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THE LONG SHADOWS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR: THE IMPACT OF EXPERIENCES AND MEMORIES OF WAR ON WEST GERMAN SOCIETY * Axel Schildt The Federal Republic of Germany is not past history. Rather, it has a history which is not completed, but continues to affect the politics and society of the present day. In the expanded Germany which, with good reason, retained the name ‘Federal Republic’ after 1990, the history of the Bonn state and West German society gains interest as a point of orientation given an uncertain future. Not least, it has to be told to Germany’s new citizens, that is, the people of the former GDR and migrants from many different cultures, just as the West Germans must become aware of the history of these new citizens. In the process, it will be important to convey the fact that West German history itself has a historiography which discovered late, but not by chance, that the long shadows of the experiences and memories of the war provided a particular access to this history. The rediscovery of these shadows behind the processes of modernizing, liberalizing, and Westernizing the Federal Republic, especially since the late 1950s, adds an important factor to our understanding of post-war history without negating these processes. The history of the Federal Republic of Germany can only be understood if it is also seen as the history of a society after the worst war which humanity has experienced. It therefore casts very long shadows over German society in the post-war period. Ever since contemporary historians started to look systematically at German history after the Second World War, 1 the question of how the relationship between continuity and change in 1945 should be * This article, presented as a lecture at the German Historical Institute London on 31 October 2006, is based on an essay written for a volume edited by Jörg Echtenkamp and Stefan Martens, to be published in German in 2007. 1 A methodologically aware synthesis is Edgar Wolfrum, Geglückte Demokratie: Die Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 2006); on the state of research see Axel Schildt, Die Sozialgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis 1989/90 (Munich, 2007). 28
The Long Shadows of the Second World War portrayed has been a major focus of interest. Tied up with this is the precise definition of the influence of the war on civil society in the post-war period. Until well into the 1970s a popular view of history prevailed in the Federal Republic that was largely independent of historical research, and was determined by the political strategies of the Cold War. According to this view, Germany ‘collapsed’ in 1945 and the Western part was then able, by the efforts of its own inhabitants but also with the help of the Western Allies, to rise like a phoenix from the ashes to the heady heights of democracy and prosperity. This master narrative of public memory did not sit comfortably with the topic of continuities, for instance, the fact that members of the elite from the period before 1945 lived on keeping their social status in the new era. It was not until the final phase of the ‘old’ Federal Republic, when the Cold War had lost its dramatic character and new generations, who no longer had first-hand experience of the Third Reich, had taken the stage, that West German society was able to approach its own history with some sort of composure. And this meant talking about continuities without denying the abrupt break represented by 1945 in political terms. In an important volume of essays on the social history of the Federal Republic, published in 1983, whose subtitle (contributions to the problem of continuity) suggests a new perspective, the historian Werner Conze said that despite the deep political caesura at the end of the war, the ‘continuity of settlement (Siedlungskontinuität) formed the crucial bridge between past and present’. 2 To put it more simply, although the political situation had changed radically, the people were still the same and had brought their biographies with them into the new era. This generational factor must always be taken into account when looking at postwar German society. Anyone who was a 65-year-old pensioner in 1950 had grown up in the Kaiserreich. Many of the men had already started their family life before the First World War and had gone on 2 Werner Conze, ‘Staats- und Nationalpolitik: Kontinuitätsbruch und Neubeginn’, in id. and M. Rainer Lepsius (eds.), Sozialgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Beiträge zum Kontinuitätsproblem (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 441–67, at 442; for a critical voice on this see Lutz Niethammer, ‘Zum Wandel der Kontinuitätsdiskussion’, in Ludolf Herbst (ed.), Westdeutschland 1945–1955: Unterwerfung, Kontrolle, Integration (Munich, 1986), pp. 65–83; Paul Nolte, Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft: Selbstentwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2000), pp. 212–14. 29
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children, charms for stealing wine
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the traditional view. Kater’s rem
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West German Development Aid in the
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fare could be contained within the
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Europe available in Czech archives
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favourably inclined to such bridal
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favouritism could damage his prospe
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plementary to the Christian command
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