Frank Trentmann, a German-born historian, teaches at the University of London and writes books in felicitous English. The special distinction of his latest study is its focus: Out of the Darkness is a history, not of facts alone but of the successive agonies of conscience besetting the Germans from the years 1942 (with the beginning of the rout at Stalingrad) till the present, with Germany’s diffident support of the Ukraine. It is a history of moral mentalities. Along the way, one hears of startling moral stances and moral conflicts: after 1943, not a few Germans considered the massive bombing of the cities in which they lived, flames leaping everywhere around them, as a deserved punishment for what “they” had done to the Jews of Europe; but others–we do not have the quantities–were as ready to see the bombing as the work of the Jews, confirming Hitler’s claim that they were indeed the mortal enemies of the Reich. In the matter of paying large sums of money to the family of citizens (certain Germans only!) who had been murdered by the Nazis, some asked: Is that the right use of state funds? What of us Germans who are suffering now! This quandary was then delegated to recipients who had the moral luck of refusing the blood money if they so chose.
Throughout the postwar years, moral issues, linked to anthropological issues, heaped up to dizzying heights. After the Wall fell and unification followed, what sort of human recognition could occur, let us say, between the contract workers from Mozambique dwelling in Rostock in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the conservative, militantly ethnic Germans, six million strong, many still mostly Hitler-besotted, who, expelled from Eastern Europe, had now taken root in the new Germany? The pathway to German citizenship was direct for ethnic Germans, even for those who had barely lived a day in Germany, but a dead end for others, never mind their years-long tenure, say, in German factories. (For an engaging example, see Fassbinder’s wonderful Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.) The motto current ca.1990, “Wir sind ein Volk” (We are One People), could seem sinister from those, as the official formulation ran, with “migratory backgrounds.”
But what of “conscience”—what Kant called “the inner court”—as a guide in all such matters calling for decision? The history of the German conscience after 1943 is not auspicious as a guide. For years, it meant duty to the state. (Even Kafka, at the age of 20, wrote, in an early letter: “God does not want me to write—but I, I must. … There are so many powers in me tied to a post, which might perhaps become a green tree while they are liberated and become useful to me and to the state.”) The state takes precedence to the will of God. In the case of “German conscience,” we have this odd correspondence: Conscience, writes Trentmann, became a weapon when German soldiers, who had sworn an oath to God, in 1934 swore a ‘sacred oath’ of ‘unconditional obedience’ to Hitler, to the Führer of the German state. In setting the Volk above everything else and representing HHitler as its redeemer, the Nazis manufactured their own good conscience, with which they could dismiss legacy morals, including established ones, like the Geneva Convention, in the name of a relitigated war of extermination. Soldiers averted to their conscience in performing acts with horrific consequences. But the 1944 attempt by high-ranking officers to annihilate Hitler and with it this ‘Hitler-conscience’ was celebrated as an ‘upsurge of conscience.’ It appears that conscience could be repurposed to justify a variety of self-serving ends (xxxiii).[i]
What might be specifically alluring about a history of German moral issues? This draw, following Trentmann, is owed to an extraordinary impulse among Germans to view all social, economic, and political problems through a moralizing lens. Whereas here we might debate the real utility of separating glassware from organic waste, “the German” is likely to make this a moral issue: if you flout measures to protect the environment, you are morally defective.[ii] Until perhaps recently, this was not generally the tone of disagreement here in pragmatic issues. For example, it might not be evident that the first line of cash and moral support for troubled individuals is their family: you would want to be sure that the family is not more broken or deranged than its unfortunate member. Support, you might argue, should come first of all from the wider community, from the social net. In Germany, care must come from the family first; and family members of no matter what standing who debate let alone shirk their duties are asking for invective from their neighbors. Here, again, you might debate the advantages and disadvantages of wind or nuclear power but taking up position in Germany means subjecting yourself to moral abuse. Hence, this fertile national ground for Trentmann’s, study.
Among the many striking incidents recorded in Trentmann, there is this illustration of the anti-Semitism of (some, a great many?) Germans, a vice not extirpated by the extreme measures taken by the present government to punish suspected anti-Semitism in any form (which includes intolerant excesses) [iii]—but intermittently always on display, as In Christmas 1959, when anti-Semitic attacks reached a peak: “a number of synagogues and cemeteries were desecrated with swastikas and SS runes. … In Cologne, ‘Jews out’ had been painted on the synagogue. Elsewhere, Jewish tombstones has been knocked over. This wave of vandalism threatened Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s project of Western rehabilitation” [and now for the jump!] as had been intended by the Soviet KGB, “which was behind several of the swastikas” (193), along with the GDR’s Ministry of State Security (MfS) department “Agitation.” Trentmann cites a phrase to describe this insistent vice: in the Germans—and not in them alone—“the bacillus of racial megalomania is slumbering;” and despite German Staatsräson—its official policy of philosemitism—it is easily awoken. The small flame of German compassion for others (rarely an affair of admitted complicity in their suffering) remains perpetually threatened, as witness now its sinister projection of Islamophobia. And yet, on balance, looking at Germany some half-century after World War II—a view which could fairly be taken today–Germany’s creation of a functioning democracy is and was remarkable. You have, by and large, a robust participation in elections by a citizenry quick to appeal to a rule of law and a demonstrable “communicative competence” (Habermas) alive in a culture of debate. “Yet,” as Trentmann concludes, “much remained undone [in ca.1990] to create a truly inclusive society,” an admonition of course trenchant today (278).
Katja Hoyer’s Behind the Wall, a history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), viz., “East Germany,” is a lively companion to Trentmann’s study.[iv] Like Trentmann, she is a German-born historian who works at a British university—in her case, as a research fellow at King’s College, London–and writes books in felicitous English. Her book arises from her concern that the GDR, where she was born four years before the falling of the Wall, should not be dismissed as so much historical excreta. Here she is at one with Trentmann, who writes on the tricky inclusion of the GDR in his narrative that “it [the GDR] can risk ending up as little more than an inconvenient detour that, with reunification, rejoins the main road to the liberal democratic West. Understandably East Germans take offense when their own past is reduced to the historiographical version of a stuttering Trabant next to a West German Mercedes” (xxxvii).[v] The deserved success of Hoyer’s book should rout her fears: it is memorable, full of one rich picture of life after another, one smart insight after another. She writes, “Both Walter Ulbricht [the GDR Head of State] and Konrad Adenauer proved to have their own (often unbending) convictions, but neither had much room for maneuver and neither was willing to move from a stance that bound their Germany tightly to the power bloc they deemed to be the morally superior one. This made both leaders suspicious and tightened their respective stance to a point of no return, even if there had been the political will in Washington or Moscow for moderation” (203/573, Kindle). Her account is full of surprises. Few readers already know that in the 1960s the GDR was the world’s leading exporter of … dolls. This might have been a time, like our own, when dolls were needed to stick pins into, in the hope of gaining magical support in rackingly insoluble conflicts. It is worth learning that on the treatment of women “East German women, on the whole, enjoyed greater professional and economic autonomy than their Western counterparts” (247). On the treatment of working-class students, “access to university [in the GDR …] was not only made possible through financial and structural support but also encouraged. […] By 1967 around a third of university students in the GDR came from working class backgrounds, while it was only 3 percent in West Germany (FRG) (and would never rise above 5 per cent until reunification)” (270-71).
Hoyer conjures another surprise: an extraordinary exercise in political tactics from 1964. The FRG in Bonn had granted Israel 60 million dollars of arms credits, which mortified Nasser in Egypt. The cunning, conscienceless gnome Ulbricht, who for decades maintained his dictator’s control of the government of the GDR, wrote to Nasser, pretending that he had felt unwell and would be pleased to recuperate in the dry sun of Egypt for several days: would that be all right? Nasser saw this letter as an opportunity of revenge for the enlivened West German-Israel nexus. Not only did he invite Ulbricht to stay in Cairo but arranged for a sumptuous state visit, concluding, before long, in recognizing the GDR as an independent state, one of the first countries to do so (Iraq was first). The Ossies were thrilled, their economic horizons widened—because now they could import and export goods to the Middle East, for starters–and Bonn nonplussed.[vi]
Hoyer’s book has been disliked by (formerly West) German critics for underplaying the dictatorial character of this East German socialism and the vicious reign of the Stasi. Trentmann writes concessively, “The GDR should not be reduced to a Stasi-land, but nor should it be normalized because many people felt that they led perfectly normal lives. The creation of a socialist normality was integral to dictatorial rule (emphasis added)” (xxxvii). It’s this last point, on the willing acceptance of GDR normality, that has led to sharp criticism. On the one hand, as Hoyer points out, in Trentmann’s very idiom, you cannot just dismiss the GDR as a barbarous Stasi-Land and written off as a repellant footnote to German history: “The East German state lasted for over 40 years, longer than the First World War, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany combined” (19/573). And we have heard about the social advantages for women and working-class students. On the other hand, the critical impulse of readers would be hard to restrain, considering that the Stasi “would grow to one of the largest and most complex police organizations the world has ever seen” (136). In its “feverish search for internal enemies” (183), it penetrated civic life to an appallingly intimate degree, leading to “the widespread militarization of society” (175). The Stasi-head, Erich Mielke, “liked to intervene in questioning techniques and in the psychological methods with which prisoners were to be softened up and broken so that they might confess whatever it was that the Stasi wanted them to say. In this area, he never moved away from the sinister methods he had learned from his role model, the Cheka: sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and deception would be all be used consistently throughout the history of the GDR” (263-64). All this easily puts the GDR among “the most efficient and ruthless police states that have ever existed” (174).
There are countless unsavory details of its administration: Desperate for cash, the East German Directorate found a way—a way that led to many hundreds of millions of marks—selling prisoners to the West German government and to West German charities, lawyers, and individual families of the chattels. Hoyer notes, with signature skill, that “the first ‘sale’ happened in December 1962 when twenty adult prisoners and twenty children whose parents had already emigrated were sent to the West in exchange for three wagon loads of fertilizer” (327). This sort of transaction, which sounds thoroughly repulsive, might be improved a bit, since, as Hoyer points out, some of the prisoners were involved in the trade, meaning, they were glad of it.
She finds other auspicious moments, as in July 1973, when East Berlin was home to the World Youth Festival, visited by 8 million people from 140 countries, including many West Germans. The American delegation was headed by Angela Davis, for whom “extensive campaigns were mounted under the slogan ‘Freedom for Angela.’” Angela can scarcely have imagined, while in a California prison, that owing to the fascination she provoked in the dictator Honecker, she was en route to an honorary doctorate at the University of Leipzig, passing, as it were, from one sort of prison to another (307). For typical of the “Yes … but” character of all the apparent achievements of the GDR was its “success in creating a highly literate society; and yet the means of expression were choked off by an oppressive state. You inform them, teach them to think for themselves, but then there are no means to express themselves.”[vii] Hoyer is still determined to show that especially from the 1970s on, many could still live good enough lives in Stasi-Land—a paradox hard to swallow. Hoyer’s and Trentmann’s admirable historical labors allow you to travel abroad with perfect visibility and gain what Milton called “an acquist of true experience” without the brutal discomfort of what is said to be “real” time travel.
Notes
[i] Much of this paragraph recasts Trentmann’s German words from a page of the German Web edition (16% of the Kindle sample).
[ii] Hillary Clinton was speaking in the German way when “she dismissed half of the Republican nominee’s supporters—at an LGBTQ fundraiser in New York—as people who held views that were ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.’ Whether or not she was correct [writes the author], the targets of her judgment did not appreciate it. And the disdain was mutual.” Mark Leibovich, “Trump Voters are America Too,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-2024-win-american-identity/676143/. Viewed 12/11/23; 03:01 UTC.
[iii] Masha Gessen cites “the German historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, for whom unified Germany turned the reckoning with the Holocaust into its national idea, and as a result ‘any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself, through comparisons with other German crimes or other genocides, can [be] and is being perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation-state.’” “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” The New Yorker,
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust?utm_source. Gessen was recently deprived of a cash prize by the West German government for the crime of likening Gaza, in this article, to a “ghetto” [!].
[iv] Trentmann’s opus was recently reviewed along with Katja Hoyer’s history of the GDR by Neil Ascherson in “Wessies and Ossies,” London Review of Books 45, no. 24 (14 December 2023). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n24/neal-ascherson/wessis-and-ossis.
[v] Identified by Neil Ascherson in the above-named review as “the small but inimitable Trabant in its featherweight Duroplast cladding (synthetic resin stiffened with Soviet cotton waste) puttered along the roads.”
[vi] This incident is implicitly present in a recent discussion of Adenauer’s anger and corresponding Islamophobia. See the incisive piece “Memory Failure” by Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books 46. no. 1 (4 January 2024). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/pankaj-mishra/memory-failure.
[vii] I am citing Hoyer speaking in a (London) Financial Times discussion of her book titled “Katja Hoyer: We need to hear ‘the whole story’ about East Germany,” https://www.ft.com/content/3f26324f-081c-47de-a168-4fdf03a1e4ed.