Divided Memory

The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys

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by Jeffrey Herf

Harvard University Press

Due/Published March 1999, 579 pages, paper

ISBN 0674213041

New in paper! (S99)

The question of how and why the Holocaust was remembered differently in East and West Germany is an interesting one. This is a book about history, memory, the Nazi legacy, and contemporary Germany. It points, for the first time, to the impact of the Cold War confrontation in both Germanys on the public memory of anti-Jewish persecution and the Holocaust. Herf examines the public and private papers of a long list of national figures--Adenauer, Heuss Brandt, Kohl, Ulbricht, Honnecker, Pieck (you can imagine the rest of the list) including material from recently opened East German archives--as part of this study that makes the German memory of Nazism comprehensible within the historical context of the ideologies and experiences of pre-1945 German and European history as well as within the international context of alliances from WWII to the Cold War.

Review

In the immediate aftermath of the war most observers felt that it would be communist East Germany, rather than the capitalist West, that would be more strident in incorporating the Holocaust and the Jewish question into their national memory. As we now know that was not the case -- "anti-fascist" East Germany suppressed the discussion of the Holocaust while West Germany, albeit without a clear mandate and at times reluctantly, ultimately provided restitution for the Jews, recognized the State of Israel and made Nazi atrocities part of its nation's history. Why this happened is the crucial question facing Jeffrey Herf in this well-argued and often gripping account of how politicians from both Germanys responded to the Holocaust in the post-war era, and how issues of the cold war dramatically influenced this issue. More specifically, the pre-1945 binary fascist/anti-fascist conflict did not necessarily correlate with the post-war dialectic of communist/anti-communist. Thus, there was pressure in communist East Germany to emphasize the suffering of the Soviets and other eastern peoples during the war. For many, the Holocaust was a distraction from the redemptive and glorious story of Soviet victory, leading to the suppression of the issue. In West Germany, the need to develop a democracy, and the need to restore the "elites" to power (whose reputation on the Jews was less than pristine) forced a delay in justice and memory, fearing that too much too soon would force a rightward turn that could jeopardize democracy. It was not until the 1960's and with greater pressure from left-wing political parties did West Germany begin to more seriously grapple with these questions of the past in an effort to be a more democratic and open society. Herf looks at key Germany political figures of the post-war era (it is politics where "meaning and power meet) and also recently-released East German archives to support his interpretations.