Bombs Away! Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan (Amsterdamer Beitrage zur neueren Germanistik 60) (Amsterdamer Beitrage zur Neueren Germanistik)

408 Pages·2006·1.89 MB·English

by  Wilfried Wilms

Bombs Away!
Representing the Air War
over Europe and Japan
A M S T E R D A M E R B E I T R Ä G E 60 6
0
G 0
Z U R N E U E R E N E R M A N I S T I K 2
Herausgegeben von
Gerd Labroisse
Gerhard P. Knapp
Norbert Otto Eke
Wissenschaftlicher Beirat:
Christopher Balme (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Lutz Danneberg (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Martha B. Helfer (Rutgers University New Brunswick)
Lothar Köhn (Westf. Wilhelms-Universität Münster)
Ian Wallace (University of Bath)
Bombs Away!
Representing the Air War
over Europe and Japan
Herausgegeben von
Wilfried Wilms
und William Rasch
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
Die 1972 gegründete Reihe erscheint seit 1977 in zwangloser Folge in der
Form von Thema-Bänden mit jeweils verantwortlichem Herausgeber.
Reihen-Herausgeber:
Prof. Dr. Gerd Labroisse
Sylter Str. 13A, 14199 Berlin, Deutschland
Tel./Fax: [phone] E-Mail: [email protected]
Prof. Dr. Gerhard P. Knapp
University of Utah
Dept. of Languages and Literature, 255 S. Central Campus Dr. Rm. 1400
Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
Tel.: [phone], Fax [phone] (dienstl.)
bzw. Tel./Fax: [phone] (privat) E-Mail: [email protected]
Prof. Dr. Norbert Otto Eke
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Fac. der Geesteswetenschappen, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam
Nederland, E-Mail: [email protected]
Cover image: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
[LC-USZ62-129782].
All titles in the Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik (from 1999
onwards) are available online: See www.rodopi.nl
Electronic access is included in print subscriptions.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 90-420-1759-7
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2006
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents
Wilfried Wilms (University of Denver) & William Rasch (Indiana
University):Introduction: Uncovering their Stories: The Rubble of
Memory and the Bombing War 7
I. NARRATIVE AND HISTORY 23
Brad Prager (University of Missouri, Columbia): Air War and
Allegory 25
Daniel Fulda (Universität zu Köln): Abschied von der
Zentralperspektive. Der nicht nur literarische Geschichtsdiskurs im
Nachwende-Deutschland als Dispositiv für Jörg Friedrichs Brand 45
Stephan Jaeger (University of Manitoba, Winnipeg): Infinite
Closures: Narrative(s) of Bombing in Historiography and Literature
on the Borderline between Fact and Fiction 65
Henning Herrmann-Trentepohl (Independent Scholar):“Das sind
meine lieben Toten” – Walter Kempowskis “Echolot”-Projekt 81
Jennifer Bajorek (University of California,Berkeley):Holding Fast
to Ruins: The Air War in Brecht’s Kriegsfibel 97
Thomas C. Fox (University of Alabama): East Germany and the
Bombing War 113
Benedikt Jager (Hochschule Stavanger):Die gepolsterte Nussschale
des Bootes – Der Luftkrieg aus der Sicht skandinavischer
Korrespondenten 131
II. THE GERMAN EXPERIENCE 147
Timm Menke (Portland State University):W. G. Sebalds Luftkrieg
und Literaturund die Folgen: Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme 149
Florian Radvan (Pädagogische Hochschule,Karlsruhe):Religiöse
Bildlichkeit und transtextuelle Bezüge in Gert Ledigs Luft-
kriegsroman Vergeltung 165
Walter Pape (Universität zu Köln): “Mich für mein ganzes Leben
verletzendes Geschehen als Erlebnis”: Die Luftangriffe auf
Salzburg (1944) in Thomas Bernhards Die Ursacheund Alexander
KlugesDer Luftangriff auf Halberstadtam 8. April 1945 181
Stuart Smith (Trinity College,Dublin):“Das war nicht mehr wie vor
Ilion”: Servicemen, Civilians and the Air War in Gerd Gaiser’s Die
sterbendeJagd 199
6
Andrew Williams (Technische Universität,Berlin):“Das stanniolene
Raschelnder Weinblätter”: Hans Erich Nossack und der Luftkrieg 213
III. THE ALLIED EXPERIENCE 231
Paul Crosthwaite (University of Newcastle upon Tyne): “Children
of the Blitz”: Air War and the Time of Postmodernism in Michael
Moorcock’s Mother London 233
Erwin Warkentin (Brandon University): Death by Moonlight: A
Canadian Debate over Guilt, Grief and Remembering the Hamburg
Raids 249
Diederik Oostdijk (Free University,Amsterdam): Debunking ‘The
Good War’Myth: Howard Nemerov’s War Poetry 265
Steve Plumb (University of Sunderland):Art and the Air Campaigns
of 1940/41 and 1945: Visual Representations of the London and
Dresden Bombing Raids 281
Silke Arnold-de Simine (Universität Mannheim):Memory Cultures:
The Imperial War Museum North and W. G. Sebald’s Natural History
of Destruction 295
Anna Leahy (North Central College, IL) & Douglas Dechow
(Oregon State University):Keep ’Em Flying High: How American
Air Museums Create and Foster Themes of the World War II Air War 313
IV. FILM 327
Jaimey Fisher (University of California,Davis):Bombing Memories
in Braun’s Zwischen Gestern und Morgen(1947): Flashbacks to the
Recent Past in the German Rubble-Film 329
Christina Gerhardt (University of California, Berkeley): The
Allied Air Bombing Campaign of Germany in Herzog’s Little
Dieter Needs to Fly 345
Wilfried Wilms (University of Denver): Hollywood’s Celluloid
Air War 355
Jerome F. Shapiro (Independent Scholar): Ninety Minutes over
Tokyo: Aesthetics, Narrative, and Ideology in Three Japanese Films
about the Air War 375
AFTERWORD
William Rasch (Indiana University): ‘It Began with Coventry’: On
Expandingthe Debate over the Bombing War 395
Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch
Uncovering their Stories: The Rubble of Memory and
the Bombing War
In A Foreign Affair (1948), Billy Wilder’s wonderfully satirical film about the
American occupation of postwar Germany, an Army officer, Colonel Plummer
from Indiana, takes a group of fact-finding representatives from Congress on a
tour of destroyed Berlin. While conscientious Congresswoman Frost sees what
to her are disturbing signs of GI fraternization with German women at every
turn (including the sight of a woman pushing a typically German baby carriage
bedecked with two crisply fluttering American flags, looking eerily like those
cars of more recent vintage celebrating support for American troops in Iraq), the
male members eagerly watch young boys play baseball among the ruins. “This
is one of our youth clubs”, Plummer tells his charges:
We’ve got a lot of them now in the American Zone. We have quite a problem on our
hands. Those weren’t ordinary youngsters when we came in. They were mean old
men. Now we’re trying to make kids of them again. We had to kick the goosestep out
of them, cure them of blind obedience, and teach them to beef with the referee.1If
they feel like stealing, make sure it’s second base.
After a pause and a loopy remark by one of the Congressmen about the kids not
having to worry about breaking any windows, Plummer concludes: “One fam-
ily has already christened a kid DiMaggio Schulz. That’s when I started believ-
ing we really won the war”. The scene ends with a disputed call at home plate,
each Congressman joining in the fray.
Although baseball may well be the only aspect of American life that has not
captured the German imagination, the image of German youngsters trading in
their Hitler Youth shorts for the ragtag outfits of a sandlot ballgame serves as a
superb parable of the reeducation and democratization of a people emerging
from the mental habits promoted by a disgraced ideology and the physical and
moral effects caused by a brutally prosecuted war. From the perspective of over
a half-century later, it certainly comes as no surprise that reeducation would
wear the guise of something as quintessentially American as baseball, that democ-
ratizationshould, in effect, be displayed as the equivalent of Americanization.
Maybe it was not as simple as training march-weary legs in the fine art of
sliding into home plate or adopting the moniker “DiMaggio”, but any visitor
1 Austrian-born Wilder, who enjoyed a masterly command of the nuances of American
English, incongruently uses the word “referee” where “umpire” belongs. Apparently
“Colonel Plummer” did not have the heart to correct him.
8
touring Germany today will be quick to note the telltale signs of success: from the
titles of American films (often un-translated) on virtually every movie marquee,
the sound of American and American-inspired music broadcast ceaselessly over
the radio and played live in clubs and “open air” stadiums, and the ubiquitous
presence of English words and phrases where once a flexible German language
managed quite well to do the work, all the way to the spectacle of present-day
German youth, certainly no longer goose-stepping “mean old men”, strutting
their liberated, hip-hop selves across dance floor and town square.
Yet, all of this did not happen overnight. As OMGUS polls showed,2despite
the Berlin Air-Lift, Hollywood, Coca-Cola, and rock-‘n’-roll, anti-American
feelings lingered in Germany until the building of the Berlin Wall (in 1961)
and the visit by a youthful American president, John F. Kennedy (in 1963),
whose touching, if grammatically problematical, pledge of allegiance to the
city of Berlin in a time of trouble was enthusiastically received and appreci-
ated. The immediate reaction of the war generation was to survive, forget, and
move on. Indeed, as thematized in many of the “rubble films” immediately
after the war, the ability to forget, the ability to repress the unpleasant experi-
ences at the front and on the “home front”, was seen as a precondition for fac-
ing often equally unpleasant postwar conditions in Germany’s urban ruins and
a very uncertain physical and political future. The reward for German industri-
ousness, based on necessary repression of memory, was the so-called economic
miracle that followed the currency reform of 1948 and led to the reintegration of
the West German state into an equally revived Western Europe. The reward for
German forgetting, in other words, was the beginning of the Americanization we
see so prominent today. The price paid, however, was the much maligned German
inability to mourn, that is, the Germans’apparent reluctance, if not outright
refusal, to accept unconditional responsibility for the horrific brutalities of the
war in particular and the Nazi era in general, especially those concerning the
expulsion, dispossession and eventual murder of millions of European Jews in
the name of a twisted duty to “improve” the world by ridding it of its vermin.
Above all, at least until each of the two new German states was enlisted into the
ranks of rival Cold War empires and rearmed for combat by the mid-1950s,
reeducation for the Allied occupiers, especially the Americans, meant graphically
and repeatedly pressing the awareness of guilt upon the retinas and conscious-
ness of individual Germans by means of photographs, film, radio broadcasts, and
print. That the message was received is indisputable. How it was processed and
why it was processed in the way it was remains a matter of scrutiny and debate.
2 For a succinct analysis, see Michael Geyer: America in Germany. Power and the Pursuit
of Americanization. In The German-American Encounter. Conflict and Cooperation
between two Cultures 1800–2000. Eds. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore. New York,
Oxford: Berghahn 2001: Pp. 121–44.
9
Germany 1945: The Camps
Germans’ reluctance to confront their own involvement in the events of the
immediate past may have been exaggerated by the frustration and, yes, self-
righteousness of later generations, but it was nonetheless real. Effective investiga-
tion and indictment of specific individuals by the West German legal system for
deeds done during the war was goaded into meaningful action only after the incar-
ceration, trial, and execution of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s.3And it was
only in the 1960s that a generation of artists and intellectuals who reached matu-
rity during the war and its immediate aftermath began to explore directly and often
in experimental forms issues of guilt, responsibility, and perhaps most troubling of
all, acquiescence.4 The situation in Adenauer’s Germany was such that even
apparently well-intended manifestations of guilt and remorse by German youth
could be met with a caustic response. In commenting on Martin Buber’s reaction
to the Eichmann verdict, the judicious and precise Hannah Arendt had this to say:
Martin Buber called the execution a “mistake of historical dimensions”, as it might
“serve to expiate the guilt felt by many young persons in Germany”– an argument
3 Allow Hannah Arendt to remind us: “The Central Agency for the Investigation of
Nazi Crimes, belatedly founded by the West German state in 1958 and headed by
Prosecutor Erwin Schüle, had run into all kinds of difficulties, caused partly by the
unwillingness of German witnesses to cooperate and partly by the unwillingness of the
local courts to prosecute on the basis of the material sent them from the Central
Agency. Not that the trial in Jerusalem produced any important new evidence of the
kind needed for the discovery of Eichmann’s associates; but the news of Eichmann’s
sensational capture and of the impending trial had sufficient impact to persuade the
local courts to use Mr. Schüle’s findings, and to overcome the native reluctance to do
anything about “murderers in our midst” by the time-honored means of posting rewards
for the capture of well-known criminals.
The results were amazing. Seven months after Eichmann’s arrival in Jerusalem – and
four months before the opening of the trial – Richard Baer, successor to Rudolf Höss
as Commandant of Auschwitz, could finally be arrested. In rapid succession, most of
the members of the so-called Eichmann Commando – Franz Novak, who lived as a
printer in Austria; Dr. Otto Hunsche, who had settled as a lawyer in West Germany;
Hermann Krumey, who had become a druggist; Gustav Richter, former “Jewish
adviser” in Rumania; and Willi Zöpf, who had filled the same post in Amsterdam –
were arrested also; although evidence against them had been published in Germany
years before, in books and magazine articles, not one of them had found it necessary
to live under an assumed name. For the first time since the close of the war, German
newspapers were full of reports on the trials of Nazi criminals, all of them mass
murderers… and the reluctance of the local courts to prosecute these crimes showed
itself only in the fantastically lenient sentences meted out to the accused”. Hannah
Arendt:Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin
1994 [originally published 1963]. Pp. 14–15.
4 We are thinking here of Rolf Hochhuth: Der Stellvertreter, Peter Weiß: Die
Ermittlung, and, somewhat later, Heinar Kipphardt: Bruder Eichmann.