How Germany Remade Itself

On February 23, Germany held a nationwide election. The results were disturbing, if not completely unexpected. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the conservative party that has served as a pillar of Germany’s democratic system for nearly eighty years, came in first with 28.5 percent of the vote, a relatively anemic result. Finishing second, with 20.8 percent, was the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a revisionist far-right party that rejects migrants and has been implicated in an attempt to overthrow the federal government. The Social Democrats (SPD), who have long been one of the country’s leading mainstream parties, posted a dismal 16.4 percent. The outcome confirmed a long-standing trend: the assumptions that undergirded Germany’s democratic institutions after World War II are being upended. The CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, has already started talks with the SPD about the formation of a new ruling coalition. Whatever form it takes, though, Merz has categorically vowed to exclude the AfD.

Yet perhaps we should not be entirely surprised. A close look at the postwar history of Germany suggests that its progress toward democracy has not always been as stable or straightforward as modern-day observers might assume. Michael H. Kater offers an apt cautionary tale in After the Nazis, his history of post-1945 West German culture, which mingles a general chronicle of events with a few elements from his own biography.

In 1962, he writes, he came up with a provocative plan for his doctoral thesis: he would write about a little-examined pet project of Heinrich Himmler. In 1935, two years after the Nazi seizure of power, the SS leader created a pseudoscientific organization that aimed at providing a scholarly basis for Nazi theories about the “master race.” Himmler named it the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Legacy), and it was soon dispatching researchers to record folk songs in Finland and conduct phrenological studies in Tibet (the presumptive ancient homeland of the Aryans). Even within Germany these efforts were openly ridiculed by serious scholars. Hitler seems to have regarded the Ahnenerbe with derision, and its real-world effects remained limited. Yet Kater grasped that examining its history could offer a useful perspective on Nazi ideology and how it was shaped.

Two weeks into his work in the West German Federal Archives, however, Kater ran into an unexpected obstacle. The deputy director, Wolfgang A. Mommsen, accused him of misplacing files and peremptorily cut off his access. Kater responded by borrowing money to travel to the National Archives in the US, which held a full copy of Ahnenerbe records that had been microfilmed by the Americans for use in the war crimes trials in Nuremberg. “As I had suspected,” he writes in After the Nazis,

I had been thrown out of the Bundesarchiv on a pretext, for I found Mommsen’s name in the Ahnenerbe files repeatedly. A Nazi Party member since 1937, he had assisted it in the looting of archives in occupied eastern territories.

Kater discovered that the USSR had considered prosecuting Mommsen for war crimes after the German surrender, but he had managed to evade charges by making himself useful to the Western occupation authorities: “Thereafter, he re-entered the archivist’s profession in 1952, becoming president of the Federal Archives in 1967. In 1972 he received the Federal Cross of Merit from Bonn.” Kater finished his dissertation on the Ahnenerbe, and it was published as a book in 1974.¹

In West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, the case of someone like Mommsen was at once scandalous and entirely routine. After 1945 the victorious powers had vowed to cleanse German officialdom of Nazi functionaries, but this was easier said than done. The Nazi (short for National Socialist German Workers) Party—a true mass organization—had had, at its peak, eight million members, a staggering one tenth of the Reich’s citizens. The Allied occupiers couldn’t run the country on their own, so they found themselves relying on the help of Germans who had the requisite technical and administrative experience—and the overwhelming majority of those were ex-Nazis.

In some ways, as Frank Trentmann points out in Out of the Darkness, his magisterial history of the “moral remaking” of postwar Germany, the Soviets had it easier in their zone of occupation, where they had a ready-made reservoir of leaders at hand: they installed German Communists, released from the concentration camps or repatriated from the USSR, in important positions. After the German Democratic Republic was formed in 1949, its leaders began incorporating lower-ranking ex-Nazis into their governing institutions, a process that required “political conversion” to the new socialist order. “Since ordinary Nazi Party members had simply been ‘betrayed’ by fascism,” Trentmann writes, “there was no need for atonement.”

Matters were more complicated in the West. “Communists had been among the Nazis’ first victims, and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany, or the GDR) saw itself as the fruit of their heroic victory,” Trentmann explains. “The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany, or the FRG), meanwhile, defined itself as the lawful successor of the German Reich, which meant taking on its liabilities.” (While the division of their country was painful to many Germans, Trentmann notes that it effectively solved one big problem of the Weimar Republic, where right-wing and left-wing militias had battled each other in the streets. The East German Communist Party now had to focus its energies on building its new state, giving it little interest in promoting subversion across the border.)

The Americans, the British, and the French each took different approaches to denazification in their respective zones (which eventually were combined to form the Federal Republic). The British, for example, instructed German war crimes courts to follow an Allied guideline that specified that, as Trentmann relates, “[not having] himself pulled the trigger did not exempt [a person] from criminal conviction, nor did the fact that he was following orders.” The Americans, by contrast, allowed the courts in their zone “to follow the conventional criminal code” and to “judge [war criminals] according to the law at the time,” an approach that led to frequent acquittals. But in both the East and the West the initial urge to weed out former Nazis soon gave way to the exigencies of governance. Some eventually ascended to the Federal Republic’s highest positions. Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had worked in Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, served as chancellor from 1966 to 1969; Karl Heinrich Lübke, who served as president for ten years starting in 1959, had worked during the Nazi era for Albert Speer’s Armaments Ministry, which made extensive use of slave labor.

In retrospect, none of this seems terribly surprising. During their time in power the Nazis had thoroughly “harmonized” (gleichgeschaltet) the country’s institutions, subordinating every administrative body and virtually every element of what we would today call “civil society” to the dictates of the party. Uprooting this pervasive presence was an enormous task.

And yet despite this, the Germans were remarkably successful at disentangling themselves from their baleful past. “Over the course of the past eighty years, Germany has gone through a remarkable moral and material regeneration,” writes Trentmann. In After the Nazis, Kater quotes a political scientist who called the postwar Federal Republic “the most successful attempt at democracy in German history.” Today Germany stands as an exemplar of the virtues of parliamentary democracy and is a pillar of the European Union. Rarely, though, does anyone consider what an extraordinary and hard-won achievement this is.

So how, precisely, did the Germans pull it off? The answers remain of interest not only to historians but also to other societies contemplating the transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. As both Trentmann and Kater show, the outcome was by no means assured.

On May 8, 1945, the Third Reich came to an end. Eighty million Germans confronted an apocalyptic scene. The economy lay in ruins, shattered by years of aerial bombing and months of ferocious ground combat; in many cities barely a building remained intact. Government-issued currency had lost so much of its value that it was supplanted as a primary medium of exchange by cigarettes. The victorious powers stripped the country of a quarter of its territory, and 14 million ethnic Germans from areas ceded to the USSR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia began a long trek to join their compatriots in the West.² Germans had spent the war years in comparatively privileged circumstances thanks to the Nazi regime’s exploitation of conquered territories. Now they faced starvation, epidemics, and homelessness. “In July 1946, the average German man in his twenties weighed 130 pounds,” according to Trentmann. “By February 1948, that had dropped to 114 pounds.”

In some ways, the moral and spiritual consequences of the defeat were even more devastating than the material ones. The Third Reich stood exposed in the eyes of the world as a criminal state. The systematic murder of six million European Jews led a long list of German sins. The gas chambers and the execution pits had also claimed Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and disabled people; concentration camps housed dissidents across the political spectrum, from Communists to priests. Nazi Germany had conquered Europe and governed its conquests on the assumption that it could exploit defeated people and their resources without any legal or ethical constraint. In the course of the war, the Third Reich and its fascist allies had slaughtered countless Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Yugoslavs, often treating noncombatant civilians just as viciously as they did uniformed soldiers. Millions of slave laborers were taken from their home countries and subjected to lethal working conditions.

The sheer scale of German defeat underlined the moral failures of the Nazi regime. Six million soldiers were dead or missing. The combat veterans who managed to make it home were often physically and emotionally crippled. For many of them, their sense of emasculation was compounded by the fact that their wives had been empowered by the war, which had pushed them into jobs and responsibilities they now found hard to relinquish. In the East, the widespread rape of women by Soviet soldiers had dramatized the inability of their absent husbands to defend them. In the West, the swagger and wealth of GIs, boasting ample quantities of “nylon stockings, chocolate and cigarettes,” made for a different form of humiliation. (The actress Hildegard Knef called the Americans “taut soldiers with tight bottoms and fixed bayonets”; she later married one.)

Even on a purely emotional level, the vaunted “master race” was now irrefutably under the mastery of others in every sense that counted. As the Allies became occupiers, they braced themselves for partisan warfare by forces still loyal to the Führer—the infamous “werewolves.” Yet the anticipated guerrilla war never materialized—one more testimony to the finality of the regime’s collapse. After World War I many Germans had succumbed to conspiracy theories that absolved the military from defeat on the battlefield and blamed it instead on alleged Jewish intriguers in the government (the so-called stab-in-the-back myth). In 1945 it was hard to blame anyone for the catastrophe but the all-powerful leader who had so clearly led the country into the war. Indeed, in the ensuing decades, the unsurpassably evil Hitler offered a useful alibi to many Germans wishing to conceal their own complicity. As both Trentmann and Kater show, many sought refuge from the heavy weight of the past by trying to assert their own forms of victimhood.

Yet even if most Germans didn’t believe that they bore personal responsibility for the crimes of the regime, there was still an inescapable sense of guilt. Trentmann offers ample evidence that many experienced Allied bombing raids as direct retribution for the atrocities committed against the Jews. Most ordinary Germans hadn’t known the precise details of the extermination program, which the Nazi government had tried to keep secret, but the scale of the crime precluded the complete ignorance that many later tried to claim. Modern scholarship concludes that at least 200,000 people were directly involved in implementing the Holocaust, and that number doesn’t include the many soldiers of the regular armed forces who also took part in genocidal actions. (Many Germans persisted for years in clinging to the idea that the regular German army, the Wehrmacht, had remained unsullied by the unspeakable crimes of the SS, but subsequent scholarship revealed this to be yet another myth.)

Too many had been involved in the savagery. Still, this morally compromised Germany gradually began to find its way forward. Denazification produced wildly different results in the two halves of the divided nation. The East, deeming itself free of any responsibility for the Nazi era, promoted a version of history in which Communists were the Nazis’ main victims and that gave little acknowledgment to the Holocaust. In its early years the West lurched between confronting the past and effacing it. Even so, the purge of the highest-ranking Nazis on both sides of the divide in the years immediately after the war did at least provide space for new elites—some of them former political prisoners or returning émigrés—to establish themselves.

There is no making sense of postwar Germany without considering Konrad Adenauer, who became chancellor of the new Federal Republic at its founding in 1949 and served for the next fourteen years. He was also the first leader of the CDU. Adenauer, a Catholic and former mayor of Cologne who had opposed the Nazis before their seizure of power and studiously avoided any political activity during their reign, was imprisoned after the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. When he assumed his new position as the leader of the West German government, he was seventy-three.

Kater only has a few lines about Adenauer and sticks mostly to the conventional view of him as a stuffy, somewhat authoritarian figure. Trentmann offers a much more interesting interpretation. While acknowledging the chancellor’s paternalism, he argues that Adenauer “oversaw an extraordinary transformation, in domestic as much as international policy.” It was Adenauer, known as der Alte (“the Old Man”), who oversaw the adoption of the Basic Law, a new constitution designed by leading legal scholars to overcome the institutional weaknesses of Weimar democracy. Among other things, it created a solidly federal structure and prevented political fragmentation by excluding from parliament parties that failed to win at least 5 percent of the vote (a provision later adopted by many of the postcommunist states in Central and Eastern Europe). When the Western Allies finally implemented a wide-ranging currency reform in 1948, Adenauer and his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, seized the chance to pass a series of reforms that ushered in the much-vaunted “economic miracle” that ultimately transformed Germany into a champion of European growth. Adenauer believed firmly in what came to be called the “social market economy,” which combined free market economics with extensive social protections and strong labor union participation.

By joining the European Coal and Steel Community (the forerunner of today’s European Union) in 1951, Adenauer signaled that henceforth the Federal Republic would side firmly with the West, breaking a long-standing German foreign policy orientation toward Central and Eastern Europe. This was not the only available option. Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the opposition SPD, long favored a course of neutrality that some believed might persuade the Soviets to allow East and West Germany to reunify. Many Germans were tempted by this vision, but Adenauer would have none of it. Instead he brought the Federal Republic into NATO in 1955, despite widespread popular resistance to rearmament. Yet voters validated the Old Man’s choice. In 1957 the CDU won a 50.2 percent majority under the slogan “No Experiments.” Trentmann describes this as one of the most famous mottoes in German election history—and also “one of the most misleading.” He views Adenauer, like the nineteenth-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who unified Germany, as a “white revolutionary,” a leader “who understood that to conserve required radical change, not standing still.”

Adenauer’s attitude toward the past was complex. He put an end to denazification procedures and defended an amnesty for ex-Nazis as the only option for maintaining governability. “You do not pour out dirty water,” he once declared, “if you do not have any that is clean.” Yet he also took an active part in the decision to pay huge sums to Israel as a form of compensation (Wiedergutmachung—literally “making good again”) for the Holocaust. “For Adenauer, Wiedergutmachung was about accountability,” Trentmann writes. “Once old accounts had been settled, forgiveness could follow.”

Adenauer’s strong hand had an unexpected side effect: it spurred many members of the younger generation into political activity. The 1950s and early 1960s are typically portrayed as a period of reactionary stagnation, but Germany’s postwar democracy was never solely a top-down project. Trentmann chronicles the myriad new paths that individual Germans began to seek. Volunteerism and civic activism swelled. Young people built ties to their counterparts in countries that the Third Reich had once occupied, accepting and demonstrating responsibility for Nazi-era crimes. By the late 1950s, he notes, many Germans were already expressing dissatisfaction with the short sentences handed out by domestic courts for Nazi-era atrocities. The 1958 trial in Ulm of men who had taken part in the mass shootings of Jewish civilians during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe resulted in appallingly mild verdicts—a pattern that was repeated in the 1963–1965 trials in Frankfurt of Auschwitz officials. German judges insisted that Nazi-era crimes could be tried only according to the standards of law valid at the time they were committed, which usually led to acquittals or minimal sentences. As the inadequacy of this approach became all too apparent, German courts began to accept that unprecedented crimes could only be tried according to broader humanitarian principles.

Kater’s sweeping account, which is unfortunately marred by dogmatic judgments and stylistic infelicities,³ nonetheless does an impressive job of chronicling how culture aided Germans’ gradual acknowledgment of these burdens of the past. One of my favorite figures in the book is Joseph Beuys, an elfin prankster who infused his conceptual art with a quirkily tactile sensibility. During the war his Luftwaffe plane was shot down over Crimea, and he was rescued by Tatars who brought him back to health by encasing him in lard and felt—or that, at least, was what Beuys claimed. These two materials later assumed a prominent place in his art, which combined elements of playfulness and mourning in weirdly resonant ways that seemed calculated to provoke the guardians of establishment culture. And that, of course, was very much the point. Throughout the postwar years, Kater shows, avant-garde artists and musicians contributed mightily to developing new tolerance for cultural experimentation, international influences, and liberal politics.

In 1947 the literary magazine editor Hans Werner Richter convened the first meeting of a group of mostly young writers united in their opposition to Nazism and its legacy. Several of the most important members of what came to be known as Group 47 had fought in the war. They included Martin Walser and the future Nobel Prize winners Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, all of whom channeled their wartime experiences into works that defied the widespread determination to draw a veil over the past. Even these well-meaning efforts, however, had their limits. The poet Paul Celan, who wrote in German, was a Jewish Holocaust survivor from pre-war Romania whose hermetic writing tested the very notion of artistic communication after the murder of millions.⁴ When he staged an eccentric reading of his work at a Group 47 meeting, his listeners reacted with condescension (though Kater insists that this was grounded in simple miscomprehension rather than antisemitism). Just because you had an anti-Nazi stance didn’t always mean that you could produce good literature—or that you could recognize it when you saw it.⁵

Both Trentmann and Kater demonstrate that Germany’s progress toward today’s emphatically liberal democracy was often bumpy and ambivalent. (The Federal Republic only abolished long-established laws against homosexuality in 1969.) A crucial moment, Kater contends, came when university students began to rebel against the continuing ubiquity of ex-Nazis throughout institutions of higher education. The children of former Nazis were strikingly prominent in the rise of the Red Army Faction, the left-wing terrorist movement that set Germany on edge in the 1970s, prompting both tortured ambivalence and open approbation among some progressive intellectuals. Kater has an especially useful section on the Historikerstreit (the Historians’ Debate) that broke out in the 1980s when a group of conservative scholars began arguing against the uniqueness of the Holocaust (particularly in light of the millions of deaths for which Stalin was responsible) and against the need to embrace Germany’s responsibility for it.

It wasn’t only conservatives, however, who struggled to come to terms with the legacy of the Third Reich. In 1989, amid the collapse of the East German state, Grass was among the many cultural figures who declared that the two Germanies should remain separate in recompense for the magnitude of Nazi crimes—even though Germans on both sides of the Wall voted overwhelmingly for unification as soon as they got the chance. Grass’s dramatic stance appeared in a strikingly different light when he admitted in a 2006 interview—seven years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize—that he had served in the Waffen-SS near the end of the war.

It is a fitting measure of the success of the Federal Republic of Germany that we tend to take its prosperity and its pacifism for granted. Collective German remorse has been an especially important element in this rehabilitation. By 2015 attitudes toward the Nazi past had evolved to the point that President Joachim Gauck, a former civil rights activist from the GDR, could declare, “There is no German identity without Auschwitz.” No other country, Trentmann notes, has “turned past sins into a source of civic pride like Germany.”⁶ This astonishing metamorphosis reminds us that collective cultural identities, which might appear to be stubbornly fixed, are in fact profoundly mutable. We shouldn’t necessarily take this as reassurance, as the rise of right-wing populist groups such as the AfD demonstrates. Germany will remain a model liberal democracy only if its leaders and its citizens continue working to keep it one.