This past week, German television audiences were offered yet another opportunity to enjoy the sort of portrayal of their collective past once very much in vogue in Germany – and which now seems to be undergoing a revival: that of Germans as victims. ZDF’s prime-time, two-part made-for-tv blockbuster, Die Gustloff, tells the story of the sinking in early 1945 of the former German cruise ship, Wilhelm Gustloff, as it bore thousands of German soldiers and refugees from the clutches of the advancing Red Army to relative safety further west. Since the basic elements of the case were clear – refugees pour in, the ship sails out to sea, where it is attacked by a Soviet submarine and sunk at great loss of life – a good deal of “filler” had to be added to stretch the tale around the movie’s three-hour running time.

One might think that the facts of the story would provide sufficient tragic drama to engage most any audience. But the film’s creators found it necessary to invent a set of appealing lead characters and stock figures to lend the story even more pathos – along with the inevitable romantic sub-plot. Unfortunately, the result is nearly as sluggish as the overburdened Gustloff itself.

In this, Die Gusfloff is much like other recent movie-events of the genre. Over the past several years, Germans have been treated to numerous fictionalized retellings of some of the sadder episodes from their wartime past. The 2006 tv-drama, Dresden, for example, recounted the Allied attack on that city in February of 1945 – as set against the backdrop of a far-fetched romance between a German nurse and a downed RAF bomber crewman. And in 2007 came a story of the German “trail of tears,” entitled Die Flucht, telling the story of a group of Germans fleeing East Prussia in front of the Soviet army.

Taken individually, each of these might be seen as little more than historical (or historicized) fictions: the mining of the German past for modern entertainments. Taken together, however, and especially in combination with other recent films of a similar type, this appears to signal a shift in Germany’s culture of memory as it relates to the German experience in the Second World War. 2005’s 60th anniversary commemorations of the end of that war marked something of a watershed in the way that Germans viewed and depicted their Nazi-era past, as the focus moved from Germany’s victims to Germans as victims. Films like Der Untergang (Downfall), Stalingrad or the innumerable documentaries that ran on German television – along with books such as Joerg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire), detailing the German civilians’ experience under Allied bombing, and Gunter Grass’ Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk), which also dealt with the sinking of the Gustloff – have been welcomed as part of an effort aimed at breaking a so-called “taboo” against commemorating (or even remembering) Germany’s own wartime sufferings and losses. The film Dresden was one of the most expensive productions in the history of Germany’s publicly-funded television networks – and garnered a sizeable share of the tv audience during its two night run. Friedrich’s and Grass’ books became best-sellers in the German market, setting off a wave of publications similarly devoted to distinctly German-focused works. The genre, whether on the page or the big (or little) screen, is popular and it sells.

Aside from the genre’s problematic focus on German suffering to the exclusion of all others – made even more pronounced by the tendency to view the war only from its end – this shift was made even more dubious by the fact that the “taboo” it was supposedly breaking never existed. The early postwar period in Germany was a time of nearly exclusive focus on German woes, German casualties and German losses in war, whether in film, publishing, memorialization (some of which is documented on this site), or everyday conversation. The suffering inflicted on others by Germans was dealt with only marginally, in the main only within academic, artistic and other intellectual circles. Popular memory in West Germany for at least the first fifteen years after the war was given up to exercises in exculpation and self-pity. And even later, when scholarly efforts at digging up the dirt on Germany’s Nazi past were making themselves felt more broadly (especially in official acts of commemoration), strong undercurrents of those earlier ways of remembering remained alive and active.

Contrary to popular impression, even the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff itself was not overlooked. Its story was the subject of a 1959 feature film, entitled Nacht fiel ueber Gotenhafen (Night Fell Over Gotenhafen). Therefore, films like Die Gustloff represent a resurfacing of underlying layers of German memory that may have been merely covered over for a time by other interpretations and depictions. It remains to be seen whether this will turn out to be a temporary phenomenon, or the start of a new re-mixing of the strata of German historical memory.

Note. The University of Leeds held a conference on the subject: “From Perpetrators to Victims? Discourse of ‘German Wartime Suffering’ from 1945 to Present” in 2007 and is now putting together research reports on the topic. Further information at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk:80/german/AHRC.htm
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