And she poured the rest of the water over the white, gnarled forehead, over the neck and the breast. However, in the context of the novel it is clear that Ellen is trying to help her grandmother, not to dishonor her. In a bizarre sense the concentration camps allow their inmates to achieve their fully human potential, as one allegorical figure in the novel declares: Concentration, you know, concentration of the human being. That difference certainly needs to be acknowledged, and the reasons for it need to be explored.
In the immediate postwar period what is now called the Holocaust was seen as one particularly horrific part of a general panoply of horrors, not as a unique and incomparable event. It was seen not from the perspective of late twentieth-century identity politics, but from the perspective of a generally idealistic universalism that potentially included all human beings. And it was generally seen from the perspective not of the Jewish but of the Christian religion. Such ways of approaching the Holocaust may now seem outdated or wrongheaded, but they do not constitute silence.
And it is quite likely that by exploring them further we may come to understand more about our own approaches to and preconceptions about the Holocaust. This raises another question: Some of the major German-speaking intellectual figures of the period were or at any rate were perceived to be fully or partially Jewish: There is no question that in both East Germany and West Germany, as well as in Austria, Jews and people of Jewish ancestry played an important role in the intellectual rebuilding of the country. However it is also safe to say — as the preceding discussion of the Holocaust has shown — that sensitivity to and interest in Jewish questions was significantly less acute then than it is now — in both Central Europe and the United States.
Nor did all of the postwar figures now perceived as Jewish actually perceive themselves as such. Victor Klemperer, for instance, who is now generally perceived as a Jew, at least in Germany, saw himself as a German Protestant who happened to have Jewish ancestors. Arnold Zweig had actually emigrated to Palestine in , but he returned to Germany in because as a German Marxist and an anti-nationalist he felt more at home there than he did in non-German-speaking, Zionist Israel.
Max Horkheimer, who had four Jewish grandparents, and Theodor W. Adorno, who had two, returned to West Germany from exile in the United States in and helped to lay the foundations for postwar German sociology and philosophy. Both Horkheimer and Adorno were products of the history of Jewish assimilation in Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries; both probably saw themselves primarily as Germans, not as Jews; neither was religious. In the general turn to religion after the Second World War, it was primarily Catholicism and Protestantism, not Judaism, that predominated.
Those writers, such as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and Hermann Broch, who became more interested in questions of Jewish tradition and Jewish identity generally did not return to live in Germany, either East or West. Hence although it is accurate to say that Jews and people perceived as Jews played a significant role in postwar intellectual reconstruction, it is important to understand that many of these intellectuals did not see Jewish identity as a primary category for their self-understanding, and that the intellectual climate in Germany at the time was not particularly conducive to explorations of Jewish identity.
They are not ahistorical or in some way natural; to posit them as such would, paradoxically, mirror Nazi notions of racial essences. In effect, Richter and others in the first postwar generation had laid the groundwork for the emergence of what were only later to become the dominant voices of postwar literature. In that myth, even if the Davids of Gruppe 47 had failed to triumph politically over the Goliaths of conservative restoration during the interregnum period, at least they could continue the struggle more successfully later in the realm of culture.
In his book After the Fires: There is no doubt that this is the way Richter and Andersch wished to view themselves and to be seen by others. And yet the line between Gruppe 47 and the inner emigration is by no means as easy to draw as Richter and Andersch would have wished. During the last decade and a half, literary historians have uncovered considerable evidence of conformism and complicity during the Nazi period on the part of some of the very writers later celebrated as the heroic nonconformists of the zero hour.
Far from being the youthful writers invoked in their own prose, they were nearly middle-aged by the time the war ended. No one falls from heaven. And yet this fundamental debunking of the zero hour concept by one of its own primary proponents has not yet been absorbed in a broader scholarly understanding of zero-hour literature. Richter, Andersch, and their associates are still for the most part accepted — even by critics like Briegleb — as the founders of postwar West German literature, while their inner emigrant colleagues are still largely ignored.
It was not just with respect to society at large that the zero hour failed; the zero hour was also not a zero hour for Richter and Andersch. In a sense, they were themselves part of the postwar restoration. In a study of the zero-hour myth completed fifty years after the end of the Second World War, I suggested that if the year is denied the status of a zero hour, then German cultural history is faced with a fundamental dilemma, forced to explain how a supposed restoration could ultimately result in the most liberal and open society Germany has ever known. At what point did the National Socialist Germany become the democratic Germany Germans and oth53 ers know today?
Kiesel has identified the same fundamental dilemma with respect to postwar literary history, suggesting that because of their reliance on the theory of restoration to discredit cultural development in West Germany during the immediate postwar years, literary historians have boxed themselves into a corner. Another fundamental complication in any attempt to reexamine German literary culture of the zero hour is the division of Germany.
Literary critics and scholars have tended anachronistically to project the subsequent history of German division onto a period in which neither the Federal Republic nor the GDR existed. This complication is no doubt reason enough to leave the — period out of postwar literary histories. However with the reunification of Germany such an approach is no longer tenable, and it becomes crucial to examine the zero hour period as a kind of prehistory to the reunified Germany of today.
In what follows I will explore the German literary situation of the immediate postwar years neither as a radical zero hour nor as a restoration but rather as a complex, ambiguous, and productive period in which German authors in all four occupation zones and in both the east and the west sought to respond to specific challenges, to engage in concrete debates, and to position themselves for the future. Because Austrian writers like Ilse Aichinger and Swiss writers like Max Frisch were also part of literary discourse in Germany during these years, I will not exclude them, but they will not be my main focus.
Likewise, since many German-language writers living outside German-speaking Europe at the end of the war, such as Thomas Mann, were nevertheless directly or indirectly involved in literary discourse in Germany, they are an important part of the story. I am less interested in institutional history than I am in the concrete discourses that writers and other literary intellectuals engaged in during the immediate postwar years. This is partly because good institutional histories are already available, and partly because, aside from broad cultural histories of the postwar period such as those by Hermann Glaser and Jost Hermand, there has been remarkably little systematic study of literary dis55 course during these years.
Meaning of "Mottenpulver" in the German dictionary
Implicit in my approach is the conviction that what writers were talking about is more important than the cultural and literary institutions in which many of them were organized. One of my primary contentions is that the substance of literary culture was surprisingly similar in both east and west during the Nuremberg interregnum, in spite of all institutional and political differences, and it is precisely such discursive similarities that tend to be obscured by institutional history.
Moreover a focus on institutions can hardly capture the flight from politics that was one of the dominant trends in literary culture at that time. In exploring the literary culture of the immediate postwar period, I draw on novels, plays, poems, essays, speeches, and reports. Rather than focusing primarily on certain genres, authors, or regions, I organize my material around seven primary thematic problems, which correspond to some of the most pressing cultural-political questions faced by Germans in the postwar period.
To each of them I devote a chapter. The most pressing was the problem of German guilt. Thus literature is not simply a reflection of social reality; it also participates in the creation of that reality. Within the context of the present study, what this means is that the literary-cultural developments and debates that form the subject matter of this book are a fundamental part of the history of postwar Germany.
From the perspective of a West German culture of the s and s in which the national unity still envisioned by most of the zero-hour authors was largely repressed, much of postwar literary culture appeared old-fashioned and even discredited — part of an unpleasant and unwanted past that had supposedly been overcome. In the context of German culture after reunification, these authors and debates may well have acquired a new relevance — a relevance to which I will return in the postscript.
The once famous authors and intellectuals of the postwar period and their then marginal opponents were doing more than just writing about Germany; they were, through their writing, seeking to recreate the nation itself and their role in it. Of course Germany was not a blank slate, even in Politische und regionale Aspekte, ed.
Jost Hermand, —; here, Wiesbaden: Unless otherwise specified, all translations from German in this book are my own; the German appears in the notes, followed by sources. Ausgangspositionen und aktuelle Entwicklungen, ed. Manfred Durzak, 14—31 Stuttgart: NS-Autoren in der Bundesrepublik: Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur Munich: Hanser, , Anthea Bell, 1—; here, 10 New York: Johann Wilhelm Naumann, , Parkes and White, i—xxiii; here, iv Amsterdam: Blicke auf die deutsche Literatur und , ed.
Eine Streitschrift zur Frage: Twayne, , Routledge, , Quick und Stern in den 50er Jahren Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, that even the popular press in Germany during the s was filled with — highly problematic — depictions of the Nazi years, not with silence. Princeton UP, , Carl Hanser, , Propaganda und weiter nichts. Claassen, , Zigeuner und Juden, Polen — und solches.
Konzentration, wissen Sie, Konzentration des Menschen. This passage was eliminated from later editions of the novel. Eine Zeitschrift zwischen Illusion und Anpassung, trans. Sauer, , Views of War and Violence Bloomington: Indiana UP, , Das geistige Berlin — Frankfurt: Fischer, , Edition Isele, , Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, , 8, 9. Diogenes, [originally ] , Rodopi, ; Stephan Reinhardt, Alfred Andersch: Zur regimekritischen Literatur im Dritten Reich Weilheim: Denk, , — Edwin Mellen Press, , xii. Kinder, Der Mythos von der Gruppe 47, The Emergence of Postwar German Culture, ed.
Stephen Brockmann and Frank Trommler Washington: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, , 8—40; here, Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, — Munich: Wissenschaft und Politik, ; and Gerhard Hay, ed. Ursula Heukenkamp, 7—10; here, 8 Berlin: Romane am Ende der Weimarer Republik Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, , It is true that during the war Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lord Robert Vansittart, a senior British diplomat, took a negative view of Germany and favored harsh political and economic sanctions against the conquered nation during the postwar period, up to and including deindustrialization and a partition of Germany.
Vansittart argued that Germans were generally humorless, undemocratic, and aggressive, and that they had already managed to tear Europe apart twice in the twentieth century; if given the chance, they would seek to do so again, he believed. I mean the majority. On the opposite side of the spectrum of views, there were those within the U. In between these poles was a middle group which, although in favor of rigorous policies with respect to Germany during the first postwar years, nevertheless was willing to consider the possibility that Germans might be reeducated into productive, democratic members of the world community.
Padover from the Psychological Warfare Division of the U. In November of , barely half a year after the end of the war, survey results indicated that, in spite of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, eighty percent of American soldiers had a favorable attitude toward the citizens of the conquered nation. It would be a mistake to spurn them. There were two primary reasons why many Germans were reluctant to address the problem of guilt in the first postwar years; and there were three primary reasons why the larger problem of guilt was frequently reduced to the single bogeyman of collective guilt in the same period.
The first reason why many Germans were reluctant to address the problem of guilt at all was the horrific nature and massive extent of German crimes. Hell has come to the surface of the 21 earth. Hence it was no wonder that Germans were treating the question of guilt like a hot potato, passing it as quickly as possible from hand to hand. Therefore the whole question of guilt seemed to many of them an unfair imposition that turned the reality of their misery on its head.
The German Wehrmacht had suffered horrendous losses by the end of the war, with millions of German men killed, wounded, missing in action, or taken prisoner by the various Allied forces. Most major German cities had been destroyed in air raids over the course of the war; cities like Berlin, Hamburg, and Dresden lay in ruins, and vast numbers of civilians had been killed or wounded.
The lost war thus affected not just German soldiers but German civilians as well, bringing home the full horror of what Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had enthusiastically called total war. Strict rationing during the last years of the war meant that ordinary Germans had little to eat; hunger and disease were widespread. In the precarious trek from east to west — carried out largely on foot and in bad weather — many of the old, the very young, and the infirm died.
The millions of refugees from the east converged on remaining German territories further west in which, due to massive bombing, there were already severe housing shortages, as well as shortages of food and basic supplies. Families throughout Germany, and particularly in the areas invaded by the Red Army, feared that their women would be raped; in all too many instances this fear became reality.
In addition to all these problems, the final months of the Second World War witnessed increasing lawlessness in Germany, including problems with youthful criminality. In his report on his experiences in Germany during and , Padover noted an almost universal sense of self-pity and consequent attempts on the part of most Germans to elicit sympathy from their conquerors.
As Karl Jaspers put it in the introduction to his book Die Schuldfrage The Question of German Guilt, , The temptation to evade this question is obvious; we live in distress — large parts of our population are in so great, such acute distress that they seem to have become insensitive to such discussions. Their interest is in anything that would relieve distress, that would give them work 23 and bread, shelter and warmth. The horizon has shrunk. The horizon got narrower.
As Vansittart had suspected, the first and most important reason why the question of guilt, if addressed at all, was frequently reduced to the problem of collective guilt, undoubtedly lay in Nazi propaganda itself, which always stressed the unity between Hitler and the German people. Far from being a dictator forced upon the Germans from outside or above, the Nazis argued, Hitler had emerged from within the German people, had been chosen by them, and was recognized by them not as the mechanically majoritarian representative of a democratic polity but as the organic, living incarnation of the German Volk itself.
Germany was Hitler and Hitler was Germany. Even Germans who had not themselves committed specific misdeeds were, at the very least, accessories to and had knowledge of them, since they had probably known about the crimes of their government and done nothing to stop them. No German who could have believed them to be sanatoriums. The second reason for the widespread conflation of the larger problem of guilt with the more limited idea of collective guilt involved not so much Nazi propaganda as the popular response to the Nazis invoked by Arendt. The Nazi rise to power in had occurred in a more or less legal manner, since by July of a relative — albeit not absolute — majority of German voters had given the National Socialists the largest representation in the Reichstag, with over thirty-seven percent of the seats.
For the right-wing writer Ernst von Salomon this meant that Hitler had been supported by most Germans. The winning of mass support through convincing arguments, the legitimate road to power by way of the ballot-box, the legitimisation by the people itself of power achieved — I fear it is hard to deny that these are democratic stigmata, revelatory perhaps of democracy in a decadent and feverish 31 form, but democratic none the less. In other words, according to von Salomon, the Nazis came to power not through a putsch or by thwarting the will of the German people, but through the democratic support of ordinary Germans.
Nevertheless von Salomon is clearly right in making a distinction between traditional authoritarian regimes and National Socialist totalitarianism, which certainly sought to legitimate itself as the will of the German people. If Germans were not generally in agreement with the Nazi government, then why had there been so few instances of open rebellion, even as it became clearer that the Nazis were committing unspeakable crimes against humanity?
That is a bitter truth. Simply stated, the idea of collective guilt can be seen as a kind of paper tiger, a concept so outrageous in its undifferentiatedness that it was relatively easy to refute. The fact that both of these perceptions were inaccurate made little impact on popular discussions of the question of guilt itself.
MOTTENPULVER - Definition and synonyms of Mottenpulver in the German dictionary
Precisely because so many Germans did indeed feel an overwhelming sense of guilt, they first limited the problem to its most easily refutable aspect — the largely fictive paper tiger of an undifferentiated national criminality — and then denied its validity. The seemingly empty and indefensible concept of collective guilt might thus have served as a rhetorically useful escape from the all-too-concrete problem of individual guilt. Of course the people as such made themselves complicit through acclamation — that was the terrible, the 47 appalling undertone one sensed behind the storms of jubilation.
Germans had been deprived of the right to consider themselves innocent and were forced to pass judgment on themselves as guilty. The warning that the German nation was plunging itself into guilt and would suffer horrendous consequences as a result had already been expressed by the Protestant pastor Julius von Jan in a sermon delivered to his Swabian congregation after the government-organized pogrom against German Jews that took place in November of Man reaps what he sows!
Yes, these were terrible seeds of hatred that have now been sown once again. What a horrific harvest will grow from this if 48 God does not grant our people and us the grace of sincere repentance. Your own lack of clarity is coming back. Your addiction to grabbing is grabbing back at you.
We held onto them too tightly, we hurt and humiliated them, and now they want their revenge! May the Almighty God forgive us. I myself have sinned against him by not raising my voice against the wicked. How can we German Catholics ask for a just peace? If we were given a just peace, then we would all be hanged — that would be justice. In a declaration made in Stuttgart in October of , a number of prominent German Protestant theologians asserted their unity with the rest of the German people not only in suffering but also in guilt.
The German people will not escape this guilt. As a German, he has betrayed European civilization and all its values; he has brought shame and disgrace on his European family, so that one must blush to hear oneself called a European; he has fallen on his European brethren like a beast of prey, and tortured and murdered them. It is pointless, Jung suggested, to criticize the concept of collective guilt because of its irrationality; that irrationality is precisely what is at stake in the concept, and given the fact that irrationality is widespread throughout Europe and the rest of the world, one must address and not deny it.
Neither Germans themselves nor other Europeans can make the psychological fact of collective guilt disappear. There is, he claimed, an objective psychological correlation between the collective German psyche and National Socialist psychopathology. Jung suggested that Hitler himself could be chosen by Germans as their leader only because the psychopathology of his own psyche corresponded to the psychopathology in the collective German psyche. Germans suffer from a profound inferiority complex, Jung suggested, which leads them to ascribe all the negative characteristics that they fear and hate in themselves to other peoples; they therefore live in the illusion of being surrounded by hostile and inferior human beings.
It cannot simply be a coincidence, the psychiatrist claimed, that Germans chose precisely the hysterical Hitler as their leader. Unlike Jung, Karl Jaspers set out to establish an objective and differentiated approach to the problem; he was only secondarily interested in the psychological truth of accusations of collective guilt. His exploration of the question of guilt was the most systematic German analysis of the immediate postwar years. The sense of political liability lets no man dodge. In contrast to many ordinary Germans, who viewed the Nuremberg trials as an affront to the entire German people, Jaspers argues that because the Nuremberg tribunal clearly limits the concept of criminal guilt to a relatively small number of criminals, it actually relieves the German people of the accusation of criminal guilt — while simultaneously making their political guilt even clearer.
Precisely because of the clarity with which the Nuremberg trials demonstrate such political guilt, they are perceived by the majority of Germans as an affront: In their persons the people are also condemned. Thus the indignity and mortification experienced by the leaders of the state are felt by the people as their own indignity and mortification.
Hence their instinctive, initially unthinking rejec79 tion of the trial. It is the duty of every German to examine his or her own conscience with respect to moral guilt, and to understand that even a subjective feeling of innocence is no guarantee of guiltlessness. However, ultimately everyone in the world is responsible for everyone else in the world, because there is a necessary metaphysical solidarity among all human beings. Metaphysical guilt can be judged only by God, not by legal or political institutions, and not even by the individual human conscience. In a metaphysical sense, almost every living human being is guilty: Rather, he is interested in what Germans feel about themselves.
Every one, in his real being, is the German people. For all Germans, therefore, guilt and the consciousness that comes from it are inescapable. A Report on the Banality of Evil. As Arendt saw it, Nazi totalitarianism had transformed the German bourgeois into an instrument of political murder, using the appearance of respectability for its own ends. After all, he was only doing his job. Therefore German declarations of innocence have a perverse kind of credibility, Arendt believes, because they are founded on the very separation of public and private life that made possible the commission of German crimes in the first place.
His own recognition of the problem of guilt, he wrote, had come during a visit that he and his wife made to Dachau shortly after the end of the war. At the crematorium there was a sign that read: But the sign said: Man, where have you been? Paradoxically, he wrote, it was during his four years outside the concentration camp, prior to his incarceration in , that he had truly been unfree. The unfree person seeks to escape responsibility, hiding under the shadow of a higher authority. But God grants human beings freedom, and that freedom entails a responsibility which they cannot evade by delegating it to others.
For twelve years we were told about it. Therefore if Germans now seek to evade their responsibility for other human beings, they are merely fleeing once again from the consciousness of freedom which they had so successfully avoided during the Third Reich. And of the present he declares: And by refusing to be made responsible we are depriving ourselves of the possibility of becoming free again. And the German evasion of guilt was really an evasion of freedom.
With respect to the question of whether the German nation as a whole was primarily a victim or a perpetrator, many writers were understandably ambivalent. The Communist writer Johannes R. Becher, later to be Minister of Culture in the German Democratic Republic, was a good example of that ambivalence. Invoking the millions of German soldiers who had become casualties of war, Becher implied that such soldiers were primarily victims of the Nazis, not perpetrators of a criminal war.
If Germans perceived themselves as victims of the Nazis, they would be less likely to identify themselves with the Nazis. All too many Germans, Wolf wrote, were seeking to exculpate themselves, claiming never to have committed any crimes nor to have been even partially responsible for injustice.
All too many Germans were turning away from the question of guilt and sticking their heads in the sand, Wolf argued. Instead of looking to others and blaming them for crimes, the playwright suggested, Germans ought to begin by examining their own consciences. In the course of such an examination they might come to realize that the ruined city of Berlin and many other ruined European cities were concrete reminders of German guilt.
Bertolt Brecht was similarly ambivalent in his judgment of the German people. And yet in private Brecht was far more critical and suspicious of ordinary Germans, acknowledging the existence of widespread popular support for the Nazis. It was not the German citizen as such but rather the German citizen as bourgeois who was a Nazi: During the winter of —3, as his regiment is decimated at Stalingrad, Vilshofen begins to question not only the leadership of the German high command but also the morality of the war itself.
Recognizing the impossibility of breaking out of the trap into which the German Sixth Army has dug itself, Vilshofen asks: It is not the proud German eagle that should be the symbol of Nazi Germany, Vilshofen recognizes, but rather the crow, feeding on weakness, disease, and death. Far from simply feeling sorry for himself, Vilshofen comes to understand the role that he himself has played in his own destruction: How heavy is the guilt? How does the dead Stalingrad army weigh in the balance, how much does this ghostly procession of prisoners weigh?
What else must be laid upon the scales? Can guilt be weighed? How can it be weighed? In spite of all talk of military duty and honor, Vilshofen comes to understand that as a respected and conscientious officer he is, paradoxically, even more responsible for the defeat and dishonor of the men entrusted to his care than the many cowardly leaders who sought to escape from Stalingrad: It was not the bad officers. No, it was he, who had possessed credibility. As Vilshofen sees it, Gnotke: At the end of the novel Gnotke and Vilshofen are seen marching through the frozen Volga landscape; their path toward each other is a path toward understanding and recognition of guilt.
In sabotaging German planes, Oderbruch is betraying the trust of his friends and comrades; but at the same time he is fighting against the larger evil of Nazi tyranny and making it more difficult for his Luftwaffe comrades to carry out Nazi military policy. Anne Eilers accuses Harras of having let her husband die for the Nazis: You looked on and did nothing to save him. That is the guilt for which there can be no forgiveness. In his last meeting with Oderbruch, the latter acknowledges to Harras his own role in the sabotage and explains his motivation.
Then the world is lost. You were right in everything. But such superiority, far from exculpating Harras, actually makes him doubly guilty. Precisely because he is an effective, charismatic military leader, his failure to oppose the Nazis bears particular weight. As a revolutionary conservative brought up in the tradition of Prussian elitism, von Salomon despised the plebeian Nazis and kept his distance from them throughout the years of the Third Reich. Der Fragebogen was based on the questionnaires distributed by American occupation authorities to German civilians in the immediate postwar years for the purpose of determining the extent of their complicity with the Nazi regime.
By taking the questionnaire to such an absurd extreme, von Salomon sought to demonstrate the absurdity of the American questionnaires themselves. His book was essentially an autobiography covering the span of German history in the first half of the twentieth century, in which von Salomon had been born and lived most of his life.
It would be impossible to understand his own individual life and actions, von Salomon seemed to be saying, without also understanding the entire complex history of the German nation. The individual, he believed, is caught up in a collective which he did not necessarily choose, but from which he cannot escape. Far from being a criminal, the helpless individual is in fact a victim. This chapter begins with a description of the so-called Night of Broken Glass Reichskristallnacht , the officially organized pogrom against German Jews that occurred on November 9, Von Salomon and his female companion Ille experience the pogrom while strolling around their bourgeois neighborhood of Charlottenburg in Berlin, where they see SA thugs breaking the windows of stores owned by Jews.
Horrified by such blatant disregard for law, order, and property rights, von Salomon and Ille quickly return to their apartment, where the youthful and somewhat naive woman asks her wiser male companion the crucial question: The people means you, and me. But, God damn it all! I never gave them any mandate! When I thought a thing ought to be done I did it myself. In the first three sentences of this passage, von Salomon is a member of the German people in whose name crimes are committed; in the last three sentences, von Salomon is an individualist insisting on his own autonomy.
A moment later the writer says to Ille: For von Salomon, the rise of the Nazis is the result not of specific political and moral failures but rather part of a much larger modern catastrophe involving the loss of religious faith and the rise of large-scale, impersonal collectives that render the individual powerless.
It is not so much that upright people are few in number. Rather, it is that individual action and even identity have themselves become meaningless: Everything that is happening about us is not the product of the internal life of those who are doing it; it is the product of a collective.
And a man who will not accept and believe in that collective is dead. The collective always acts unconditionally. It also demands our unconditional faith and acceptance. But this collective has not gathered us up into itself, it has atomised us. Atomised frag ments cannot constitute a community, but only an explosive mass. Such individualists have become mere atoms without a connection to the German whole, he believes.
Even individualist Germans who are excluded from the Nazi collective are incapable of resisting the onslaught of barbarism.
Porsche. Die Geschichte eines Autos
They are, von Salomon argues, also zombies, because they do not participate in the life of the all-powerful collective. In their lifelessness and impotence, they are even more victimized than the actual victims. Non-Jewish German individualists are far more to be pitied than Jews, he insists, blatantly minimizing the persecution of the Jews while maximizing the description of his own purported victimization.
He must therefore endure the hatred of the very woman whom he has tried to help. In her eyes — he believes — he is simply drawing unwanted attention to her, therefore making her even more vulnerable to her tormentors. Von Salomon draws the conclusion — logical only if one accepts his premise of an all-powerful Nazi collective — that any demonstration of civil courage is necessarily counterproductive, resulting only in further degradation.
It is at any rate the only decent course. And it is also the most difficult thing in the world, a sort of Gandhi-ism without Gandhi. The helpless individual withdraws into heroic but impotent paralysis, observing with melancholy scorn the degradation of the world around him. After he has made these reflections and realized how the irresistible power of the collective helps to exculpate him as an individual, von Salomon finds: There seemed to be something to the methods of the psychoanalysts after all.
Moreover, von Salomon declares: Like himself and Frau Imming, most Germans during the Third Reich were caught up in political developments which they were helpless to resist. Das Beil von Wandsbek is the story of Albert Teetjen, a butcher in Hamburg who is facing severe competition from large department stores. For 2, marks, Teetjen — covered in a black mask to preserve his anonymity — chops off the heads of the condemned men. Initially, the butcher and his pretty wife Stine seem to have regained their financial stability as a result of this unconventional execution; but it is not long before word gets out in the neighborhood that their newfound prosperity is based on blood money.
In the end, Teetjen loses almost all of his customers and is forced to give up his butcher shop; he and his wife commit suicide. They have betrayed their fellow working men and women and must therefore die. Their fate is that of Judas Iscariot in the Bible. Albert Teetjen is an ordinary man, a petit-bourgeois shopkeeper afraid of social decline.
The guilt with which he covers himself has its origin in economic desperation.
Translation of «Mottenpulver» into 25 languages
Those with money can easily afford the luxury of being without Schuld — in both senses of the word — but the poor have a far more difficult time. Albert Teetjen is faced with financial ruin — a mountain of debt — and he therefore also takes upon himself moral ruin — a mountain of guilt. The thoughtful prison warden Heinrich Koldewey, a traditional German conservative, detests Hitler and the Nazis, and he is convinced of the innocence of his four prisoners; but he does nothing to save the men in his care, and any efforts he makes against Hitler are too little, too late. But it is the socially weak and impecunious butcher Teetjen who becomes the embodiment of German guilt.
Poor people have little or no influence over the course of political affairs; it is the wealthy members of the educated bourgeoisie who organize and profit from politics throughout most of the world; when things go wrong, however, they do not want to pay the price. If Marx had viewed the capitalist system as the organized expropriation of surplus value for the benefit of the wealthy, then Zweig views the discourse of collective guilt as the organized foisting-off of responsibility onto the poor and powerless.
The ruling classes steal not only money but also innocence; the lower classes are not just poor but also — therefore — guilty. If Teetjen is Judas, then Koldewey and his kind are Pontius Pilate, seeking to wash their hands of guilt by implicating the common people. At the center of the novel are two German men from different generations: He had gone further than the burghers in the hall, but it was they who had made it possible for him to go so far.
They had underwritten his wanderings with their lives. Because art for the Philistine Friedrich Wilhelm had always been a compensation and cosmetic disguise for an inadequate social reality — in other words: His music is dedicated to truth: Siegfried did not want to reproduce himself. The thought of causing a life that could be subjected to unforeseeable encounters, coincidences, actions, and reactions and which through deed, thought, or further reproduction of its own could once again have consequences throughout the future, the idea of being the father of a child, this provocation to the world, truly appalled him and spoiled any contact with girls for him, even if they were using contraceptives, which were in and of themselves already humiliating and disgusting, and which humiliatingly and disgustingly pointed out the very thing which was to be prevented.
His refusal of sexual intercourse is a logical refusal to propagate the family itself. As the Nazi regime collapsed, Adolf and his comrades were packed into a train and shipped off; but the train was stopped by enemy bombers. As Adolf and his fellow schoolboys make their way by foot along the railroad tracks after leaving the train, they suddenly encounter a group of inmates from a concentration camp who have themselves escaped from a train.
The children trembled in their Party school uniforms. And Adolf thought that his father was probably dead, that he must be dead; but the fact that his father was dead said nothing to him. If he was crying, then he was crying for himself, or maybe not even for himself, he did not know why he was crying, maybe he was crying for the world, but he was not crying because of his father. Had he not loved him? Had he hated him? While Adolf feels a profound sense of guilt when confronted with the Jewish boy — it is this sense of guilt that makes him and the other boys afraid of punishment — he is simultaneously unable to separate himself from his father, a Nazi criminal.
Adolf is therefore pulled in conflicting directions. Perhaps his father, like the father of the Jewish boy, is dead; perhaps he even deserved to die. Whereas the atheist Siegfried has dedicated himself to music as a substitute father-figure and superego, Adolf dedicates himself to God. The greater power of God protects Adolf from his seemingly omnipotent biological father, but at the same time Adolf fears revenge from that real father, a human god of death and destruction.
Eva mourns for the lost and betrayed German Reich and for the dead Hitler, and she feels guilty for having survived the death of her beloved hero. To have survived Hitler is to have made oneself guilty, as if one had contributed to his death. Eva Judejahn is thus a fury seeking revenge.
Judejahn heard a voice, not the voice of God nor the voice of conscience, it was the thin, hungry, self-improving voice of his father, the primary schoolteacher, whispering to him: In the service of Hitler, Judejahn imagines himself magnificent and powerful, lord over life and death. The murder that he commits at the end of the novel comes at the very moment when he feels his own mortality, shortly before the heart attack that ends his life. Powerless to defend himself, Judejahn then receives extreme unction from none other than his son the priest, the representative of the very God whom he has spent his entire life trying to escape.
Because of the guilt that they have inherited, Adolf and Siegfried seek in their own different ways to atone for the sins of their fathers, but in the end they are unable to escape from the hell that the Nazis have created. They have become the executors of their own damnation. Ultimately this novel describes an inferno in which all of its major figures live in varying degrees of torment.
Germans know the horrors from which they are trying to escape, but they have no idea where to find a possible refuge. The furies they carry with them wherever they go will quickly seek them out and punish them.
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Originally in the Deutsche Rundschau, August Wer war an Hitler schuld? Die Debatte um die Schuldfrage — Munich: Minerva, , Knopf, , Vansittart, Lessons of My Life, Morgenthau, Germany is Our Problem, Knopf, , ix, Padover, Experiment in Germany: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, , In the subsequent pages Barnouw also explores some of the ambiguities and complexities of official U. Army anti-fraternization policies in Germany. Dial Press, , Der Horizont ist eng geworden.
Von der politischen Haftung Deutschlands Munich: Piper, , Der Horizont verengte sich. Man machte nicht mehr Weltgeschichte. Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, Martin Secker, , Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Feldman, —36; here, New York: Originally published in Jewish Frontier, January Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager Munich: Kindler, , Originally published in The Theory and Practice of Hell, trans.
Heinz Norden New York: The chapter from which this sentence is taken does not appear in the published English-language translation. This sentence does not appear in the English-language version. Putnam, , — Rowohlt, , Das ist eine bittere Wahrheit. Padover, Experiment in Germany, Publications, , German American, , 25, Reflections and Recollections, trans. Harvard UP, , Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen Brockhaus: Wiesbaden, , Beck, , Aufbau, , 34—39; here, In subsequent editions of the novel, this passage does not begin the chapter.
Holz, Christliche Weltanschauung, Heliopolis, , Jean Steinberg New York: Praeger, , Eure Sucht, zu greifen, greift nun nach euch. Ihr selbst habt die Materie zum Material gemacht. Eugen Rentsch, , Kaiser, , Cited in Herf, Divided Memory, , note 8. Hull, —; here, New York: For a critique of Jung, see Dr. German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment Berkeley: U of California P, , Der Sinn politischer Haftung erlaubt es niemandem auszuweichen.
In ihnen wird das Volk mit verurteilt. Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage, Jeder ist, wenn er eigentlich ist, das deutsche Volk. Juli bis Mitte Mensch, wo bist du gewesen? Ich hatte mich damals bereits meiner wahren Verantwortung begeben. Wir werden heute verantwortlich gemacht und wollen doch nicht verantwortlich gemacht werden. Werner Hecht et al. Aufbau and Suhrkamp, Eric Bentley, in Brecht, Werke, vol. See Victor Klemperer, Kultur: Neues Leben, , Richard and Clara Winston New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, , 8. Aufbau, , Richard and Clara Winston, Wieviel wiegt die tote Stalingradarmee, wieviel wiegt dieser gespenstische Gefangenenzug, und was ist noch auf die Schale zu legen?
Ist die Schuld aufzuwiegen, wie ist sie aufzuwiegen? For an alternative Englishlanguage translation: Kriegserlebnis und Kriegsdeutung in deutschen Medien der Nachkriegszeit — , ed. Sogar Weib und Kinder. Sie haben zugeschaut und ihn nicht gerettet. Dann ist die Welt verloren. Fallen Sie nicht um, Oderbruch. Sie hatten recht, mit allem. Influenced by the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials in the early s, and after further criticisms that the figure of Harras was not presented in a sufficiently negative light — and, conversely, that the figure of Oderbruch had failed to appear in a sufficiently positive light — Zuckmayer published a slightly revised version of Des Teufels General in ; in this version Zuckmayer made it even clearer that Harras ultimately accepts his own guilt.
Westdeutscher Verlag, , 13— Reclam, , — Sie haben immer nur einen Auftrag des Volkes vollstreckt. Volk, das bist auch du und bin auch ich. Aber ich habe, verdammt nochmal, keinen Auftrag gegeben. Der Rathenau-Mord und die deutsche Gegenrevolution Frankfurt: Alles, was um uns herum geschieht, lebt nicht aus denen heraus, die es tun; es lebt aus einem Kollektiv heraus. Wer sich zu diesem Kollektiv nicht bekennen kann, der ist tot. Das Kollektiv handelt immer unbedingt.
Es verlangt auch das unbedingte Bekenntnis. Aber dieses Kollektiv, es hat uns nicht aufgenommen, sondern atomisiert.
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Atomisierte Teilchen bilden keine Gemeinschaft, sondern eine Sprengmasse. For an alternative English translation, see von Salomon, The Answers, Und es ist zugleich das Schwerste, was es gibt, eine Art Gandhismus ohne Gandhi. An den Methoden der Psychoanalyse schien doch etwas dran zu sein. Hutchinson International Authors, , Zweig, Das Beil von Wandsbek Stockholm: Penguin, , Suhrkamp, , Vanguard, , I cite the Hofmann translation unless otherwise noted. Er hatte nur zugesehen. Sie hatten sein Wandern mit dem Tod gebilligt.
For alternative translations, see 49 in the Hofmann version and 50 in the Savill version. For an alternative translation, see in the Hofmann version. For alternatives, see in the Hofmann translation and in the Savill translation. Tote guckten sie an. Hatte er ihn nicht geliebt? Er glaubte es nicht. For alternative translations, see 75—76 in the Hofmann version and 79—80 in the Savill version.
Koeppen, Der Tod in Rom, For an alternative translation, see 68 in the Hofmann version. Koeppen, Death in Rome Savill translation , In both the original and the two published English-language translations, this phrase is part of a rhetorical question. However Der Tod in Rom was not published until , well after the zero hour itself. Die Welt der Angeklagten No: In other words their response to what appeared to be an unprecedented event was in fact predetermined by tradition.
All access to the past may have been broken off, but the inability to connect with the past does not yet imply the compensatory turn toward the future that was later to become part of the zero hour myth. In fact it is precisely because the connection to the past has been broken off that the future appears inaccessible: In this context both survival and death seem little more than coincidences, without fundamental meaning.
The only thing we could do was not to be loud and not to have too much weight. All it would have taken would have been for someone to start shouting, and we 3 would all have been lost. The abyss over which the narrator floats is his present, and the present is all he has. Only small size and light weight offer the possibility of a grace that might blow him over the danger zone. Powerlessness is the fundamental fact of a zero hour in which human agency has been reduced to nothingness.
In this world of nullity, human response can take two possible routes. On the one hand people can acknowledge the fact of their powerlessness; on the other, they can seek, through frenetic activity, to hide their impotence from themselves and others.
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For those in the first group, the destruction of their world means the end of ordinary life; while the second group clings desperately to ordinary life in order to obscure a more profound reality. See, life goes on! Again and again he describes his alienation from the routine activities of life. This ordinary activity appears bizarre and unaccountable to the narrator: The people on this side and on the 6 other side have begun to hate each other. Once upon a time there was a man who had no mother.
A fist thrust him naked into the world, and a voice called out: And he dared not look behind, for behind him was noth7 ing but fire. The subject of the parable has no mother and therefore no connection to a reassuring past or to tradition. Nor has he willed his own coming into the world. Far from being a hero of the zero hour, the narrator of this parable is at an utter loss. Beyond the world of daily necessity and the hoped-for end of the war the narrator perceives nothing, and he believes that no one else can see beyond the present either: No visions of a grand rebuilding or of a newer, better Germany make the loss of the past more bearable; instead, the narrator suggests that the destruction of Hamburg heralds the end of European history.
The city and the continent are both gone for good. What remain are the living dead and those who are already ghosts. Even those who have busied themselves with the ordinary tasks of daily life are not necessarily thinking up grand schemes for the future: In the midst of their frenetic activity they suddenly stop, forgetting any projects they may have, and gather together with other people to listen to the news. To an outsider it must have seemed as if we had a lot of time, and yet we were people without rest.
Everything we did be10 came instantly meaningless in our own eyes. The dissociation from time renders meaning impossible. For those outside time, any action taking place within time makes no sense. Examples of use in the German literature, quotes and news about Mottenpulver. Den Gestank nach Mottenpulver hasse ich. Brennt in meiner Nase wie Pfeffer. Bleib mir in Zukunft weg damit! Oder du bist auch bei mir unten durch. Ich habe doch auf der Liste alles abgehakt. Vorsichtig machte sie die Kiste auf.
Er kann es nicht leiden, wenn man ihn so anstarrt, meint der Kater. Ach, das ist Mottenpulver? Ichkenne das Zeug von meiner Oma. Behm, Kai Steiner, Warum stinkt dieser armselige Schafspelz so nach Mottenpulver? Du kommst von ganz weit her.