Germany: history, culture, and contemporary society

Germany

Before the rise of Nazism in Germany and the Second World War, there had been acts of violence and discrimination against the Jews, but there had never been a systematic policy for ridding Germany of its non-Aryan population. However, as the Third Reich gained homeland power under the banner of postwar nationalism and soon too began expanding its own borders, the territories conquered brought with them a larger collection of Jews, begetting a new proportion to the "Jewish problem." Hitler stressed the cleansing of the Jews, or Judenrein, as a valiant necessity, and by the end of the 1930s, Germany was engulfed in discussion of how to rid the land of the Jews. Mary Fulbrook discusses the ghettos, exportation to Madagascar, and mass-graves that were first toyed with, before the development of the sinister "final solution." (Fulbrook, 197.) The suppression of human emotions and enculturation of obedience restructured the people of Germany into killers, supporters, silent accomplices, and victims, who, post-war, were faced with the monumental task of rebuilding a nation in the face of despicable memory and civil discontent.

The Third Reich that built Auschwitz was not a collective of Nazi thugs, Fulbrook stresses, nor was it the mastermind of a group of vicious animals, according to Richard Bessel. Instead, it was a bureaucratically organized and technologically perfected system that fostered the mass-destruction of the people and cultural prowess of Germany.

"The bureaucratically organized, technologically perfected and efficiently executed mass murder of over 6 million Jews, as well as the almost complete annihilation of Europe's gypsy population, and the killing of numerous political opponents of Nazism or others deemed 'unworthy of life', from a whole range of cultural, political, and national backgrounds, including communists, Social Democrats, Conservatives, Protestants, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses and others -- this mass killing, undertaken by members of that highly cultured nation which had produced the music of Bach and the poetry of Goethe, raises questions almost impossible to contemplate, let alone answer." (Fulbrook, 200.)

Fulbrook argues that by the end of 1943, most Germans knew that their neighbor Jews were not being rounded up and shipped off to a new home and resettlement, but were instead being sent directly to their death. Silently, in the wake of an incredibly violent leadership, they either complied or remained quiet; dissent was not tolerated. (Fulbrook, 201.) After the war, reconstructive efforts to both cope with and eradicate the Nazi legacy was written within the structure of the global setting, in its initially punitive approach, then with allied support, as the social dilemma of historical memory motivated German life on both sides of Berlin.

Despite institutional efforts for denazification, such recent persecution, pain, and current lack of a stable Israel make more important the need to address outstanding legal issues that pertain to the Third Reich. The aftermath of Hitler's terrorism called for not only immediate action to reunite both sides of Germany and both sides of the culture, but for a sensitive awareness to the emotional and political needs of both sides. In the context of the postwar FRG, a struggle to come to terms with the past, or a Vergangenheitsbewalitgung, was partially institutionalized, but further developed in literary, cultural, educational, and political contexts. The Historical Commission of 1998 mandated a review of Austria's role in the expropriation of Jewish property in a legal perspective, but also demanded an acknowledgement of those complicit with the crimes of the Third Reich.

Bessel presents an monochromatic view of the Nazis that developed in post-World War I Germany as not the deviants of society normally depicted, but instead normal human beings whose legacy extended to the Storm Troopers of Eastern Germany. Bessel focuses his historical inquiry on the nature of political violence and its role in the growth and lifetime of the Nazi group, arguing that its actuality was actually the "expression of mainstream social values." (Bessel, 154) He argues that the ultimately failure of the Nazi regimen was that it was transgressed "commonly accepted social and moral code," later demanding significant demobilization. (Bessel, 154.)

Bessel maintained that the postwar area was subject to the conditions of actual demobilization, but that ideology and reality became increasingly distant as the Republic of the Right colonized public memory. His revisionist understanding undermines the Weimer Republic's enemies insistence of unfettered disaster, and instead argues tahat German civilians and officials "did their utmost" to welcome home the soldiers, "war heroes" not returning to a disrespectful "home front." (Bessel, 88.) His focus on the creation of postwar Germany extended more largely to discourse regarding new jobs, the integration of unemployed veterans into a new army, and the displacement of women in the workforce with men. Economics, not the politics of causality that led to the November Revolution, constitute his central discussion of the Germany that allowed for a Third Reich's legacy.

The socially integrated core violence of the Nazi Regime is what Bessel fostered as the fundamental ideology of the Third Reich. His argument that "war was both cause and Effect, condition and consequence of Nazism," (Bessel, 6) provides the teleology to understand postwar posturing of the German people. Ultimately, the Germans after the war believed that they, too, were the victims, and Bessel supports this thesis, arguing that hardwired Nazism doomed millions of Germans to an un-winnable fate in the modern world. The discussion that they so carefully avoided until the mid 90s about fault, blame, and the mass genocide led under Hitler and Nazi Germany also fostered the change in public memory of what happened during the war.

Perpetuated social discontent further exacerbated the historical problem in the new Germany; the path to continuity between the Germans and the Jews was a necessary aspect of their restructuring. Fulbrook recalls the efforts of Konrad Adenauer and David Bon-Gurion, who held the helm of renewed life between the Jews and the Germans after World War. The symbolic opening of the American Jewish Committee in Western Germany further cemented this civic outreach. Initially, it served as a source of reform, since many of the founders of the Berlin AJC were of German dissent. Additionally, it served as a sign of trust and partnership between the Allies, particularly the United States, and the Germans, as well as Israel. Such momentous co-sponsorship actuated a commitment to a German-Jewish dialogue that would help both those persecuted and those silent in their persecution form a new life together.

Fulbrook emphasizes the culpability of the Germans who silently stood by as the Holocaust took on new terrors in the "cleansing" of the German race; covering up guilt and grievous desires for blame would not provide a plausible base for a new Germany. She pays particular attention, too, to the German Democratic Republic, the so-called "other Germany." Her extensive research into the recent history of the GDR leads for an understanding of the Soviet satellite as something powerful that, while ultimately on the losing end of German reconstruction, lasted three times longer than Hitler's Third Reich. She judiciously analyzes the failures of the Weimer Republic and the crimes of the Third Reich as source of such instability that their legacy extended into the building of two separate Germanies, of which the Soviet illegitimacy remained so solvent it was unable to remain in control.