West Germany's transformation from a National Socialist dictatorship that had plunged the world into its second global conflict within two decades to a thriving liberal democracy firmly embedded in Western political and cultural values has garnered a wide range of historical studies. West Germans’ reckoning with their recent past and their role in supporting and participating in a criminal regime has been closely scrutinized. The popular notion of May 8, 1945 as West Germany's “Stunde Null” (zero hour) implying a complete breakdown of the old order and a new beginning have been challenged by historians, activists, and politicians at least since the 1960s. What made and still makes this concept so problematic is that it implies that the breakdown offered Germans a clean slate on which they could construct a new society and state free of the legacies of authoritarianism, militarism, fascist ideology, antisemitism, and racism. This concept allowed Germans to evade and ignore their own complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime as well as the continuities in terms of institutions, personalities, and worldviews. Jörg Echternkamp's book provides a nuanced intervention into the memory politics of the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on veterans of World War II.
Echternkamp uses the concepts of “communities of experience” and “collective representation” (18) to capture the complexity of attitudes and debates regarding World War II. His study counters the notion that West Germans repressed the memory of the Nazi era and World War II, only to finally confront their past under pressure from the postwar generation in the 1960s. This popular idea of an era of repressed memories is too simplistic, as is the dichotomy of remembering = good, repression = bad. Instead, the author shows that World War II was ever-present in the public discourse of the late 1940s and the early 1950s.
The central community of experience are the veterans of World War II. However, Echternkamp does not neglect civilian experiences. As a matter of fact, one of the major differences between 1918 and 1945 was that German civilians themselves had firsthand experience of violence and warfare. After a brief survey of the interwar years, Echternkamp explores in-the-moment representations in the final years of World War II. What this analysis makes clear is the widespread awareness among Germans of the criminal nature of their nation's conduct of the war. This awareness was reinforced by the Allied occupation authorities through reeducation policies, the Nuremberg Trials, and their press coverage. What shifted within a few years after the war were German views of the Wehrmacht's role in the crimes committed. The outlines of representations feeding the “clean Wehrmacht” myth appeared already in the early Nuremberg trials. German defense lawyers presented their clients as honorable officers who had done their duty. The demand for leniency for key generals such as Albert Kesselring in the later trials showed the growing resonance of such notions among the German public, often reinforced by Allied officers’ exculpation of their counterparts.
The struggle of returning POWs to reintegrate themselves into postwar society further promoted exculpatory representations of regular soldiers’ conduct. The returning soldiers faced the dilemma of framing their individual experience of the recent past while finding their place in the present. In the early postwar years, soldiers felt rejected and alienated as the German public initially did associate the military with the criminal conduct of the war. Convenient representations emerged that separated the soldier from the political context. The notion that soldiers’ perseverance showed qualities valuable to the growing economy made their wartime suffering relevant in the present. What helped was a shared narrative of universal victimhood through which Germans had persevered in the violence and deprivation, closing the gap between soldiers and civilians. Aside from comparisons with German veterans’ experiences in the 1920s, some consideration of the frequency of veterans’ alienation in other national contexts in the twentieth century could have provided some additional perspective.
The book argues that these self-serving representations of German military conduct played an important role in stabilizing postwar West German society and integrating veterans into the new political system. Equally important was that while exculpatory narratives dominated public representations of the war, the more accurate narrative of military and civilian complicity in the criminal conduct did not disappear. Despite the consensus-oriented media, over which the Adenauer government exerted a high degree of control, exculpatory representations did not go unchallenged. Counternarratives emphasizing the Wehrmacht's criminal conduct remained present in the media. The fact that representations of the past were contested and debated itself became an important aspect in the democratization process.
Continuities regarding “universal” soldierly virtues and honorable conduct stabilized West German identities in the moment but would cause problems in the 1960s. Echternkamp emphasizes that, despite the widespread refusal to accept any individual responsibility, West German attitudes towards warfare shifted significantly in the immediate postwar era. The criminality of the war was not questioned. As a matter of fact, the narratives emphasizing that the majority had acted honorably contained the mostly-unspoken acknowledgement that crimes had been committed. Heroic and masculine conceptions of war found little expression in public. When Konrad Adenauer tasked former Wehrmacht officers with developing plans for the new Bundeswehr, the officers insisted that “universal” soldierly virtues had prevailed among most soldiers and should be carried into the new armed forces. However, this was not a return to ideas of heroic masculinity. The idea of creating citizen soldiers remained central, and future wars had to be defensive.
Echternkamp makes a convincing argument that his focus on veteran communities of experience provides a more complex explanation of the generally successful West German democratization despite the prevailing nationalist conservative values. While the “how” becomes clearer, he has less insight to offer as to why these veterans—particularly officers—did not question or challenge the new order more. Recent incidents in the Bundeswehr show that nationalist conservative sentiments never entirely disappeared among soldiers despite the progress made in the 1970s. Given the already quite massive scope of the author's research, limiting the analysis to West Germany appears reasonable, but the comparison to officers serving in the GDR would likely offer further insights into what previously held values and ideals veterans were willing to part with and why. Echternkamp mentions but does not fully explain that, despite the shared representations of the war, veterans supported different parties and came out on different sides of the rearmament debate. As useful as collective representation proves to be, it does become somewhat vague at times. The concept allows Echternkamp to rely on a few select sources without claiming they capture the entire spectrum of experience and representation. Social elites in the form of officers and journalists are more present than the rank-and-file. The failure of the Free Democrats, dominated by former officers, to gain mass appeal among rank-and-file veterans does indicate a social and cultural gap worth exploring.
None of these critiques should take away from the fact that Echternkamp's dense and nuanced study makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of West German democratization and public attitudes toward warfare and the military.
