagellation, among many others, are obviously useful political weapons, the normal coin of public commentary. And yet, in fact, Konrad Adenauer (Christian Democratic chancellor from 1949 to 1963) spoke volumes more than did Willy Brandt (Social Democratic chancellor from 1969 to 1974) about the Nazi past. At the very least, therefore, we need to parse such characterizations on the basis of systematic empirical investigation.

Doing so, of course, is much more than a quantitative affair. The historian Manfred Kittel (1993), for instance, was widely criticized (and rightly, I believe) for his attempt to refute the second guilt thesis by adducing numerous instances when the Nazi past was mentioned in the 1950s. Kittel maintains that there was no silence. Technically this is true. But just as silence can speak volumes, speaking volumes can also be a silence of sorts.³⁷ One of this study’s unique challenges, therefore, is to disentangle the representation of an historical reality, the representation of an earlier representation of that reality, and the evaluative elements involved in each, to say nothing of our own stance toward those representations. This is first and foremost an empirical and scientific