Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe

329 Pages·2010·1.54 MB·English

by  Frank Biess

Histories of the Aftermath

Histories of the Aftermath
The Legacies of the
Second World War in Europe
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Edited by
Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller
Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford
First published in 2010 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
©2010 Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Histories of the aftermath : the legacies of the Second World War in Europe / edited
by Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84545-732-7 (hardback : acid-free paper)
1. Reconstruction (1939–1951)—Europe 2. World War, 1939–1945—Infl uence.
3. Collective memory—Europe—History—20th century. 4. Memory—Social
aspects—Europe—History—20th century. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Motion
pictures and the war. 6. Group identity—Europe—History—20th century.
7. Citizenship—Europe—History—20th century. 8. Military art and science—
Europe—History—20th century. 9. Europe—History—1945– I. Biess, Frank,
1966– II. Moeller, Robert G.
D829.E8H57 2010
940.55’4—dc22
2010010761
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.
ISBN: 978-1-84545-732-7 Hardback
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Frank Biess
I. Defi ning the Postwar
Chapter 1. The Persistence of “the Postwar”: Germany and Poland 13
Norman M. Naimark
Chapter 2. Feelings in the Aftermath: Toward a History of
Postwar Emotions 30
Frank Biess
Chapter 3. In the Aftermath of Camps 49
Samuel Moyn
II. Public and Private Memories
Chapter 4. Nothing Is Forgotten: Individual Memory and the Myth
of the Great Patriotic War 67
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
Chapter 5. Neither Erased nor Remembered: Soviet “Women
Combatants” and Cultural Strategies of Forgetting in Soviet Russia,
1940s–1980s 83
Anna Krylova
Chapter 6. Generations as Narrative Communities: Some Private
Sources of Offi cial Cultures of Remembrance in Postwar Germany 102
Dorothee Wierling
III. Mass-Mediating War: How Movies Shaped Memories
Chapter 7. “When Will the Real Day Come?” War Films and Soviet
Postwar Culture 123
Denise J. Youngblood
vi Contents
Chapter 8. Winning the Peace at the Movies: Suffering, Loss, and
Redemption in Postwar German Cinema 139
Robert G. Moeller
Chapter 9. Italian Cinema and the Transition from Dictatorship to
Democracy 156
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
IV. The Reconstruction of Citizenship
Chapter 10. War Orphans and Postfascist Families: Kinship and
Belonging after 1945 175
Heide Fehrenbach
Chapter 11. Manners, Morality, and Civilization: Refl ections on
Postwar German Etiquette Books 196
Paul Betts
Chapter 12. “We Are Building a Common Home”: The Moral
Economy of Citizenship in Postwar Poland 215
Katherine Lebow
Chapter 13. From the “New Jerusalem” to the “Decline” of the
“New Elizabethan Age”: National Identity and Citizenship in
Britain, 1945–56 231
Sonya O. Rose
V. In the Shadow of the Bomb: Military Cultures
Chapter 14. The Great Tradition and the Fates of Annihilation:
West German Military Culture in the Aftermath of the
Second World War 251
Klaus Naumann
Chapter 15. Soviet Military Culture and the Legacy of the
Second World War 269
Mikhail Tsypkin
Chapter 16. 1945–1955: The Age of Total War 287
Pieter Lagrou
Select Bibliography 297
Notes on Contributors 303
Index 307
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Acknowledgements
T
HIS VOLUME REPRESENTS A selection of much revised contribu-
tions to a conference that was held at the University of Califor-
nia, San Diego. The editors are very grateful to a series of institutions for their
crucial fi nancial support: the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD),
the German Historical Institute (GHI), the University of California Humani-
ties Research Institute (UCHRI), the Humanities Center at UCSD, the Insti-
tute of European History at the University of California, Berkeley, the Institute
for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (IICAS) at UCSD, and the
UCSD Department of History. We would also like to thank Gershon Shafi r,
the director of IICAS, for providing indispensable logistic and organizational
support. In particular, we could not have organized this event without Melissa
LaBouff’s excellent professionalism and organizational skills. We are also grate-
ful to the following individuals who served as commentators at the conference:
Choi Chatterjee, John Connelly, Geoff Eley, Kai Ewers, Peter Gourevitch,
Deborah Hertz, Martha Lampland, Phil Nord, and Pamela Radcliff. They are
not represented as authors in the volume, but their ideas and suggestions entered
the individual contributions in innumerable ways. Two anonymous reviewers
for Berghahn Books provided detailed and constructive criticism. Although we
were not able to incorporate all of their suggestions, their input undoubtedly
made this a better volume. Finally, we would like to thank Marion Berghahn
for her interest in the project, and Ann Przyzycki, Melissa Spinelli, and Jamie
Taber for shepherding the manuscript through the production process.

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INTRODUCTION
Histories of the Aftermath
Frank Biess
T
HE HISTORY OF THE European “postwar” is en vogue, as is signaled
by a series of conferences, edited volumes, and monographs that
have addressed the legacies and aftereffects of the Second World War on the Eu-
ropean continent.1 Tony Judt’s massive synthesis Postwar offers a culmination point
of a historiography that has emphasized the “long shadow of World War Two”
that “lay heavy across postwar Europe.”2 The new research on the postwar re-
fl ects an important shift in historiographical perspective: it no longer treats the
post-1945 period primarily as the incubation period of a new Cold War order
that was shaped by the antagonistic infl uences of “Americanization” and “So-
vietization.” Rather, it makes central the lasting and persistent aftereffects of the
Second World War for the history of European societies after 1945. Instead of
analyzing European societies for what they became, the history of the postwar
directs attention to the rubble—psychological, emotional, literal—from which
they emerged. In this sense, postwar history seeks to capture multiple narratives
of the aftermath in the wake of the Second World War.
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism clearly formed
the most important political contexts for this historiographical shift. These mo-
mentous events defi ned the years from 1945 to 1989–91 as a distinct historical
period that could be subjected to historical scrutiny without running the risk
of succumbing to the ideological antagonisms of the Cold War. But the origins
of this renewed historiographical interest in the aftermath of the Second World
War extend even further back. Even before the end of the Cold War, a more
revisionist historiography began to deconstruct national mythical memories as
they had emerged during the fi rst postwar decades. These rigid and redemptive
“usable pasts” had served essential functions for postwar reconstruction and
were also deployed as weapons in the ideological battles of the Cold War. But
they largely wrote the murder of European Jews out of national commemora-
tive cultures.3 It was therefore the ascendancy of Holocaust history and mem-
ory from the late 1960s onward, but especially in the 1980s, that increasingly
2 Frank Biess
destabilized these narratives, fi rst in the West and, after 1989, in the East as
well.4 In the (West) German context, a renewed judicial prosecution of former
Nazi perpetrators as well as a larger commemorative shift toward the victims of
Germans (rather than German victims) actually preceded historians’ newfound
interest in the Holocaust.5 In other parts of Europe, the emergence of the Ho-
locaust as a new historiographical and commemorative paradigm implied the
exposure of long-denied histories of collaboration in the territories of former
Nazi-occupied Europe.6 It demonstrated the extent to which large sections of
European societies had been contaminated by fascist-induced violence, even in
countries that were spared direct occupation by Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.
At the same time, Holocaust historiography also brought into focus the endur-
ing aftereffects of the massive experience of violence, especially in the fi gure
of the survivor, who advanced to become perhaps the iconic character of the
twentieth century.
The new historiography of the postwar takes the literature on the Holo-
caust as a moral and historiographical starting point. But just as the new litera-
ture on the Second World War has sought to (re)integrate the murder of the
European Jews into the larger context of German occupation policy and the
war of annihilation against civilian populations, the history of the aftermath seeks
to reconnect the legacies of the Holocaust with the war’s broader aftereffects.7
The history of the postwar extends the scope of inquiry to a wider range of
individual and collective experiences of violence that were characteristic of
the Second World War: population displacements, mass starvation, internment,
forced migrations, aerial bombardments. In this sense, postwar history derives
from the specifi c nature of the Second World War that targeted, at least in some
of its localities, civilian noncombatants to an unprecedented extent. It inves-
tigates the ways in which individuals and groups managed to cope with active
and passive experiences of violence during the war and its aftermath. To be
sure, this approach needs to avoid the risk of creating a new kind of consensus
history in which everybody becomes a victim of the war.. Instead, the history
of the postwar should maintain crucial moral and analytical distinctions be-
tween, for example, ethnic cleansing and genocide, or for that matter between
victims, accomplices, bystanders, and perpetrators. To be sure, an individual
could occupy several or all of these roles during the war and the immediate
postwar period. Yet it is precisely by delineating the specifi cities of experiences
of violence during the war that we might be able to assess the precise ways in
which they radiated into the postwar period.
This volume seeks to give greater analytical, thematic, and historical depth
to the concept of “the postwar.” It defi nes the postwar not only as a chrono-
logical and thematic unit but also as an epistemological tool. By making the
divergent wartime experiences of European societies—and different groups
within them— central to understanding their post-1945 histories, postwar his-