When scholars descend from the “ivory tower” and address non-specialist audiences, they realize that journalists and talk show hosts may well engage in what U.S. intelligence jargon calls “cherry picking,” i.e. minimizing the overall intent of a work and emphasizing its minor points. The controversies that have erupted in the aftermath of Nicolas Berg’s account of how the “founding fathers” of West German contemporary history interpreted the Holocaust suggest that selective reading can be an occupational hazard of historians as well as journalists – at least when a book concerns their own guild. It must be said that Berg set himself up for controversy by publishing “Lebenslüge vom Pathos der Nüchternheit,” in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in July 2003, in which he revealed a very ripe “cherry” indeed -- that the esteemed historian Martin Broszat had joined the National Socialist Party in 1944.1
The immense significance of Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker has been drowned out by reviewers’ attention to the possibility that distinguished historians may have harbored an allegiance to National Socialist values. Berg, the unwelcome messenger, has become the iconoclast, “Denkmalstürzer” 2, and ensuing questions center on predictable issues. Which historians joined the NSDAP? Could someone have joined the party without knowing it? Was affiliation with the Deutsche Christen evidence of Nazi allegiance? Did lingering prejudice affect harsh treatment of Jewish historians (pp. 343-352)? Could conscientious historians affiliated with the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) have relied on former Nazis to “fact check” particular details in their manuscripts while debunking victims’ testimony as unreliable? While these are important questions, they are also conventional. The great strength of Berg’s book lies in the new questions he asks about the context within which post-war research was conducted.
Berg approaches the historiography of the Holocaust in the early decades of the Federal Republic using both powerful facts from previously neglected primary sources and an interpretative lens centered on the discursive milieu and institutional context of West Germany. Departing from the analytic frameworks that have guided most historiographical accounts of denial and discovery of the Holocaust in West German history, Berg inquires into what philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called the Denkkollektiv within which that history was written.3 Although he attends to popular historical works about National Socialism, Berg did not set out to write an account of the Holocaust in German public memory.4 He is interested less in conflicts of opinions than in the concepts underlying the “Battle for Memory”, den Kampf um die Erinnerung between, on one hand, scholars raised in Nazi Germany and, on the other, victims of Nazi racial and political persecution (e.g. p. 329).
By delving into archives, scouring libraries for books long out of print, and tracking down book reviews, Berg assembled the raw material he uses to explore the unacknowledged values that shaped a consensus across the political spectrum (and I would add, far beyond the borders of Germany). This is not, as some suggest, an “a-historical” project, but on the contrary, a sophisticated history of knowledge about National Socialist Germany. In his 46-page introduction, Berg lays out his research agenda in terms that will be familiar to readers of journals like History and Memory and History and Theory. His integration of theory, public culture, and scholarship fits comfortably into the models established by historians of, for example, the memory of the U.S. Civil War or the French Revolution. But those histories lie far behind anyone living today. Esteemed historians in Institut für Zeitgeschichte circles and their students, however, are still very present.
Brushing aside the standard debates normally covered in historiographical analyses of the Nazi past, Berg examines the tropes of public discourse in order to gain what he calls a “mentalitätsgeschichtliche Einsicht” (p. 8) into the thinking of mainstream historians. Possibly because he anticipated that some of his archival findings would incite controversy, Berg treads carefully across the mine-field he calls the “Spannungsverhältnis” between research and memory. His interpretative summaries remind readers that no monolithic public memory exists, but rather an “unterschiedliches kollektives Gedächtnis.” He cautions against misunderstandings by reminding readers that, for example, “die Bilanz der Frühgeschichte des IfZ ist zwiespältig” (p. 318). Acknowledging the near impossibility of weighing too much against too little memory of Nazi genocide, he adds qualifiers to his generalizations. To an unusual degree, Berg includes extended passages from key documents that allow readers to judge the context that produced particular views – even when the quotations may contain material that goes against the grain of Berg’s commentary.
In constructing what he calls the Konflikterinnerung that has shaped West German mainstream academic history, Berg articulates his goals clearly: “Wer Erinnerung von wem einfordert, mit welchen Gründen dieser Appell versehen wird, was an Erinnerungen warum bedeutungsvoll eingeschätzt und für gedachtniswürdig erachtet wird und – nicht zuletzt – wessen ‘Vergangenheitsversion’ auf Kosten welcher konkurrierenden aufgezeichnet wird” (p. 13, emphasis by the author). Berg traces the work of historians who insisted on their commitment to objectivity and yet shared many assumptions of the public culture within which they lived (p. 524). By now the allegation that mainstream West German historians ignored the Holocaust is hardly news. After all, Marxists also dismissed Nazi racism as epiphenomenal, as did many West European and North American historians. Moreover, historians in other nations with criminal histories have not been quick to investigate the wages of slavery, territorial expansion, and “asymmetrical” warfare. Against this standard, the IfZ has done rather well. Besides publishing many journal articles, the IfZ sponsored monographs like the Anatomie des SS-Staates (published in relationship to the 1963 trials), Michael Kater’s Das "Ahnenerbe" der SS (1974), Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm and Helmut Krausnick’s Die Truppen des Weltanschauungskrieges (1981) and Lothar Gruchmann’s Justiz im Dritten Reich (1988).5 The central issue for Berg is not a failure to investigate the National Socialist state and society, but historians’ habit of falling into discursive structures that muted the inhumanity of individual perpetrators and the suffering of victims. By concentrating on Herrschaftsstruktur, historians in IfZ circles avoided the horror (p. 645). Insisting on their objective approach (pp. 326, 274) they developed a tendency that Berg calls the Entkonkretisierung of atrocity (p. 58).
In short, the giants of post-1945 West German historical scholarship participated in a consensus that attended to “the Final Solution” but deflected attention away from its Schande – by thinking within systemic explanatory frameworks. Although international comparisons lie beyond the scope of this book, it seems clear to me that this approach resonated the social science paradigms that prevailed (and attracted funding) in Western Europe and North America. Hannah Arendt’s paradigmatic Eichmann established the trope of the “hollow man,” the “shallow bureaucrat,” the “cog” caught up in a vast social structure. Systemic explanations emphasized either the racially obsessed elite around Hitler (intentionalists) or a machine-like bureaucracy gone awry (functional-structuralists). These totalitarian explanatory approaches but dissolved individuals’ agency.
Berg documents West German historians’ participation in the Zeitgeist of the postwar years in their resentment of the International Military Tribunal and their repudiation of the images of inhuman “monster” perpetrators produced in early Allied propaganda. A key document is Hermann Mau’s (unpublished) speech from the founding days of the IfZ that established the outlines of what became the hegemonic view of historical agency and periodization. In the 1990s, thanks to the availability of new archives and an abundance of fresh empirical research, a series of stunning micro-histories have made it clear that Judenhass had indeed played a role in mass murder operations on the Eastern Front. The mindless functionary epitomized by Eichmann’s trial testimony (pp. 648-652) yielded to the picture of committed, opportunistic true believers. Portraits of Werner Best and SS bureaucrats revealed men who had internalized the long-term objectives of racial Flurbereinigung and displayed considerable initiative in meeting and exceeding formal expectations. Berg re-introduces us to earlier outsider historians’ path-breaking historical studies that anticipated these findings, even as he documents established historians’ efforts to keep them marginal. What made them unerwünscht? Joseph Wulf asked himself the same question. “Here I stand in front of the 18 books I have written. What does it take to make a dent?” What was it about his work that historians did not wish to see? Not only the victims’ perspective, Berg suggests, but the totalitarian Täterbild (p. 345-362) that implicitly guided their vision.
In the Täterbild of Joseph Wulf, Leon Poliakov and other marginalized historians, not systems, but committed individuals engineered expropriation, deportation and mass murder. These two scholars made a major effort to document the sources of the beliefs that animated the killers. They anthologized documents concerning the radio and press, theatre and film, racial expertise, bureaucrats, visual arts, music, and thinkers. The sources they anthologize do not fit within either structuralists’ or intentionalists’ interpretative schemes. But in these pages we discover ample evidence of a massive betrayal intellectual integrity by the well-educated professionals who devoted their skills to the service of a monstrous racial scheme. When I read their anthologies, as well as Max Weinreich’s Hitler’s Professors, I am astonished at these historians’ restraint, not at their anger.6 In a typical passage, Poliakov and Wulf explained why they saw it as their historical duty to expose intellectuals’ and functionaries’ complicity with genocide, even if after 1945 these men insisted that deep in their hearts they had opposed Nazi rule all along. “’Den von uns ausgewählten unfreiwilligen Denkern mögen mildernde Umstände zugebilligt werden, aber verdienen sie den Freispruch des Schweigens?’” (p. 351).
Until the 1990s, scholars of genocide virtually ignored the intellectual planners, the Vordenker of Nazi racial operations. Nazi ideology was commonly written off as crack-pot and amateurish – as if those qualities by definition rendered it irrelevant. Although H.G. Adler, Joseph Wulf, Hermann Langbein, Helmut Eschwege and others thought generally within the same systemic frameworks as mainstream historians, their works included searing portraits of perpetrators’ hypocrisy, cruelty, and opportunism. Langbein’s Menschen in Auschwitz (1972), H.G. Adler’s Theresienstadt 1941-1945 (1955), and Joseph Wulf’s Vom Leben, Kampf und Tod im Ghetto Warschau (1958) and Lodz (1962) integrate sources that depict perpetrators and victims. Since the appearance of Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997), this breadth of vision has returned to historical writing.7
Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker has restored the works of underappreciated survivor historians to the historiographical heritage within which the wealth of recent studies of perpetrators and victims belongs.
Claudia Koonz teaches history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Her research interests lie in 20th Century German History, Women’s History, and genocide. Her most recent book “The Nazi Conscience” was published by Harvard University Press in 2003.
Notes:
1 Berg, Nicolas, Die Lebenslüge vom Pathos der Nüchternheit. Subjektive jüdische Erinnerung und objektive deutsche Zeitgeschichtsforschung in den sechziger Jahren, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17.07.2002.
2 Blasius, Rainer, Keiner wäscht weißer. Ja, nein, weiß nicht: Der Disput um den Historiker Martin Broszat, in: FAZ Nr. 219, 20.09.2003, S. 35: „Wie erregt ein aufstrebender Nachwuchshistoriker heutzutage das meiste Aufsehen? Indem er sich als zorniger Denkmalstürzer präsentiert.“
3 Fleck, Ludwik, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache, Frankfurt am Main 1980, S. 129-146. Major studies of the historiography of Nazi genocide include: Marrus, Michael R., The Holocaust in History, Hanover 1987, Maier, Charles S., The Unmasterable Past. History, Holocaust, and German National Identity, Cambridge 1988, as well as anthologies such as: Koch, Gertrud (ed.), Bruchlinien. Tendenzen der Holocaustforschung, Köln 1999, Hohls, Rüdiger; Jarausch, Konrad H. (eds). Versäumte Fragen. Deutsche Historiker im Schatten des Nationalsozialismus, Stuttgart 2000, (currently out of print), and several articles in Knigge, Volkhard; Frei, Norbert (eds.), Verbrechen erinnern. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, München 2002.
4 Novick, Peter, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston 1999; Segev, Tom, The Seventh Million. The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York 1993.
5 Buchheim, Hans, Anatomie des SS-Staates. Gutachten des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Olten 1965; Kater, Michael H., Das „Ahnenerbe“ der SS, 1935-1945. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches, Stuttgart 1974; Krausnick, Helmut; Wilhelm, Hans-Heinrich, Die Truppen des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938-1942 (Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte 22), Stuttgart 1981; Gruchmann, Lothar, Justiz im Dritten Reich 1933-1940. Anpassung und Unterwerfung in der Ära Gürtner (Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte 28), München 1988.
6 Weinreich, Max, Hitler’s Professors. The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People, New York 1946.
7 Langbein, Hermann, Menschen in Auschwitz, Wien 1972; Adler, H. G., Theresienstadt 1941-1945. Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie, Tübingen 1955; Wulf, Josef, Vom Leben, Kampf und Tod im Ghetto Warschau, Bonn 1958; Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews, New York 1997.