The Burden of German History: A Transatlantic Life

By Konrad H. Jarausch

As one of the leading historians of Modern Europe and an internationally acclaimed scholar for the past five decades, Konrad H. Jarausch presents a sustained academic reflection on the post-war German effort to cope with the guilt of the Holocaust amongst a generation of scholars too young to have been perpetrators. Ranging from his war-time childhood to Americanization as a foreign student, from his development as a professional historian to his directorship of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung and concluding with his mentorship of dozens of PhDs, The Burden of Germany History reflects on the emergence of a self-critical historiography of a twentieth-century Germany that was wrestling with the responsibility for war and genocide. This partly professional and partly personal autobiography explores a wide range of topics including the development of German historiography and its methodological debates, the interdisciplinary teaching efforts in German studies, and the role of scholarly organizations and institutions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Apr 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800739611

Konrad H. Jarausch

Konrad H. Jarausch ist Lurcy Professor of European Civilization an der University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Gastprofessuren und Forschungsaufenthalte führten ihn wiederholt nach Deutschland (Saarbrücken, Göttingen, Leipzig, Potsdam und FU Berlin). Von 1998 bis 2006 leitete er zusammen mit Christoph Kleßmann bzw. Martin Sabrow das Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam.

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PREFACE

My triple bypass surgery came as a shocking surprise. In November 2019 I was getting a visa to travel to China for a lecture in Shanghai and a conference in Beijing where I would present a paper on German memory politics. But before leaving I noticed that it took me longer than usual to catch my breath after climbing all eighty-eight stairs to my office on the fifth floor of Pauli Murray Hall. An immediate checkup with a stress test revealed irregularities in my heartbeat, and the subsequent catheterization showed massive blockages of three arteries, making it impossible to widen them with the insertion of stents. The attending cardiologist therefore insisted on performing a triple bypass surgery, arguing that my otherwise excellent state of health would reduce the risk. Nonetheless, before the anesthesia started to work, I said goodbye to my wife Hannelore, unsure of whether I would ever wake up again.

This unexpected reminder of mortality has made me reflect with gratitude on my somewhat unusual transatlantic academic life. Due to the flexibility of American institutions, I have been fortunate enough to teach beyond eighty years of age, one and a half decades beyond the standard time of retirement. But the end of professional work could only be postponed, not avoided altogether, forcing me to put my papers in order. Digging through a wide range of sources, including family photographs, private letters, scholarly essays, and academic books, turned out to be a heartening and exasperating task, since it recalled forgotten incidents and prior aspirations. Such an archaeology of personal and professional traces revealed a series of earlier selves—some incarnations to be proud of and others best ignored as having been rather embarrassing. Essentially, this search in my own past has constituted an ambivalent journey of self-discovery.

In the following pages, I risk sharing some of my experiences because my uncommon life story as German and American intermediary may be of interest to others. Often enough, my children and grandchildren have asked questions about the reasons for our complicated existence in both Chapel Hill and Berlin. Moreover, students and colleagues have been intrigued by my transatlantic career in two different academic systems that has illuminated their respective peculiarities. Finally, some readers of my diverse books have wondered about their argumentative framing and publication in several languages. Taken together, these impulses have inspired me to provide an explanation of some crucial personal decisions as they have interacted with key developments in German historiography on both sides of the Atlantic. I hope that such an exploration will shed a more general light on the relationship between historical experiences and historiographical writing in the second half of the twentieth century.

My research for Broken Lives (Princeton, 2018) has shown that autobiography is a treacherous genre because of its self-affirming pretension to personal importance. Such retrospectives are usually written at the end of a professional life to sum up one’s experiences and to pass on lessons learned to posterity. Most authors tend to present their own life story as a success narrative, leaving out any awkward details or mistaken judgments. Politicians love to show that their policies were right, especially when they were actually proven wrong by the course of events. Generals often try to win battles on paper that they have lost in the field. Celebrities instead engage in kiss-and-tell exhibitionism of their private affairs. … Skeptical of such biographical illusions, historians tend to be rather suspicious of the veracity of such accounts. But this reluctance to engage memoirs misses out on the human dimension, which can, in a critical reading, often reveal what it is trying to hide.¹

Academic autobiographies are even more problematic since they require an interest in and a knowledge of a field of scholarship that is being discussed. Such scholarly memoirs presuppose some familiarity with the substantive debates of a given area and with the sequential shifts in methodology. They involve tracing the intellectual training that initiates a scholar into an area as well as the institutional affiliations and the career paths taken. Moreover, they also require discussions of the products of scholarships, such as books or PhD students. According to ethnographer Sara Delamont, such reminiscences are important because they illuminate the personal dimension behind scholarly work by reflecting a constructivist understanding of academic arguments. Unlike the polite questions of interviewers, a self-reflexive perspective can provide an inside view of the feelings and motives behind one’s scholarship.² Especially in an area as contested as German history, I hope that the exploration of such subjectivity may help to reveal the personal stakes of some interpretative claims.

Notes

1. Konrad H. Jarausch, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2018).

2. Sarah Delamont, Academic Autobiographies (London, 2020); Volker Depkat, Autobiography and the Social Construction of Reality, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29 (2003): 441–76.

INTRODUCTION

A Poisoned Past

For young postwar Germans like myself, the past was not an inspiration but a heavy burden with which they struggled to make sense of the mass murder committed in their country’s name. Instead of growing up in a peaceful world and being proud of our country, we as children of the war were confronted with the physical and moral debris of the Third Reich that forced us to rebuild our personal future as well as our political outlook. Ashamed of the disastrous legacy left by our elders, we distanced ourselves from our national heritage and tried to strike out on our own in the search for models that often took us abroad. While some members of our cohort clung to religious or bourgeois traditions, many others embraced a critical view of German history that challenged orthodoxy by importing interpretations from overseas émigrés or by learning from Nazi victims at home. Inspired by the broader exploration of seven dozen German Migrant Historians in North America, the following text presents an individual narrative so as to reflect on the effort at wrestling with a catastrophic past in general.¹

In contrast to other Europeans, German youths had few sources of pride in their own country because virtually all their traditions had been corrupted by National Socialism. Since 17 June was a Cold War creation, there was no real holiday to celebrate the democratic heritage of 1848 and 1918. Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s national anthem was restricted to the third verse of unity, right and freedom so as to avoid "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles." The style of the Federal Republic was sober and provisional, a state in waiting for a future rebirth that seemed to recede ever more. Even innocuous folk songs fell out of favor because they had been bellowed by marching SA columns. At the same time, the revived Bundeswehr had difficulty deciding whether to base its sense of tradition on the Wehrmacht or the Resistance.² Adolescent Germans were therefore embarrassed by their own country and rather sought inspiration from anti-fascist intellectuals or athletic heroes like the 1954 winners of the soccer World Cup.

Figure 0.2. Lurcy Professor of European Civilization. Photo courtesy of the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Popular representations of German history abroad also tended to employ a whole repertoire of negative stereotypes repeated by the media. While German immigrants to the United States largely blended in, the Kaiser’s injunction during the Boxer Rebellion to be terrible like the Huns left a lasting impression, especially when reinforced by the image of heel-clicking and monocled Prussian Junkers. While the democratic émigrés of the Weimar Republic evoked sympathy, the potbellied, beer-drinking brownshirts of the SA created much revulsion due to their brutality. Even more feared were the Wehrmacht officers, who featured in countless World War II propaganda movies, due to their arrogance and ruthlessness. Most reviled were the Blackshirts of the SS, mainstays of the Nazi dictatorship and henchmen of genocide in the concentration camps.³ Prompted by actual NS excesses, these repulsive new images overshadowed the older appreciation of the country of poets and thinkers.

During the postwar decades the negative legacy of the German past even colored some personal encounters in foreign settings. When asked about their origin abroad, young Germans tended to evade the issue by claiming just to be Europeans. During one blind date in Madison, Wisconsin, a young Jewish woman accused me of being a Nazi even though I was too young to have been personally involved. Since her family had not directly suffered from persecution, she repeated a widespread cultural resentment. Another example of Germanophobia was the refusal of some Jewish customers to buy German products like VW or Mercedes cars. German youths therefore learned to live with a collective stigma that many of them resented. A more constructive response was to confront the legacy of German crimes in order to understand the reasons for such feelings and to make attempts at international reconciliation, like with the Aktion Sühnezeichen or the joint youth efforts to tend to military graves.⁴

Presenting my own effort of coming to terms with this poisoned past, this autobiography deals with my involvement in half a century of scholarly debate about German history on both sides of the Atlantic. Due to the prewar emigration of liberal and Jewish historians as well as the postwar reorientation of West German historians, the connection between American and German scholars has been extraordinarily close.⁵ The initial effort of political and diplomatic historians focused on the Nazi dictatorship and the responsibility for World War II. The impact of the social sciences then triggered the development of quantitative methods that looked for generalizations. The German version of the history of society sought to provide historical foundations for the Federal Republic, while a parallel East German effort attempted to legitimize the GDR with a Marxist history. More recently, the transatlantic exchanges have debated the cultural turn, women’s and gender history, and the Holocaust. Due to a lengthy scholarly career and a residence on both sides of the Atlantic, my own work has been involved in virtually all of these approaches, providing a guide to their succession.

In order to be generally relevant, such a self-historicization must seek to address broader themes beyond individual interest. No doubt, my personal experience, including its intimate dimension, remains at the core of the narrative. But this academic autobiography intends to probe the connection between my individual life and the development of an entire academic field. Its form is inspired by the exemplary accounts of Jewish émigrés like George L. Mosse as well as the postcommunist narratives of GDR historians like Fritz Klein, even if its content might be somewhat less dramatic.⁶ The subsequent text seeks to combine the presentation of personal experiences with a discussion of scholarly interpretations in a challenging mixture of narrative and reflection. By addressing the role of one German-born US historian as a transatlantic mediator, this autobiography hopes to shed light on the effort of the entire field to draw lessons from a catastrophic past.

The double focus on my personal life and intellectual engagement makes it necessary to address a mixture of chronological issues and thematic topics. The narrative begins by recalling my wartime childhood in Germany that awakened my interest in history. The text then discusses my Americanization at the universities of Wyoming and Wisconsin, which developed into my training as a historian in the United States. The next part examines the transformation of my research interests from political biography to the new social and later on cultural history in order to wrestle with the thesis of a special path of German development. The following chapter engages the debate about the failure of the GDR and my role as director at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam. Finally, the analysis returns to the University of North Carolina to explore the shift toward Holocaust and gender approaches as well as the training of dozens of PhDs. By expanding an earlier summary of more than five decades of transatlantic scholarship,⁷ this account seeks to illuminate some of the main developments of German and European history and historiography.

Historical experiences hold the key to understanding Berlin’s policies in several controversial areas. For instance, the German fear of inflation and insistence on austerity are the product of the hyperinflation in the early 1920s. Berlin’s pacifist rejection of the use of military force is the result of two lost wars with enormous loss of life that touched almost every family with some member killed. The FRG’s foreign policy axiom of multilateral negotiation stems from misguided unilateral efforts to gain control of the European continent. Berlin’s use of trade and exchange is part of a European learning experience that integration is more effective than bludgeoning. The special sensitivity toward Moscow comes from feelings of guilt for the twenty-seven million Soviets killed in World War II. Similarly, the unquestioning support of Israel is the consequence of a deep sense of shame for the Holocaust. The peculiarity of such reactions can only be understood as collective experiences that make Berlin different from its neighbors.⁸

Confronting the German past also remains important because it contains universal lessons that should never be forgotten. On the one hand, the first half of the twentieth century presents a cautionary tale, full of catastrophes and depression, followed by dictatorship, world war, and mass murder. It is a stark reminder of what can go wrong when cultural conflict and economic crisis empower a populist frenzy to capture a government that implements repressive policies that would have been considered outrageous in a civilized society. Through insistent memorialization, the Holocaust has become the symbol of ultimate evil that calls for a vigorous commitment to human rights in order to prevent its recurrence. But on the other hand, this shocking history also holds a more encouraging message of a potential recovery of civility. A consistent internal effort, aided by outside pressure, can succeed in self-critically transforming a political culture and in restoring a vibrant democracy. In spite of ugly right-wing remnants, the Federal Republic of Germany has become a pillar of domestic stability and European peace. To explain this perplexing story to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic has become the task of my life.

Notes

1. Karen Hagemann and Konrad H. Jarausch, eds., German Migrant Historians in North America after 1945 (forthcoming New York, 2024).

2. Edgar Wolfrum, Geschichte als Waffe: Vom Kaiserreich bis zur Wiedervereinigung (Göttingen, 2001).

3. Hans Walter Frischkopf, ed., Images of Germany (New York, 2000).

4. https://www.asf-ev.de; https://www.volksbund.de/jugendbegegnungen/.

5. Philipp Stelzel, History after Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise (Philadelphia, 2019).

6. George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison, 2000); Fritz Klein, Drinnen und draussen: Ein Historiker in der DDR: Erinnerungen (Frankfurt, 2000). Cf. Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, 2005), and Martin Klingst, Guido Goldman: Transatlantic Bridge Builder (New York, 2021).

7. Konrad H. Jarausch, Contemporary History as Transatlantic Project: The German Problem, 1960–2010, in Historical Social Research, supplement 24 (Cologne, 2012).

8. Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (New York, 2006).

Chapter 1

CHILD OF WAR

Healthy boy arrived on the 14th. This telegram to my father, who was serving in the German army, announced my birth in August 1941 in the hospital at the Kaiser-Otto-Ring 6 in Magdeburg. Since I was a couple of weeks late, the doctor had to use forceps. But soon everything was fine. My parents had prepared the delivery well to prevent additional miscarriages and hired a nurse for the care of mother and child. But my father never had a chance to see his offspring since his leave was cut short due to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which needed every soldier it could get. From deep within Russia but as yet without news of his son, he wrote to his own mother the following day: Now I want to wish you and all of us that we shall be able to have a real celebration in peace so that we can participate wholeheartedly and not have to think again of goodbyes and separation. He was never able to share in my baptism as the Russian campaign bogged down in the late fall and he died of typhus in January 1942.¹ From its very beginning, my life was overshadowed by war.

In Germany, the generation born between 1939 and 1945 has become known as that of the children of war, or the Kriegskinder. Haunted by troubling memories, many broke their silence only as they reached retirement age, since they were preoccupied with survival and career success. Though some had a protected childhood, others were deeply affected by their recollections of wartime terror to which they attributed all manner of psychological and physiological problems in their later life. While only rarely having witnessed actual killing, they recalled the fear of being huddled in air-raid shelters, the violence of flight and expulsion, the rapes of their mothers or sisters, the lack of food and shelter after the war’s end, and so on. A veritable wave of private publications, public media portrayals, and academic analyses has described their shocking experiences and examined their potential psychological impact.² Many analysts have blamed characteristics such as political conformity, preoccupation with work, emotional blockage, hoarding of food, and other strange quirks on their wartime experiences.

This concept of a Kriegskinder cohort is, nonetheless, somewhat problematic, because it supports claims to German suffering. Even if one expands the time frame from 1930 to 1950 in order to include the pre- and post-history of the war, these children were too young to be perpetrators themselves and can therefore claim a degree of innocence. But many were indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda and were proud of the collaboration of their parents, thus they were still caught up in the vortex of the Third Reich. Public discussion has also pointed to a wide range of differing experiences, with some youths hardly affected at all and others deeply scarred by what they observed but failed to understand. This diversity of individual fates makes it difficult to apply the psychological notion of trauma to the entire age group, even if it might be quite appropriate for individual case histories.³ Instead of supplying a collective answer, the notion of the children of war raises important questions about the practical and psychological consequences of growing up during and immediately after a devastating war.

I shared many of these experiences in my own childhood, such as a wartime birth, loss of a father, destruction of my home, displacement from the East, and nagging hunger. Though my mother tried to protect me, fear of air raids and material deprivation remained ubiquitous. The death of my father destroyed a middle-class family with a promising future. While my mother saved some of our furniture and library by removing them to a suburb, the obliteration of our five-room apartment during one of the air raids on Magdeburg left me without a home. As a result, she relocated us to the lower Bavarian countryside where there was food and shelter. But even after the war, she had to struggle to resume her teaching career and bring up her unruly son as a widow. While we recovered materially during the 1950s, the mental baggage of the war remained by discrediting for young intellectuals the authority of the older generation who had created the disaster. This wartime imprinting impelled me to become a historian in order to find out what had gone so horribly wrong.⁴

Bourgeois Roots

The Jarausch family, which would determine my early life, had many of the advantages and problems of the German middle class, the Bürgertum. In regional terms, the Jarausches were Prussian and North German, having a pronounced sense of personal discipline and national duty. In religious affiliation they were also fiercely Protestant, considering faith an individual responsibility, and proud of the Lutheran reformation. Economically speaking, the paternal branch left a Silesian farm and moved to Berlin around the turn of the twentieth century, starting a small grocery store in the German capital. By contrast, the maternal side was more educated and clerical, with a long record of working in public service. While benefitting from the general rise of prosperity in the late Empire, both branches had to struggle to persevere through World War I, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, and World War II. They considered themselves respectable but found their prosperity threatened time and again. They therefore passed on a double sense of social mobility and continuing insecurity to their daughters and sons.⁵

According to the family history written by my uncle Bruno, the Jarausches hailed from the Silesian village of Alzenau, close to the town of Brieg (now Brzeg). A George Jarausch is first mentioned in 1741 as "Frey und Gerichtsscholz," i.e., a wealthy farmer with judicial authority. The last name is probably of Slavic origin, but in the written records it is linguistically German, though the mixture is typical of the ethnic blending of the region. Born in 1868, my great-grandfather Hugo Jarausch possessed a flourishing farm in the neighboring village of Misselwitz, but his third son entered a commercial apprenticeship in Brieg since he could not inherit. In order to have better prospects, he moved to Berlin, and in 1896 he married the petite Anna Grenz and bought a grocery, which offered goods imported from European colonies (Kolonialwaren), for 2,200 marks. Since business was somewhat disappointing, Grandfather sold the store and rented another shop at the Oldenburger Strasse in 1902, which turned out to be more profitable until the rationing of World War I once again threatened its existence.⁶

On 12 December 1900, my father Konrad was born as Hugo’s second son. His older brother Bruno recalled that a maid named Bertha spoiled our ‘Radi’ whenever she could and that both of them got along well and only rarely fought. The boys had to work in the store, learning bourgeois virtues such as honesty, frugality, and industry in order to make ends meet. Inspired by his elder sibling, Konrad learned to read quite early and did so well in preparatory school that he was allowed to skip a grade and enter the Gymnasium, a selective classical secondary school that offered courses in Latin and Greek. During World War I he was drafted in 1918 and trained to handle artillery horses, but fortunately the conflict ended before he could see combat. After a stellar Abitur, Konrad studied German literature and history, to which he added Protestant religion, at Berlin University, working with such stars as the Germanist Gustav Roethe. His 1925 dissertation on The Popular Beliefs of the Icelandic Sagas fit into the Nordic interests of neoconservative intellectuals in the German Christian Student League (DCSV). After passing his Staatsexamen in 1925/27 with distinction, he started on a high school teaching career at Schwedt on the Oder River, having risen from a shopkeeping family into the ranks of the educated bourgeoisie.⁷

By contrast, the Petri family on my mother’s side was part of the educated middle class, the Bildungsbürgertum, and included a sprinkling of nobles and businessmen. A genealogy of its clerics and teachers goes back to 1391, but that claim is difficult to prove since the biblical name is quite common. Around the turn of the century, one branch of the Petris lived in the small residential city of Wolfenbüttel in Northern Germany where my grandfather Heinrich, born in 1859, worked as a research librarian in the famous eighteenth-century collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek. He married Maria Teich, a nurse from a wealthy family that owned a marble quarry in Kelheim on the Danube. But since he was an alcoholic, he died prematurely in 1904, leaving his