This week, the new German-made feature film on the wartime exploits of World War One’s leading air ace, Manfred von Richthofen (a.k.a. the Red Baron), began its run in German theaters. The movie, entitled The Red Baron, presents a portrait of a blond pretty boy who scores victories both in the skies and in love. Few historians nowadays would raise objections to the inclusion (no matter how awkwardly) of a romantic subplot in an historical drama -- the employment of such dramatic tools having long become commonplace in cinematic storytelling. What might well raise the historian’s ire, however, is the use of such subplots as a means of initiating a revisionist misrepresentation of historical fact, as is the case here. To quote from the synopsis included in the film’s website:

… von Richthofen soon realizes that his status as a hero is misleading. His love for nurse Kaete opens his eyes to the brutality and barbarity of war – a war that not only leaves no room for honorable chivalry, but also takes friends away from him who risk their lives in audacious air battles.

In a following paragraph (which appears in the German-language but not the English-language version of the site), it goes on to say:

When he realizes that he is being misused for propaganda purposes by the military government, resulting in the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who see in him their role model, von Richthofen makes the fateful decision to break with the cult of heroism surrounding him – a decision that transforms him into a legend ….

This transformation of von Richthofen from chivalrous aerial dualist into a heroic symbol of anti-war resistance is highly problematic and again raises questions about current trends in German historical memory. There is, in fact, no evidence to suggest that von Richthofen ever harbored any anti-war sentiments. He was, by all accounts, a cold-eyed and skillful trophy hunter engaged in eager pursuit of his 81st kill when he was himself shot down over the Somme in 1918.

The Red Baron is not a product of tinsel town – though made in a style commonly associated with Hollywood productions. The move was made by a German director using a German cast and script, all underwritten exclusively by German patrons. It is the past “Made (or, one might better say, manufactured) in Germany.” True, it isn’t serious history. It’s just entertainment. But even entertainment can tell us something about the way that people think about and view the past (or the present). Taking the sort of liberties with a historical figure as this film does points to a tendentious urge in the current German Zeitgeist to subsume their wartime experiences – whether those were, as here, during the First World War or, as in many other instances, in the Second World War – into a grander anti-war epic, without regard to historical accuracy in either the micro or the macro sense of the term. This wholesale conversion of the stuff of the past in service to a postwar ethos reveals just how much the ghosts of that past still haunt the German mind – and how easily that stuff can be reshaped to fit current fashion.

http://www.redbaron-themovie.com

German officialdom has lately been ruminating whether or not the Germany military’s increased involvement abroad calls for the creation of a new decoration commending special acts of bravery – including possibly reviving perhaps the best known German military award: the Iron Cross. A peitition in support of re-issuing the Iron Cross was registered with the German parliament’s Petition Committee in 2007 and both the German Defense Minister and President Horst Koehler have signaled their approval in principle of the idea of a new decoration – though theydemur at reviving the Iron Cross.

Originally designed and issued in 1813 during the struggles against Napoleon, the Iron Cross was reissued for each of the major conflicts in which Germany was involved through the Second World War. It has not been issued since, however, because of the medal’s popular association with Nazism and German militarism and because it has historically only been awarded to German soldiers serving in times of war. Those in favor of bringing it back into service point out the German military’s current lack of any award specifically aimed at recognizing acts of bravery. They also remind the public of the Iron Cross’s history prior the Nazi era and its use as a national emblem (albeit in slightly modified form) on all vehicles employed by the postwar German armed forces. Somewhat despondently, they also refer to the German public’s generally cool attittude toward its own military services, and to the cuts and deficiencies those forces have faced – suggesting that a historically established symbol like the Iron Cross could compensate to a degree for these slights.

Judging from the public response to news reports on the matter, the idea of reviving the Iron Cross is not viewed at all favorably. Reader comments to stories on the topic carried in Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung were overwhelmingly (almost unanimously) negative. But this rejection appears to come less as a consequence of the historical „baggage“ that the Iron Cross bears than it does from its role as a commendation bestowed during wartime. Clear majorities of German public opinion are against Germany’s military engagement in Afghanistan – and many Germans oppose any Germany military involvement abroad (except perhaps as part of UN-sanctioned peacekeeping or purely „humanitarian“ missions). So the suggestion that their armed forces be granted a special decoration for bravery in combat runs against German self-perception of the country’s role in the world. Germans do not see themselves „at war“ (even in places, like Afghanistan, where combat is a reality) and so resist the notion that their soldiers be grannted war commendations. Online commentary reflects this sentiment, with few giving much attention to to the matter of the Iron Cross specifically and focusing instead on the the broader topic of German military invovlement. For the bulk of German opinion, it seems, there should be no medal for bravery in war (no matter the form the award may take) since there should be no war. So long as this view prevails, any commendation that Germany may issue will have little or no public meaning.

Background:

www.bmvg.de

www.demokratieonline.de

www.sueddeutsche.de

www.spiegel.de

www.faz.net

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
or
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=157840

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, American-born, Berlin-based philosophy professor Susan Neiman assesses the state of Germany’s commemorative culture and finds it wanting – but not for the reasons one might think. She suggests that Germans use the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power to reevaluate and recallibrate their country’s choices of whom it should commemorate for their acts of moral courage in standing up to the Nazi regime. In short, she finds that, in its selection of heroes, Germany has so far „chosen ... wrong.“

As the title of the article indicates, Neiman would prefer heroes who were able to „resist and survive“ over those whose „deeds cost them their lives, and accomplished nothing.“ She contrasts the self-sacrifice of Munich‘s White Rose student group and the conspirators of July 20th with the lesser-known protests by German women whose Jewish spouses were held, and subsequently released, from Gestapo captivity in Berlin’s Rosenstrasse. Neiman proposes that, in addition to restraining the attention given to the victims of the Nazis, we, and Germans particularly, should instead focus on those, like the women of Rosenstrasse fame, whose acts demonstrated that the Nazi regime could be opposed successfully. Only the latter, she believes, can serve as a working model for current and future generations.

One is inclined to agree with Neiman that Germans have often demonstrated a tendency to focus on death and failure in their memorial culture. „Gescheitert“ (failed) has become such a catchword in postwar usage that one sometimes wonders if Germans automatically assume that failure is the default setting for all human action. There is something to be said for the power of positive thinking.

But even so, Neiman’s suggestion here seems misdirected – at least in placing emphasis on events like those in Rosenstrasse. First of all, it is odd that Neiman should assert that „these brave women remain anonymous,“ especially since the Rosenstrasse protests were the subject of a 2003 feature film (entitled Rosenstrasse !) by the well-known German director, Margarethe von Trotta. More significantly, there remains some question as to just how successful those protests were in actually bringing about the release of the Jews held by the Gestapo in Rosenstrasse, with some scholars arguing that the Nazi authorities never intended to deport those they were holding to concentration camps. (For more on this debate, see: www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/Rosenstrasse/Rosenstrasse_index.htm)

Most importantly, however, is the question of whether these protests constituted acts of resistance qualitatively equivalent to those taken by the likes of the White Rose, the Kreisau Circle and other resistance groups. While taking nothing away from the courage these woman demonstrated, a distinction should nevertheless be drawn between protests, like those in Rosenstrasse (rare enough in itself), which aimed solely at altering or stopping specific actions taken by an evil regime, and those acts, such as by the July 20th plotters, that were aimed the much larger purpose of putting an end to that evil regime. While the one sought to save individuals linked to the protesters by the intimate bonds of marriage, the latter sought to further the greater good of all: family, friends and strangers alike. It seems to me that there is still something to the biblical adage that no man hath greater love than to sacrifice his life for others.

When read in combination with Neiman’s book, Fremde sehen anders, it seems clear that her suggestion serves as part of her larger purpose of encouraging Germans to embrace a more positive view of themselves and their history. But, to use a German aphorism, she is “running through open doors.” The time when a hypercritical caste of Germans saw their country through darkened glasses is past – except perhaps among a small group of mostly leftist negativists. The majority need no encouragement from Dr. Neiman. Most Germans feel quite comfortable in their skins – at times perhaps a bit too comfortable.

Spiegel Online has just reported that the last German veteran of World War One has died, Dr. Erich Kästner, who was Germany's second oldest man at 107. It went almost unnoticed and would have been totally overlooked if someone had not by chance noticed the obituary and updated the Wikipedia article, unleashing some discussions on internet forums for military buffs.

The story by Hans Michael Kloth aptly contrasts memorial culture in Germany, where the First World War is a side show at best and something like this can be overlooked, with France, where, when the second-to-last veteran died a few days ago at 110 and it made front page news. For Germany, everything is overshadowed by the monolithic presense of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

This gives pause to consider - again - the relevance of veterans and oral history for the history of war. There is very little chance that Dr. Kästner took anything of great relevance to his grave that he was on the verge of telling us. The days of oral history uncovering new and interesting information for World War Two are essentially over, and World War One is that much further gone. For historians, the world wars are both book and film and archive and memory wars. Eye witnesses have very little left to tell. But biological survival of such events is always important in terms of the impression that veterans and their stories can make on the next generations, something one might call the "grandpa told me" factor. The emotive impact of one more war has now slipped away. Given the simple biological and psychological limits of human beings, and in this concrete case going on how little he actually told his family about the war (the time he was in a parade for the Kaiser seems to have been his main story), it seems clear that these events die their biological death years, if not decades, before the last veteran goes to his grave. Thus, I cannot really agree with the final words of the Spiegel article, that we have "missed a chance, forever" to possibly learn something. He had decades to say whatever it was he was going to say.

On 7 October, 2007 the town of Oberndorf (part of Rottenburg tothe north of the main city, between Herrenberg and Tübingen) held a special worship service for the 60 year jubilee of the dedication of the chapel on the nearby Tannenrain hill.

On that day in 1944, bombs had fallen near the edge of the small town. They were probably from an warplane which had lost its formation en route to or from some other target. According to the church chronicle, men who were, at that very moment, gathered in the pastor's home for a meeting, swore an oath to build a small wayside chapel "in honor of the Mother of God, a Via Dolorosa and, as soon as possible, a larger chapel on the Tannenrain hill."

Construction began in 1946 after a local owner donated some land at the highest point of the hill. The project was financed by the people of the city. Construction materials were very hard to come by, but the locals managed to get the needed stone and gravel from nearby towns. At the athletic fields at the base of the hill, the materials were loaded onto oxcarts and carted up a narrow path to the top of the hill. Many of the smaller stones were carried up the hill by the locals themselves. Schoolchildren carried rocks in lieu of religion class. Young women, who otherwise were restricted from going out, took the opportunity to get out of the house. People who attended sporting events made one trip each up the hill carrying rocks before each game.

On October 2nd, 1946, the people of Oberndorf celebrated the topping out (Richtfest) at the chapel. "Max," the ox who had hauled the altar up the hill was slaughtered for the event. He had supposedly swallowed a nail and would not have survived anyway. It was dedicated a year later, on 7 October, 1947.

Ever since, the chapel has been used in May and October for commemoration ceremonies.

My account above follows very closely a press account in the lead up to the ceremony printed in the Schwäbisches Tagblatt (4 October, 2007).

What strikes me about this whole story is the central role played by local religion. It is almost "medieval." I don't mean that in a negative way. It simply harks back to a time when the church and religious modes of thought were so dominant that any and all unusual events were interpreted by default in Christian terms. Indeed, it seems more like a religious tradition than a memory event in the narrow sense.

People in a twentieth-century, industrialized country in the middle of a global war involving mass conscription, mechanized warfare, and subjected to an aerial bombardment, immediately - according to both oral tradition and the church records - interpret the event in religious terms. It is not considered a chance event, the fog of war, the luck of having a confused enemy aircrew drop bombs 50 meters to one side instead of another, but a matter of divine intervention. It is not part of a banal chain of cause and effect related to aircraft ranges or wind direction, but is instead directly connected to the ultimate causes and effects which consciously guide human history. It is not just a moment to breath a sigh of relief or even a brief prayer of thanks. It is not simply a moment of wonder. It immediately "fits" into the universal scheme and sets in motion long term action which permanently shapes the wartime expereince of the town in explicitly Catholic terms.

As people in Oberndorf - and throughout the region - no doubt knew, the air war had gotten very serious. Stuttgart had been subject to one of its first major bombardments in mid March (about three weeks before) and stray bombs then had leveled the nearby town of Kusterdingen and damaged Tübingen.

The enthusiastic participation in the construction of the chapel (and the attendence at the 60 year jubilee that puts National Day of Mourning ceremonies in the much larger city of Tübingen to shame) is evidence that this approach was not simply a matter of the church imposing an interpretation on the people. This interpretation resonated with the town. If the church had and to no small degree still has interpretive hegemony over these events, but that hegemony served a recognized and appreciated purpose. Religion served to order and make sense of events during a time of great fear and uncertainty and continues to shape and order the memory of the period up to the present.

I was mystified by the theology behind the event. I am not Catholic, and I asked myself why the town appealed to Mary following an event on Easter or whether there was a tradition behind this? I sent an e-mail to mariology.com and got the following response:


Just as one asks one's parents to help one during a crisis - either through
physical means or through their parents - so also in the spiritual realm we
are encouraged to seek the intercession of our spiritual mother. Revelation
12:17 shows Mary as the mother of the followers of her Son who protects them
from the attacks of the Devil. Such a response is both biblically sound and
based on the practice of all Christians from the first century. A copy of
the Sub Tuum prayer to Mary dating back to the 2nd/3rd century was
discovered in Egypt. (see below)

We turn to you for protection,
holy Mother of God.
Listen to our prayers and help us in our needs.
Save us from every danger, glorious and blessed Virgin.



Photos of the event, which was organized by the mayor, Karl Schneck, and Viktor Heumesser, can be seen at the sites-of-memory.de webpage: http://sites-of-memory.de/main/oberndorftannenrainkapelle.html.

Since the proposal to create a memorial for the Bundeswehr dead, a debate has taken place in the German media, although it has been rather less boisterous and prolonged than earlier discussions about other historical-political themes such as the Wehrmacht discussion or the years of debate about the Holocaust memorial. Some of the materials form this debate have now been collected and made available online at www.zeitgeschichte-online.de.

The next issue of the Bundeswehr Journal will be devoted to this topic as well.

Another memorial to deserters has been opened in Stuttgart. Photos and a report on the dedication ceremony are now available at sites-of-memory.de. Despite my previous announcement that I would not be able to attend, I did manage to go.

This memorial is intended to not only memorialize the more than 15,000 men executed for deserting the ranks of Wehrmacht during the Second World War, but to acknowledge and honor all deserters from all wars. That aspect was emphasized at the memorial ceremony by the presence of both a Wehrmacht deserter and a recent American deserter from the "Global War on Terror." The two men, Ludwig Baumann and Chris Capps, are shown in the photo as they posed right after unveiling the memorial, a design by Aulendorf sculpture Nikolaus Kernbach.

This memorial was the result of 11 years of work by peace organizations supported in part by German labor unions. The current location memorial is considered temporary until a location near the city center can be found. Efforts to get the memorial placed there have been unsuccessful so far. The city leadership has rejected the memorial in principle. Mayor Wolfgang Schuster, for example, has said that the memorial to the victims of the Nazis can be considered to include deserters. He argued that we do not need memorials for individual groups of victims.

This memorial is an example of how any form of subversion is a threat to authority - even if the authority claims to oppose the authority being undermined or attacked by the specific subversion in question.

On 30 August, a new memorial to German deserters will be unveiled in Stuttgart, Germany. The memorial is being funded by selling sponsorships in units of 50 Euros. The memorial is going to be dedicated in front of the Stadttheater (near the Killesberg Hochpark) until a permanent location can be found. I will not be able to attend that event and document it in the same detail as I did for the unveiling in Ulm. See this link for more information in German on the event and the speakers.

I will not be able to attend that event and document it in the same detail as I did for the unveiling in Ulm. If anybody would like to document the event for this blog, their report would be welcome.

Meanwhile, an initiative in Tübingen to have an unnamed square in the newly-renovated French quarter (Französisches Viertel) named in honor of German deserters passed in July. The journalist Hans-Joachim Lang discovered in 2004 that a nearby location had been used for at least three executions of deserters in the spring of 1945. Several political parties opposed the initiative, citing "political reasons". The majority won out, however. There are no buildings which will have the new name, "Platz des unbekannten Deserteurs" ("Unknown Deserter Square") as an address.

The recent death of Hans Filbinger has sparked another controversy in Germany about the Nazi past. Hans Filbinger, born in 1913, was a judge in the legal service of the German navy during the war. He later went into politics and served from1966 to 1978 as the minister president (essentially governor) of Baden-Württemberg, one of West Germany's largest and most prosperous states, as a prominent member of the Christian Democrats, the conservative party. He was brought down in 1978 by two scandals. His role during the Nazi period had been in the public discussion since 1972. Then, in 1977, several members of the Red Army Faction imprisonsed in Stammheim died in their cells, in the hospital, or were injured. Then, in 1978, his role as a judge for the Nazi regime was revealed. He had had a hand in numerous death penalty cases, including the executions of deserters shortly before the war ended, as well as in disciplinary cases among prisoners of war after the end of hostilities. (Read an obituary in English at The Indepdendent).

His death has caused a stir at the national and local levels here in Germany. At his funeral, the current minister president of Baden-Württemberg, Günther Oettinger (also Christian Democrat) referred to him in his eulogy as an opponent of the Nazi regime, information he purportedly got from http://www.hans-filbinger.de/, Filbinger's official webpage. When the storm of protest broke out - including accusations from the Social Democrats that he was "fishing on the far right" and calls for his resignation by the Zentralrat der Juden, the main Jewish reprisentation in Germany, Oettinger stood by his claims and apologized only for having hurt anybody's feelings. Last night the news featured his total retraction of his statements in a forest of microphones. As the commentators noted, he has been politically damaged from the left by his statement and on the right by buckling to the media storm.

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Heribert Prantl puts Oettinger's remarks in the context of the longstanding politiization of German postwar history. He follows German historians in dividing German memory of the Nazi period into four phases:

1) 1945-1949: denazification by the occupying powers
2) 1949-1963: denial, ignoring and making light of the past
3) 1963-1985: This phase is bounded by the Auschwitz trials of the 1960s and the famous speech by federal president Weizäcker on the 40th anniversary of the capitulation. It is a 20-year period of confronting the history of the Holocaust. One highpoint of this period, I might add, was the Shoah miniseries in the late 1970s.
4) Prantl calls phase 4 "maintaining the past" as being These kinds of falsifications of history have brought several politicians to their fall since the 1970s.

The whole scandal has revolved around the label "opponent" (Gegner) from Oettingers eulogy. It continued to simmer in the back pages of the newspaper for several weeks as letters to the editor and follow-ups about Filbinger and Oettinger continued to be published.