Hohenlohe-Bartenstein, Alice. 2011. In the Presence of the Past: ‘Third Generation’ Germans and the Cultural Memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/6601/ The version presented here may differ from the published, performed or presented work. Please go to the persistent GRO record above for more information. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Goldsmiths, University of London via the following email address: [email protected]. The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. For more information, please contact the GRO team: [email protected] 1 In the Presence of the Past: ‘Third Generation’ Germans and the Cultural Memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust Alice Hohenlohe-Bartenstein Thesis submitted to obtain the degree of P.h.D. in Sociology Goldsmiths College, University of London July 2011 2 I herewith certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. ______________________________________________________________ 3 Abstract This empirical study is based on interviews with 26 grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators, followers and Wehrmacht soldiers and examines how they remember their Nazi family histories and the Holocaust and the Third Reich more generally. Most studies of this ‘third generation’ are framed in the terms of purely constructivist theories of collective (Halbwachs [1925] 1992) or communicative and cultural memory (Assmann 1999) and thus cannot take account of present but unrecognized aspects of the past. In contrast, this thesis draws on the traumatic realism of Dominick LaCapra and others to examine questions concerning the memory and representation of extreme events and makes use of the psychoanalytic notions of working-through and acting-out/mourning and melancholia. It does so to distinguish between what is remembered and what remains dissociated, marginalized and excluded in the grandchildren’s accounts of their Nazi family pasts. It furthermore draws on this non-binary distinction to acknowledge the two interrelated dimensions that remembering the National Socialist past entails in ‘the double “post” of the postmodern and the post-Holocaust’ (Santner 1990: 18): 1) coming to terms with the absence of essential, unfractured and stable identities, i.e. with what Eric Santner and Dominick LaCapra term structural trauma and 2) mourning the suffering caused by the Nazis and countless ordinary Germans, i.e. what both theorists refer to as historical trauma. This study explores how these two dimensions intersect in the generation of the grandchildren to find that the structural dimension has been receding into the background since German unification. This implies that the cultural and official memory of the Holocaust is increasingly either used for the purposes of national identity building, and thus in a redemptive way, or rejected because it is considered to obstruct a return to an essential and pure national identity. In drawing on recent theories of shame, this thesis argues that efforts of ‘coming to terms’ with the NS past can only be ‘successful’ if working-through structural trauma is part of the process. 4 Contents List of Ilustrations 8 Acknowledgements 9 Preface 10 Chapter 1: Introduction – A short history of official and cultural memory of the Holocaust and National Socialism in Germany 18 1.1 Introduction: Two ‘mnemonic orthodoxies’ and their decline 18 1.2 Official and cultural memory of the Holocaust and NS in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1989-90 23 1.2.1 The victim discourse in the 1950s in the FRG 23 1.2.2 The 1960s: Protest and democratization 25 1.2.3 The 1970s and the beginnings of the institutionalization of the memory of the Holocaust and National Socialism 27 1.2.4 The ‘geistig-moralische Wende’ and the Historians’ Debate: A debate about ‘the Federal Republic’s self-understanding’ 29 1.3 Unification and post-Wende challenges to the ‘mnemonic orthodoxies’: The rise of the ‘discourse of contrition’ 33 1.3.1 European integration and the transnationalization of the memory of WWII and the Holocaust 42 1.4 Conclusion: The post-Wende (re-)emergence of memories of German wartime suffering and victimhood 45 5 Chapter 2: Literature Review – Between memory and forgetting: The ‘seething presence’ of the past 52 2.1 Introduction 52 2.2 The limits of social memory studies 55 2.3 Memory and representation in the wake of ‘the age of extremes’: (The family) Home as a ‘tangled site of memory’ 62 2.4 What does working-through the past mean and is it still necessary? 67 2.4.1 Critical theories of working-through: Between structure and history 67 2.4.2 Post-memories in post-Wende Germany 77 2.5 In Shame lies responsibility: Working-through reconsidered 83 2.6 Conclusion 89 Chapter 3: Methods – At the limits of narrative: Analysing family and life stories of the grandchildren of the war and Nazi perpetrator generation in Germany 90 3.1 Introduction 90 3.2 Auto-ethnography as method: the self as a ‘fieldwork tool’ 91 3.2.1 The Holocaust as an object of study 92 3.2.2 The self in the field 94 3.3 Interviews 98 3.3.1 Sample and recruitment 98 3.3.2 Between confrontational and empathic interviewing 104 3.3.3 From the standard in-depth interview to the biographical narrative interview 107 3.3.4 The active interview(er) 108 3.4 Methodology and analysis 111 3.4.1 Biographical methods and narrative analysis 111 3.4.2 Family narrative, subjectivity and national identity 116 3.5 Conclusion 121 6 Chapter 4: “You should really ask me about the war!” Reconsidering the post-war silence in families of Nazi perpetrators, followers and Wehrmacht soldiers 122 4.1 Introduction: The paradox of denial 122 4.2 Transmission in not of silence: Narrative and degrees of dissociation 125 4.3 Enacting silence in the family 128 4.4 Weak dissociation and narrative rigidity: recounting the grandparents’ Nazi and war past 135 4.4.1 Between condemnation and ‘critical empathy’ 140 4.4.2 ‘Sentimental and historicist empathy’ 143 4.5 Conclusion: Fantasy and the uses of memory against history 152 Chapter 5: Family memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust: Trauma and the everyday experience of the Third Reich 155 5.1 Introdution: ‘Borrowed memories’? 155 5.2 Remembering and imagining the extreme 159 5.3 Purging family histories: From perpetrators to heroes and victims 164 5.3.1 Remembering and imagining the everyday without the extreme 165 5.3.2 Post- or prosthetic memories as screen memories: Trauma, victimhood and wartime suffering 170 5.4 The re-interpretation of the familial silence: From denial to a symptom of trauma 180 5.5 Conclusion 187 Chapter 6: National Socialism and the Holocaust: Between memory, history and education 189 6.1 Introduction: Developments in the theory and practice of Holocaust education in Germany 189 6.2 The pedagogic value of (traumatic) affect 194 6.2.1 Working-through and indebted memory 194 6.2.2 Vicarious victimhood 200 6.3 Reevaluating the National Socialist past 203 7 6.3.1 Working-through as resented obligation 203 6.3.2 A more ‘differentiated view of the past’: Historicizing the Holocaust and National Socialism 209 6.4 Conclusion 216 Chapter 7: Proud guilt and other ways of ‘normalizing’ national identity in unified Germany 218 7.1 Introduction: The dialectics of ‘normalization’ 218 7.2 Defiant pride 223 7.3 Proud guilt 229 7.4 Europe and the Europeanization of the Holocaust and its memory 235 7.5 Conclusion: Shame and the limits of ‘normalization’ 243 Chapter 8: Shame in the presence of the past 246 8.1 Introduction: Responsibility beyond ‘normalization’ and reconciliation 246 8.2 Shades of shame 251 8.2.1 Fabian: Fear of shame 254 8.2.2 Caspar, Silke, Melanie and Ilka: Transformative shame 255 8.2.3 Carolin: Shame and the loss of self 265 8.3 Conclusion 270 Conclusion: Rebelling against the rebellious? Attempting to draw some preliminary conclusions about the ‘third generation’ 272 Appendix 277 Bibliography 294 8 List of Illustrations 1 Photograph of my paternal grandfather. 12 2 Private photo album of a Wehrmacht soldier (Zeit Geschichte 2011). 63 3 Family photograph of an unknown Wehrmacht soldier and his bride (private possession). 65 4 Private photograph of Wehrmacht soldiers and others committing mass executions of Jews in Ukraine (Pohl 2011). 66 5 Survivor in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, April 1945 (Zelizer 1998). 160 6 Wehrmacht soldiers and others committing mass executions in Kragujevac, Serbia (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1996). 161 7 Wehrmacht soldiers and others committing mass executions in Weißruthenien, 1941 (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1996). 162 8 Public executions of Jews in Shitomir, Ukraine 1941 (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1996). 163 9 British soldiers ‘burying’ the dead at Bergen-Belsen (Hirsch 2001). 200 9 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to thank my supervisor, Professor Victor J. Seidler, who has had extraordinary patience with this project. Without his generous support, it would probably have never been finished. I also want to mention the remarkable generosity of my interviewees, who volunteered to talk to me about the still very difficult subject of Nazi family histories and who made this thesis into what it is. I would also like to thank Professor Les Back and Dr. Nirmal Puwar for vitally contributing to the final shape of this thesis. Furthermore, I would like to express my appreciation to the Embodied Narratives seminar group, and here especially the always helpful and insightful comments of Daniela Jara Paz, Clair Morrow and Nela Milic.