War Stories : The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany

Robert G. Moeller powerfully conveys the complicated story of how West Germans recast the recent past after the Second World War. He rejects earlier characterizations of a postwar West Germany dominated by attitudes of "forgetting" or silence about the Nazi past. He instead demonstrates the "selective remembering" that took place among West Germans during the postwar years: in particular, they remembered crimes committed against Germans, crimes that-according to some contemporary accounts-were comparable to the crimes of Germans against Jews. Moeller draws on a wide range of U.S. and German government documents, political debates, film archives, letters, oral histories, and newspaper accounts. "The Complicated Story of how West Germans recast the recent past after the Second World War is powerfully conveyed in Robert G. Moeller's highly original study. Moeller rejects earlier characterizations of a postwar West Germany dominated by attitudes of "forgetting" or silence about the Nazi past. He instead demonstrates the "selective remembering" that took place among West Germans during the postwar years: in particular, they remembered crimes committed against Germans, crimes that - according to some contemporary accounts - were comparable to the crimes of Germans against Jews." "Representative of German victimhood were the three million soldiers captured by the Soviets and the twelve million women, men, and children the Red Army drove from eastern Europe as the war ended. Moeller reveals how the experiences of both German POWs in the Soviet Union and German expellees became part of a public memory of the Second World War in which all Germans were ultimately victims of a conflict that Hitler initiated but everyone lost. Emphasizing the crimes against POWs and expellees made it possible for Germans to talk about the Third Reich without assessing responsibility for its origins. Moeller suggests how the intersection of public memory of the Nazi past, politics, and history in the 1980s and 1990s was strongly influenced by the forms of public memory that emerged in West Germany in the first decade after the war." "Moeller's analysis draws on a wide range of U.S. and German government documents, political debates, film archives, letters, oral histories, and newspaper accounts. Elegantly written, with more than forty evocative photographs, War Stories is a major contribution to our understanding of the abiding influence of memories of the Second World War in contemporary Europe."--Jacket This work intends to convey the complicated story of how West Germans recast the past after the Second World War. It demonstrates the the "selective remembering" that took place among West Germans during the postwar years: in particular, they remembered crimes committed against Germans. Contents 8 Illustrations 10 Acknowledgments 12 1 Listening to War Stories 16 2 Accounting for the Past 36 3 Driven into Zeitgeschichte 66 4 Prisoners of Public Memory 103 5 Heimat, Barbed Wire, and “Papa’s Kino” 166 Epilogue 214 Notes 242 Bibliography 320 Index 364 In 1995, a half-century after the end of the Second World War, battles over the meaning of that event still raged.