Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ to change in the 1960s, particularly after the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961. Eichmann was the SS officer who had headed the Jewish Evacuation Department of the Gestapo; amongst many other things he had taken personal charge of transports from Moravia and had even run Auschwitz for a short time in order to learn about the ‘problems’ of the operation first hand. The trial was immaculately conducted in Israel by the Chief Prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, and it was televised. Eichmann did not deny his role in the Holocaust; indeed he could be seen talking with indifference – even pride – about the fact that he had helped to kill millions of human beings. Although the Eichmann trial aroused interest amongst people in the rest of the world most Germans ignored it and continued to try to ‘put the past behind them’.⁷⁷ Few German universities offered courses on twentieth-century history and none taught about the Nazi period; parents refused to discuss the Second World War with their children, and it seemed that the past would remain firmly hidden away. West German scholars continued to carry out important research but few concentrated on Nazi crimes or on the Holocaust, preferring to debate various theories of totalitarianism or to study the leadership structure of the Third Reich or the military history of the war. The general public were first prompted to confront the most criminal aspects of their history not by schools or universities, but by the media. Above all, it was the screening of the American mini-series Holocaust in January 1979 – which coincided with yet another attempt by Germans to extend the statute of limitations for war crimes and crimes against humanity – which finally brought the horror of what had happened into people’s living rooms. History had not gone away after all.⁷⁸

      The film was a milestone in post-war West Germany because it took the study of the Holocaust out of the specialist academic realm and made it an issue of national debate. More research was carried out and some understanding developed as to how and why these crimes had been committed. It was ironic that it took a Hollywood film – and not a particularly good one – to provoke such a response, and there were problems with the approach.⁷⁹ Rather than reflect upon its significance to all Germans, including themselves, many of the younger generation veered towards a blanket condemnation of all who had lived under National Socialism: most knew very little about the complexities of Nazi history and made little attempt to learn how and why the Nazis had come to power, or to find out what it had been like to live under a dictatorship, or to differentiate between, say, an SS camp commander and a young Wehrmacht soldier stationed in Norway. And, as few older Germans had actually been directly engaged in the act of killing Jews, they in turn dismissed these shrill accusations of ‘collective guilt’ as ill-informed and irrelevant, ignoring their own often substantial contributions to the maintenance of the criminal regime. Many who had lived through the war years still failed to see that even if they had not actually carried out the first Zyklon-B test in Auschwitz or experimented on the bodies of camp prisoners, they had helped to maintain the system which had made these crimes possible.

      The study of the Holocaust and the Nazi period continued in West Germany during the late 1970s and early 1980s and a great deal of original research was carried out. West Germany became unique in its attempts to confront its history and to atone for its crimes, and it won respect in the international community.⁸⁰ Nevertheless, debates over how to approach this history became increasingly politicized and were bound up with questions about German national identity. Very generally, those on the left tended to argue that the Holocaust was unique, that it could never be put into a historical context, while more conservative historians argued that the crimes of other nations were also terrible and that Germans must stop thinking that they were uniquely evil so that they could begin to build a normal nation. The debate intensified in the 1980s in response to the Tendenzwende, a shift to the right represented by Helmut Kohl’s electoral success. Kohl provoked controversy through his ill-judged 1985 visit with President Reagan to the Bitburg cemetery, where Waffen-SS men were buried. This in turn fuelled the Historikerstreit – the historians’ debate – which focused on how Germans should approach the Nazi past. This debate was sparked off by an article published in the Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung by Ernst Nolte in June 1986 in which he argued that the mass murder of the Jews should be put into a broader historical context and that the Final Solution had perhaps been an ‘asiatic deed’ modelled on Bolshevik crimes to which the Nazis had added only the technology of gassing.⁸¹ The article was hastily rebutted by Jürgen Habermas in Die Zeit, and the exchange set off a flurry of argument and counter-argument about whether Nazi crimes were unique or whether they were comparable to other national atrocities, in particular the Stalinist Terror. The debate produced little new research and quickly degenerated into bitter personal attacks between rival groups, prompting Gordon Craig to dub it ‘the war of the historians’.⁸² The arguments were tempered somewhat by Richard von Weizsäcker’s moving and courageous speech as Federal President on the fortieth anniversary of the German surrender in 1945. Weizsäcker renounced the notion of ‘collective guilt’ but acknowledged the ‘historical consequences’ of the Third Reich and maintained that Germans could not ‘come to terms with the past’ because that implied ignoring the moral burdens of history. Indeed, he argued, only by facing and accepting the past could Germans look forward to any credible future.⁸³

      When I worked in both East and West Berlin in the 1980s – in particular during the 750th Anniversary celebrations in 1987 – I was always struck by the extraordinary contrast between West Berlin, with its vast range of debate and discussion, and the GDR, where nobody was permitted to deviate from the official line. The contrast alone was a powerful argument in favour of the West German system, and of the attempt to be open about the past. Nevertheless, although discussion about Nazi crimes had become widespread amongst historians and journalists and writers and film makers, there were many ordinary people who resented it. The members of the ‘Active Museum’ who created the first exhibition at the former Gestapo headquarters did so in the face of unpleasant protests from members of the general public; those who put up signs marking infamous landmarks such as the site of Freisler’s People’s Court had to repair them when they were repeatedly knocked down; members of the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst who displayed and discussed Nazi art at the Inszenierung der Macht exhibition carried on in spite of the death threats they received for ‘stirring up the past’.⁸⁴

      The controversies about how to come to terms with this history after reunification remain unresolved, but although interest was still strong amongst the educated elite it had become clear by the 1990s that many ordinary people were tired of seeing their nation in terms of this terrible history and wished to look to the future. Some claimed that too much attention was being paid to the Holocaust, and that it was time to draw a line under the past. Young West Germans born after the war may have felt remorse at what their forefathers had done but many now echoed Helmut Kohl’s claim that the ‘grace of late birth’ absolved them of guilt. The desire to draw a line was reflected in a Der Spiegel survey of January 1992 commemorating the Wannsee Conference. Two-thirds of Germans stated that they wanted less discussion about the persecution of the Jews. Far more worrying, however, was the result which showed that 32 per cent of those polled believed that the Jews were themselves partly to blame for being ‘hated and persecuted’.⁸⁵

      There is another reworking of the Faust legend which takes place in the city of Berlin. This one was written in 1936 by Thomas Mann’s son Klaus, who committed suicide in Cannes in 1949. It is entitled Mephisto – Roman einer Karriere, and was made into the extraordinary film Mephisto by István Szabó in 1981.⁸⁶ A true story, it recounts the career of Mann’s brother-in-law, the actor Gustav Gründgens, who went to Berlin in 1928 and remained until 1945, becoming the head of the Deutsches Theater and then the Staatliches Schauspielhaus under the Nazis. During those years he became one of the best-known actors in Germany. He was most famous for his production of Goethe’s Faust, and for his own performances in the role of Mephistopheles.

      Klaus Mann’s story is also a metaphor for Berlin, and for all the people who sold their souls for the fame and fortune, security and success afforded by the new regime. Mann mocks the poet Gottfried Benn – ‘Pelz’ – and André Germain – ‘Pierre Larue’ – who remained in Berlin to further their careers, but he reserves СКАЧАТЬ