Dominance and Marginalization in the “First Generation” of Post War German Authors—A Correction

Generations and the post-1945 German memory discourse

In her 2006 book Genea-Logik, the cultural historian and literary scholar Sigrid Weigel points out that the concept of generation contains two dimensions: the first being synchronic, when “generation” is used to describe the affiliation to a certain age group and defines a common collective identity for this group, and the second diachronic or genealogical, when it denotes the succession of, or the relationship between, generations. Thus combining Mannheimian and pre-Mannheimian approaches to the concept of “generation,” Weigel points out: “Insofern verbirgt sich im Begriff der Generation immer schon ein komplexes Zusammenspiel zwischen Herkunft und Gedächtnis.“68 By

considering ourselves as part of a specific generation, we describe our position in a certain historical context and delineate our origin.

Therefore, the generational discourse in Germany after 1945 has always

inherently been a discourse about memory politics, Weigel argues. After World War II and the Holocaust, generational affiliations defined the relationship to the Nazi past. During the second half of the twentieth century, the further a generation could distance itself from the guilt of the past, the more political and moral power it could attain:

[The discourse on generations] ist einer jener Schauplätze, auf denen die Verhandlungen über die politische Macht und die moralische Definitionsmacht ausgetragen werden. Das Selbstverständnis, Vertreter oder Angehöriger einer bestimmten Generation zu sein, ersetzt und überlagert nämlich durchweg das Paradigma von Opfern und (Mit-)Tätern. Insofern stellt sich der

Generationendiskurs nicht selten als ein verdeckter nationaler Diskurs dar, in dem sich Schuldabwehr und Reinheitsbegehren artikulieren. [...] Die Generation

funktioniert als Medium der Gedächtnispolitik.69

In a pivotal article, “Generation’ as a Symbolic Form,” published in English in 2002, Weigel had already addressed the close ties between generational discourse and memory politics.70 In this essay, she analyzes the concept of “generation” “as a cultural pattern for constructing history” and sheds light on the implicit distortions of the generational

discourse in post-1945 Germany. Both on the side of the Jewish survivors and on that of the German perpetrators, the events of World War II defined a break in the historical continuum, from which a new genealogy emerged. We are counting the first, the second, and the third generation, with the first generation representing the perpetrators and victims, the second their children, and the third their grandchildren. On the side of the perpetrators, Weigel argues, “the fact that the part of a first generation’s discourse is not occupied is easily explained: in this case the position of the historical actors coalesced with that of the perpetrators of incomparable crimes.”71

The counting of generations in Germany thus started with the second generation, the generation of 1968. She argues that the silence of the first generation and their refusal of guilt triggered the generational conflict of 1968, in which the second generation revolted against their parents. In her view, the most striking aspect in the Sixty-Eighters’ generational discourse is their self-understanding in opposition to the collective of perpetrators: the Sixty-Eighters, she argues, defined themselves in opposition to their guilty fathers. Their desire not to belong to the “perpetrator” side of history can be seen

69 _{Ibid., 97.}

70 _{Sigrid Weigel, “‘Generation’ as a Symbolic Form: On the Genealogical Discourse of Memory since} 1945,” Germanic Review 77.4 (2002): 264-77. For the German publication see Sigrid Weigel, “Die ‘Generation’ als symbolische Form. Zum genealogischen Diskurs im Gedächtnis nach 1945,” figurationen:

gender, literatur, kultur 0 (2000): 158-173.

particularly clearly in the literary genre of so-called “Väterliteratur”, autobiographical texts written by members of the generation of 1968 that are crammed with accusations against perpetrator-fathers (Täter-Väter).72 This discourse, she writes, “had the precarious effect that the children described themselves as victims, and thus assumed the role of the historical victims, who to a large extent had been forgotten in the discourse.”73 _For

Weigel this repression of the Jewish perspective presents the main distortion of the second generation’s discourse.

Sigrid Weigel on the Hitler Youth Generation as “concealed first generation” Weigel convincingly demonstrates that in the conflict between the Sixty-Eighters and their fathers—staged as a debate between the accusers and the accused, between the innocent and the guilty, between the victims and the perpetrators—the Hitler Youth generation remained widely absent. While they distanced themselves from the generation of perpetrators and expressed their general support with the generation of 1968, their own biographical ties with the Nazi-past made it impossible for them to side with the Sixty- Eighters in their accusations against the first generation. Weigel argues that it is due to their absence in the generational battle of 1968 that the Hitler Youth generation is

typically not represented in the genealogy of post-war generations, i.e. it is omitted in the counting of the first, the second generation (the Sixty-Eighters) and the third generation (their children). Nevertheless, she writes, the Hitler Youth generation has attained a significantly powerful position in the post-war era: “it established itself after the war as

72 _{For a description and a critique of the genre “Väterliteratur”, see chapter three (“Autobiographical} Novels: Generational discord”) in Ernestine Schlant, The language of silence: West German Literature and

the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 1999).

the first authority in questions of politics, truth and morality” and can thus be called “the concealed first generation.”74

She argues that the “concealed first generation” assumed this authoritative

position by turning their biographical ties to Nazi Germany to their advantage. Unlike the Sixty-Eighters, born after the war, members of the “concealed first generation” could not easily distance themselves from the Nazi period. They had experienced it first-hand as children and adolescents. But by creating a self-image presenting them as innocent witnesses of the years 1933-1945, she claims, intellectuals of this generation could function in their role as moral authorities in post-war German society despite being, at least biographically, implicated in this Nazi regime. Weigel argues that this image gave them control over the memory discourse, and that in having “authentic” access to the Nazi era without being considered the perpetrators, the “concealed first generation” put forth their “hegemonic claim for the image of history,”75 which, as she attempts to show, has led to the exclusion of other forms of memory, specifically Jewish ones.

Distortions—A critical assessment of Weigel’s argument

To support her thesis that the discourse of the “concealed first generation”

inherently contains a hegemonic claim to the memory of Nazism, Weigel mainly presents two examples, one from the field of historiography and the other from the field of literary criticism. It is worth considering briefly the texts from which she draws her argument about the Hitler Youth generations’s memorial hegemony—an exchange of letters in the case of the first example, and an essay on post-war poetry in the case of the second

74 _{Ibid., 272.} 75 _{Ibid., 274.}

example. In my view, both examples are less clear-cut than they than they are made to seem in Weigel’s presentation.

The first example is a text taken from a historiographical debate between historians Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer in 1988 in the wake of the

Historikerstreit. Broszat, born in 1926, belongs to the Hitler Youth generation, while Friedländer, born in Prague in 1932 to a family of German-speaking Jews, survived the Holocaust by posing as a gentile, while his parents were gassed in Auschwitz. The catalyst for this exchange was Broszat’s 1986 article “Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des National-Sozialismus” published in Merkur, in which, as the title suggests, he had insisted on the need to consider the Nazi era from a sober historical distance. Friedländer published a critical response to Broszat in 1987, in which he spoke about the dangers of Broszat’s plea for historicization. Broszat, in turn, felt the need to clarify his position, and the two historians entered a dialogue in the form of an open exchange of letters, which was published in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte in 1988.76

Weigel takes issue with a passage from the opening letter of this exchange, in which Broszat further elucidates his concept of historicization in order to defend it against Friedländer’s reproaches. Friedländer considered it dangerous to approach National-Socialism with a merely neutral and scientific lens without the possibility of moral judgments; the crimes seemed too atrocious to apply a perspective from which

76 _{For the two articles, see Martin Broszat, “Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus,”}

Merkur 39.5 (May 1986) and Saul Friedländer, “Überlegungen zur Historisierung des

Nationalsozialismus,” in Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit, eds. Dan Diner and Wolfgang Benz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987). For the exchange of letters, see Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “Um die ‘Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus’: Ein

Briefwechsel,” Vierteljahresschrift für Zeitgeschichte 36 (1988): 339-372. For the English translation of this controversy that includes an excellent introduction, see Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism,” New German Critique 44: Special Issue on the Historikerstreit (1988): 85-126.

everything could be understood by means of reasoning because the next logical step would then be to excuse them. Broszat tried to clarify that this was not what he had intended to say.77 Naturally, he stated, a scholarly approach to the Nazi era did not need to exclude the possibility of critique, and of course, the history of National Socialism was neither a solely German affair, nor was the scholarly approach the only approach to history. Scholars would have to realize that they were dealing with the memory of a time period “besetzt von den schmerzlichen Empfindungen vieler vor allem auch jüdischer Menschen, die auf einer mythischen Form dieses Erinnerns beharren.”78 Broszat suggests that historiography ought to make room for this type of memory. Historians ought to be sensitive to the pain of the Nazi’s victims who saw “history” from a different, personal angle:

Deutsche Historiker und Geschichtsstudenten, das möchte ich meinem Plädoyer expressis verbis hinzufügen, müssen verstehen, daß es von Opfern der NS- Verfolgung und ihren Hinterbliebenen sogar als eine Einbuße ihres Anrechts auf ihre Form der Erinnerung empfunden werden kann, wenn eine nur noch

wissenschaftlich operierende Zeitgeschichtsforschung mit akademischer Arroganz das Frage- und Begriffsmonopol in bezug auf die NS-Zeit beansprucht. Der Respekt vor den Opfern der Naziverbrechen gebietet, dieser mythischen Erinnerung Raum zu lassen.79

Weigel points to the juxtaposition of “rational” German historical scholarship and Jewish “mythical” memory that Broszat allegedly evokes here, playing on century-old (as she suggests anti-Semitic) stereotypes. She is bothered especially by the next sentence, in which Broszat speaks explicitly of the “Nebeneinander von wissenschaftlicher Einsicht und mythischer Erinnerung” expressing his hopes that this coalition might generate a tension fruitful and productive for the investigation of the Nazi era.

77 _{Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “Um die ‘Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus’: Ein} Briefwechsel,” Vierteljahresschrift für Zeitgeschichte 36 (1988) 340.

78 _{Ibid., 342-343.} 79 _Ibid.

I agree with Weigel that in this formulation, which also becomes a point of discussion in the subsequent exchange with Friedländer, it sounds as though Broszat distinguishes the Jewish from the German approach when speaking about the mythical versus the scientific-scholarly perspective of this time. In one of the following letters, however, Broszat assures Friedländer that this was not the distinction he had meant to set up. He said he wanted to express “daß es neben der wissenschaftlich-akademischen Rekonstruktion der NS-Zeit (durch deutsche und nicht-deutsche Historiker) einen legitimen Anspruch auch anderer, etwa mythischer Formen der Geschichtserinnerung durch die Opfer gibt, und ‘kein Vorrecht der einen oder anderen Seite’.80

Thus, while Broszat’s choice of words is certainly vague and perhaps even a little careless, Weigel incorrectly represents his overall argument when she claims that Broszat “excluded this form of memory (Weigel means the Jewish memory) from the historical model.”81 For Broszat’s point is precisely to criticize the “nur noch wissenschaftlich operierende Zeitgeschichtsforschung [, die] mit akademischer Arroganz das Frage- und Begriffsmonopol in bezug auf die NS-Zeit beansprucht.“82 _{He argued for the integration}

of the victims’ memory, not for its exclusion.

In her essay, Weigel further suggests that Broszat’s alleged disqualification of memories of Nazi victims corresponds to a particularly high estimation of the memory of German war participants, especially of his own generation, the Hitler Youth generation. To back up this claim she quotes a passage in which Broszat reflects on the particularities of the Hitler Youth generation. He does this in response to Friedländer, who had warned about the danger of overestimating the possibilities of an objective scholarly-scientific

80 _{Ibid., 362.}

81 _{Weigel, “Generation as a Symbolic Form,” 272.}

treatment of the Nazi period. Both Jewish and German historians, Friedländer had

argued, could not ignore their personal ties to this period, which could well be seen in the fact that some of the most reactionary German historians involved in the

Historikerstreit—the highly emotional debate that had just caused great turmoil in the field of historiography—were members of the Hitler Youth generation. The following quote from Broszat’s response includes the passage that is cited in Weigel:

Ganz persönlich gesprochen: Hätte ich nicht dieser HJ-Generation angehört und ihre spezifischen Erfahrungen gemacht, wäre es für mich nach 1945

wahrscheinlich nicht ein solches Bedürfnis gewesen, mich so kritisch und, wie wir damals empfanden, zugleich mit “heiliger Nüchternheit” mit der NS- Vergangenheit auseinanderzusetzen. Als Angehöriger dieser Generation hatte man das Glück, in politisches Handeln und in Verantwortung noch nicht oder nur marginal hineingezogen zu werden, aber man war alt genug, um emotional und geistig hochgradig betroffen zu werden von der moral- und gefühlsverwirrenden Suggestivität, zu der das NS-Regime, zumal im Bereich der Jugenderziehung […] Zwar betroffen, aber kaum belastet, war die HJ-Generation freier als ältere

Jahrgänge und motivierter als jüngere, sich dem Lernprozeß dieser Jahre voll hinzugeben. Aus der persönlichen Kenntnis vieler Altersgenossen weiß ich, und aus den Lebensläufen vieler anderen bestätigt sich meines Erachtens, daß sich die Mehrheit dieser HJ-Generation nach 1945 die einst von den Nazis denunzierten Werte mit Verve zu eigen machte. Aus dieser Generation sind besonders viele engagierte Demokraten hervorgegangen, und sie ist in der politisch-kulturellen Prominenz der Bundesrepublik überproportional vertreten.83

Weigel claims that Broszat presents the Hitler Youth generation “as the only one that can provide the possibility of an objective record of history.”84 It could be argued, however, that this passage is descriptive rather than normative: it does not favor the memory of members of the Hitler Youth generation to the memory of Jewish victims, as Weigel claims. The strongest reproach one could make against Broszat on the basis of this passage is that he overemphasizes his generation’s as well as his own anti-Nazi

83 _{Ibid., 361.}

credentials, which, however, is a point with which several scholars, myself included, would agree.

I devote such detail in my analysis of Weigel’s treatment of Broszat because Weigel sees a pattern in his argumentation that she considers typical for the discourse of the Hitler Youth generation: “[T]he privileged position of the Hitler youth as witness”, she writes, “functions through the paradoxical construct of knowledge without guilt.”85 This idea that the Hitler Youth generation has apologetically created the status of the innocent witness of the Nazi era to seek dominance over the memory discourse has influenced the scholarship on writers of this generation. Therefore, I consider it important to demonstrate the distortions in Weigel’s essay. As the passage quoted above shows, Broszat does regard his generation as privileged when he speaks of a learning process to which his generation committed more freely than the older and the younger generations: “[D]ie HJ-Generation [war] freier als ältere Jahrgänge und motivierter als jüngere, sich dem Lernprozeß dieser Jahre voll hinzugeben.”86 He does not, however, privilege his generation’s view of the past to that of the Jewish victims, as Weigel suggests—at least, this is not evident from the text.

The second example Weigel presents in order to reveal the Hitler Youth’s claim to discursive power is taken from the realm of literature. Analyzing Peter Rühmkorf’s 1962 essay “Das lyrische Bild der Nachkriegsdeutschen,”87 she argues that Rühmkorf, born in 1929 and himself a member of the Hitler Youth generation, disqualifies Paul Celan’s poetry while propagating the style of writers of his own generation, specifically

85 _{Ibid., 272.}

86 _{Broszat and Friedländer, “Um die Historisierung,” 361 (see quote above).}

87 _{Peter Rühmkorf, “Das lyrische Bild der Nachkriegsdeutschen,” in Bestandsaufnahme: eine deutsche}

that of Günter Grass (born in 1927) and Hans-Magnus Enzensberger (born in 1929) as the ideal for modern poetry. The problem with Weigel’s argument is that again she proceeds in a very selective way. By focusing only on a few phrases of Rühmkorf’s essay, she leaves her readers with the impression that he directly juxtaposes Celan’s poetry with that of Grass and Enzensberger, clearly favoring the latter. The essay, however, provides an overview of Germany’s poetic movements since 1945—an overview suggesting that only at the beginning of the sixties poets had found a truly innovative style.

In his guided tour through contemporary German poetry, Rühmkorf presents Celan as only one in a series of writers whose poetry do not meet his number one criterium: stylistic innovation. Poetry written between 1945 and 1947 merely produced “die perfekte Mittelmäßigkeit.” Instead of marking “Wandlung oder Neubeginn,” poets sought “Halt am Herkömmlichen”.88 Similarly, the so-called “Naturlyrik” of the years 1948-1950 led poets “in die ästhetische Provinz [...], wo sie am Ende alle die gleichen Blumen für sich in Anspruch nahmen.”89 For example, Gottfried Benn’s Statische Gedichte (1948), while fresh and original, only gave rise to a wave of poor imitations. Rühmkorf sums up: “Eine schöpferische Revision des deutsches Expressionismus und eine Besinnung auf die eigenen modernen Traditionen, die an allem Anfang hätten stehen sollen, ließen weiter auf sich warten.”90

Against the backdrop of these early post-war movements, Rühmkorf initially portrays Celan in a positive light, namely as one of three poets who entered the literary scene in 1952 with new forms of writings. These “neue Jahrgänge”—apart from Celan, Rühmkorf mentions Walter Höllerer, Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Riegel—shared not

88 _{Ibid., 447-449.} 89 _{Ibid., 452.} 90 _{Ibid.458-459.}

only “eine neue dichterische Intensität,” but also “ein seltsam verqueres, gespanntes und dennoch leidenschaftliches Verhältnis zu Welt und Wirklichkeit.”91 In the poetry of these young writers, Rühmkorf states, one could finally see the long-awaited “Wandel im Ausdruckswillen“ and a critical stance towards reality.92

What bothers Rühmkorf primarily about Celan’s poetry is, “daß Celan […] mit vorgegebenen Symbolen arbeitet, Symbolen, die seit Mallarmé eingeführt, seit Benn und Trakl kommun sind und die durch allzu häufigen Gebrauch schon lange an

Ausdruckskraft verloren haben. […] so gesellt sich denn dem kühlen Entzücken an manchem einsfarbenen Bilde und der kunstvollen Tonlosigkeit der Sprachmelodie immer wieder der Ärger über den altbekannten Chiffrenreigen.”93 _{Celan, then, does not provide}