How was it possible that the Germans, perceived to be, as a people, radical exponents of National Socialism, would turn out to be avid supporters of Western democracy, eager to participate in NATO, only a few years after 1945? Ten years after total capitulation, the western part of Germany had been granted partial sovereignty by the former Allies, framed by the Paris Treaties. In that same year, 1955, that part of the former German Nation was accepted as a NATO member and positioned as a bulwark against the Communist threat. The grand outlines of this astonishing transformation have been exposed by historiography, but its working at the grassroots level merits a closer look. The transformative path must not be taken for granted; it was structured by policies and institutions instigated by the Western Allies in agreement with selected German elites admitted into power after the total capitulation, but, willingly or reluctantly, had to be taken individually by each resident or association of the newly established German Federal Republic. In the following article, I’ll sketch an example pathway, that of a small town in Northwestern Germany, Jever, and of a family living there, i.e. my own. Millions of other families in over 2,000 small towns in Western Germany underwent similar transformations, with considerable individual differences.
In the fragile peace dominated by the Cold War, life looked safe enough for my parents to start a family, despite the threat of mutual destruction posed by the atomic rearmament of the antagonistic global superpowers. After their final exams at Hamburg University, where they had met and become engaged, my parents, having received approbation as dental surgeons, found themselves well situated in Jever, a small rural residential town in Lower Saxony, close to the North Sea coast.
The town castle, now a museum of local history worth visiting, had been the seat of a Frisian renaissance ruler, Fräulein Maria von Jever, and of dynastic administrators from the duchies of Oldenburg, Zerbst, Moscow, Paris, and Prussia.
There, my mother had inherited a dental surgery and a two-story house and garden. The town had been barely affected by allied bombing, even though there had been a military airport (Fliegerhorst) close by, used for raids against England. During the Cold War again, the coastal area and the naval Port of Wilhelmshaven remained a frontier area against a Russian maritime or air invasion.
Destination map of the US Air Force 1943
In November of 1955, the author was born, with a sister and a brother following each two and a half years later to one another. By then the World War was ten years over, the nuclear threat seemed distant enough, and the Soviets reasonably far away. All was well in this town, peaceful, and tidy, with substantial subsidies from the Bundeswehr, the British and U.S. forces, and the state administration discreetly boosting the buying power of local small businesses. At least, peaceful it seemed to us children, growing up in modest comfort in the late 1950s and 1960s into a well-ordered present and a future that promised jobs, security, and prosperity for the respectable classes and beyond.
In childhood, orderliness was linked with the beauty of simplicity, secured by family and environment.
From an early age, however, the child’s widening awareness became irritated by cracks in the polished surface of childhood reality, ignored, left unexplained, or even provoked by the grown-ups. Most of it was probably an essential element of growing up – gradually shedding childhood fantasies for experience, increasing knowledge, and wit. Enough of it, however, did not seem to be related to the foreseeable future, but rather to a former rupture with the past, a violent and since ousted rupture, affecting family, neighbors, Kindergarten and school, the town and the congregation, the county, and the whole environment. What exactly did the familial pride of heritage relate to? To the child, this was puzzling. Only in late hindsight did this make sense, once this past had become readable, revealing even things once appearing normal to the child as markers of this rupture, its braids, its clothes, or the small, limping seamstress Frau Klose who made dresses and came to the home every Friday for ironing, mending, and sewing. Whenever she, very rarely, tried to talk about her hometown of Breslau, her voice broke. Breslau, now Wrocław, had a predominantly German-speaking population. After 1945 it fell under Polish administration. By 1948, the Germans had been driven out either by the Soviet army or the Polish government. This forced migration continued to be a collective trauma of the refugees.
Our parents were distant, but attentive and caring. The NS curriculum they went through had taught them that children were a responsibility towards their German Volk. But, of course, older civic gentle habits were still alive in the family. Times and circumstances did not turn directly against me and my sister and brother as they had against their cohort, wasted in war, and against whole populations in the murderous first half of the century. I became an observer of incidents that stuck in my mind; there must have been many more that I since forgot. This is not MY story, however, but a collection of micro-histories of the many-faceted transformation from a society drenched in willingly adopted Nazi attitudes into a society that accepted democracy as a civic lifestyle while coming to terms as a fractured nation. The inconsistencies in behavior, the pondering silence; loopholes in a polished surface, observed by the child, appeared to be traces of an alternative, covert reality, scripted by divergent memories of the grown-ups in the field, enacted in their mostly distanced encounters. Whom to greet? Whom to ignore? Only in hindsight does it become clear that respectability wasn’t just based on function and merit, but on a hierarchy established by National Socialism.
A fictitious town jubilee used for self-assurance in a town already, in 1936, completely and voluntarily under NS dominance, symbolized by uniforms, flags, and marches
The quasi-military signs of hierarchy (uniforms, medals), the flags, and Hitler portraits had disappeared from public view, discarded together with the infamous “Mein Kampf” in fear of persecution by the Allied forces (i.e. American, British, or Polish detachments in 1945). The locals hadn’t forgotten that hierarchy, a close-knit community for those included, an existential danger for those excluded, and most certainly not a topic at the dinner table or in the schoolyard. But then some of those signs could be found, in the attic, the basement, in wardrobes, jewelry boxes, or photo albums. The house I grew up in held a number of these objects strewn between the usual attic and basement paraphernalia. Once Frau Klose was asked to create a winter coat from a leftover Nazi uniform for me, adorned by a collar made from rabbit fur. I didn’t know why but refused to wear it, it was given away and I had to make do without a winter coat (I preferred my anorak anyway). I sensed this coat’s specific color would have exposed me in the neighborhood. Unknowingly I was already marked as the daughter of the former local “Jungmädel” leader anyway, and thus treated with a respect that I did not deserve.
“Jungmädel” dressed up in a pseudo-dirndl dress on the occasion of the 1936 city jubilee. This dress was entirely uncommon in the rural area around Jever. The NS version of the “Dirndl“-dress was still exhibited in a local garment shop in the 1980s. The norm BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel) uniform consisted of a black skirt and a white blouse under a brown jacket. Courtesy of Hartmut Peters, curator at the Groeschlerhaus Museum. Author: Luise Hinrichs.
During the postwar years and well into the 1970s, my mother acted as part of an invisible network, helping to sustain locals who had lost their economic basis with the total capitulation of Nazi rule and were socially marginalized: buying coffee from two elderly sisters living in the attic of a house that their family had snatched from Jewish owners, buying tea in a shop built on the foundations of the destroyed synagogue, sending me to swimming lessons in a moor pond full of hydrophytes and algae that had become the basis of a scant subsistence for another former Nazi and his German shepherds. But she also distanced herself from my teacher at elementary school who objected to vocabulary deemed un-German by her, like “portemonnaie” (French for purse). She, thin greyish braids tucked to a chaplet around her head, stuck to völkisch ideology and lifestyle curated by the Ludendorffian sectarian movement, an ideology kept alive, marginalized, but passed on to the next generations. The movement is still alive in the “Bund für Deutsche Gotterkenntnis.“
In the sixties, the network was less about ideology and more about protecting local and group interests. This had been true even in the 1940s: the moronic son of the premium men’s clothing store owners was married off to protect him from hospitalization and subsequent killing. I remember him sitting on a bench in the marketplace around 1960, dressed immaculately in a dark blue pin-striped suit, red-faced from untreated hypertension, staring attentively at passersby but unable to speak. By then, the network was tightly interwoven with other formal or informal small-town associations with a tradition beyond 1933. The role of its members during the Nazi years remains obscure: The marksmen association (Schützen), the freemasons, the wellguards (Püttachten), the Lions’ Club for males, the cake-studded tea and coffee afternoon parties (Kränzchen) for the married women. In my mother’s Teekränzchen forgathered women with Mädel leadership experience awarded with an academic education suitable to the Nazi imperialist strategies such as physicians, dentists, or pharmacists, some following a career path within the party framework that would lead them out of town and into the far-reaching war machine. But this past wasn’t mentioned, the small talk focused on family affairs. Having survived the war in relatively comfortable circumstances (family members lost to war, but no bombing, no displacement), the Kränzchendamen profited from its outcome and had no qualms about it. In the post-war years, an academic degree was still a rarity among women, even more so in a small town, a mark of social distinction. These kinds of grassroots associations helped to foster the opinion that a war had been lost — smashed careers, bombed habitats, liquidated relatives, and unstable national borders — of which the Germans themselves perceived to be victims. It was left to the distant Adenauer government to accept responsibility for military aggression.
The Spielmannszug was a department of the marksmen’s association (Schützenverein). Every August, there was a Schützenfest (Marksmen’s festival), with marches, military music, and a jamboree with carousels and a Ferris wheel near the marksmen’s headquarters and ballroom. Schützenvereine had a tradition reaching into the 18th century and beyond as town guards and associations of former conscripts. Local continuities and ruptures remain to be researched. But in line with traditions, who cares? Source: Spielmannszug archive. Courtesy of Dieter Cassens, president.
Originating from a family rooted in lower nobility Pomeranian landowners, but dependent on the agricultural and military skills of their males, my father arrived as an outsider in town but, married into a dental practice, was in a comfortable position, and soon aligned to supra-local networks open to him because of the two careers he had pursued before he became a dentist. His first career started in his teens. It had been cut short by the onset of war because all able young men of his generation were drafted into military service from the age of eighteen. By then he had just passed an early Abitur exam. As the son of a distinguished Kaiserreich officer, he qualified for a career in the air force, effectively stalling his career as a violinist. (After years of violin practice, he had been admitted to study classical music at the conservatory.) He was able to keep up violin practice while in the German Air Force and earned some money with musical entertainment to pay for his university studies after the war.
The town itself had owed its modest prosperity to a good part by heavy investments into major military projects: the marine port in Wilhelmshaven, built into the marshes in 1869 by the Prussian and, later, Imperial German administration, followed by another investment wave from 1933, and the Fliegerhorst air force base used for attacks on England. After the capitulation, the military infrastructure was taken by the British Royal Marine and Royal Air Force. From 1955, German soldiers and officers were again recruited for the Bundeswehr, and men in redesigned Luftwaffe uniforms appeared in town. The military areas eventually became NATO territory, hypersonic Starfighter planes practiced in the skies along the coastline, and country inns became brothels regularly advertising Brazilian ladies in the local newspaper.
My father stuck to his civilian career despite the military tradition in the family.
Korvettenkapitän (captain of a corvette battleship) Paul Cleve, in imperial naval officer uniform. Photo ca. 1916 His SMS Emden was eventually scuttled at Scapa Flow. Source: Cleve family archive.
Son of a captain of the Imperial marine, my father became linked with the growing military networks between British and American officers, the former stationed at the marine seaport of Wilhelmshaven or the Upjever airport, the latter responsible for a detachment for nuclear artillery stationed in nearby Hohenkirchen, a network eventually incorporating former German officers provided they were not compromised. As a consequence, members of the military community frequented his practice, and he was invited to social events on base. My father had survived the war, unexpectedly, as a distinguished airman, having earned several military medals which he had stored in a cigar box and stowed away in the wardrobe where his lab coats hung. Soon after his arrival, he must have been invited by his military peers, then out of their Wehrmacht uniforms. Hearing him practicing Bach fugues in the patients’ waiting room every evening after supper belongs to my sentimental childhood memories. In his post-war military network, he got acquainted with a British teacher at the Prince Rupert Boarding School in Wilhelmshaven, set up for children of the British occupation army detachments.
Sea Cadet Color Party, Prince Rupert Boarding School Wilhelmshaven
The former officer shared his passion for classical music, and together they engaged like-minded friends to perform quartets and quintets in our living room. My father once told me (without further explanation) that, when the war was over and he had survived against all odds, he enjoyed being able to play Mendelssohn’s violin pieces once again. Having found a public in the better-off educated circles of the town, he managed public Schlosskonzerte (castle concerts) in Jever castle, casting the Renaissance audience hall in a romantic atmosphere.
Thanks to a network of music agents, my father could engage professional musicians for off-season prices. Music marked a class line in this town: You were either a fan of Spielmannszug marches or the Schlosskonzerte. I can’t make up whether both publics met in church concerts. Probably not. The National Socialists had invested much effort in masking class division in favor of a German “Volk”, a fictitious collective body materializing in their uniforms and marches, and, finally, war. In the seventies, rebellious youth would develop their own tastes along transnationally popular bands originating in the U.S. or U.K.
One evening in spring, I must have been about five years old, my father took me across the park and the marketplace to the castle courtyard, past the war memorials commemorating the fallen warriors of the town in the wars of 1870 to 1871, and 1914 to 1918. A detachment of Bundeswehr recruits, the first in our region after 1945, clad in dark grey uniforms, with large and heavy iron helmets, marched in and stood still in formation, awaiting to deliver their solemn pledge to defend the nation, to be celebrated by a traditional army tattoo, the Grosse Zapfenstreich, and thereby framed by post-Napoleonic Prussian military tradition. The march, the military music, the loud commands cutting through the stark silence, the whole solemn scene illuminated by flickering torches: for all the men (I don’t remember any woman spectators) Germany must have come again to life as a Volk, as those men had grown into, as a nation founded on a love for military power, their minds aligned into unity by marching tunes, transcending into a collective in the torchlight. And by a moving piece of musical prayer, the soldiers standing motionless, helmet in hand, marking the apex of the ceremony: Ich bete an die Macht der Liebe (I pray to the power of love).
The Zapfenstreich ritual has remained unchanged since the founding of the Bundeswehr. Its tradition dates back to the German Wars against Napoleonic occupation. Author: Jana Neumann, Bundeswehr.
For my father, as for many of the spectators, each of whom had in a way kept to his pledge — and personally lost his own war — their fragmented lives and wounded selves must have at last felt justified, their future and the prosperity of their families after total defeat assured and protected. They just had to ignore that the most probable enemy the emerging Bundeswehr would have to fight against were fellow Germans, recruited by the German Democratic Republic for its Nationale Volksarmee, both armies being props in the Cold War build-up between the new superpowers.
By 1962, this build-up escalated into the Cuban Missile Crisis, debated in the political chapters of the German media and by grown-up family members. To them, war had again become imminent, this time under the auspices of total destruction, and we children sensed the nervous excitement and tried to make sense of it during school breaks: what was a war, why would it happen, and which consequences to expect? Our parents and teachers wouldn’t listen or answer our questions. And because of the starfighter bangs we, too, had become used to war, barely noticing when the newspapers published headlines about yet another supersonic jet that had crashed on a meadow just outside a nearby village. Almost three hundred jets were lost by the Bundeswehr Luftwaffe, with half of the pilots surviving the crash by ejection. The Jagdgeschwader Richthofen, stationed in Upjever, lost 16 starfighters in all.
Locally, the strategic investments in military infrastructure, backed by NATO plans, re-established a traditional source of income for the local populace and secured jobs for displaced persons and refugees resettling in the area. Initially excluded from the intricate local networks, they eventually found their niches, went to church, pubs, and cafés, and participated in sports competitions, business associations, the Schützen marksmen, and grassroots politics, eventually becoming an acknowledged part of public life.
Most of the high school (Gymnasium) teachers also came from outside, some were young and motivated, others traumatized, returning from the lost war, some from captivity in Russia or chased from their homelands in the east. Professionally unfit, their knowledge gathered at universities under Nazi government and ideology, they were dumped into town by a school administration that did not know where else to employ them. In the postwar years, there was a severe teacher shortage. Whatever the official topic, their lessons inevitably focused on the captivity experience or the geography of their lost Eastern Heimat. By and large, their knowledge didn’t exceed the texts in our textbooks. They were unable to gain our respect: their ultimate defeat. This school was an institution that must be survived, leaving with good grades if possible, but with no outlook on careers in the postwar world other than pastors, lawyers, medical practitioners, pharmacists, or teachers — fixed roles in a stagnant small-town society.
If political and social normalization evolved in town despite the mental setting and professional entrenchment of the local elites, it was because the legal underpinnings of the state and federal institutions upholding the legal system, education, public welfare, and definition and distribution of political power were brought under democratic controls, sidelined by superregional media controlling public discourse. Apart from the Social Democratic Party, all major parties started from scratch. People with a Nazi past could not rise to an exposed position in there. Former members of the Nazi Party could continue to be in public service but had to play by the new rules. In short: the mental setting of those in charge after the war locally had only a limited chance to gain public attention. Because open communication was difficult, it stayed inside local networks. Communication within families was barred so as not to impede the careers of its offspring. It was clear enough that children adopting a Nazi mindset ran in danger of marginalization. On the other hand, the children couldn’t discuss those matters directly and openly with their parents. There were no discursive patterns available. It would be interesting to study this in detail, based on past issues of the local newspaper (Jeversches Wochenblatt). It continued to exist after 1945 despite its total support of Nazi ideology, but the tone had changed, even with the old editor in place. The past wasn’t written about, but the present wasn’t covered in past vocabulary, either. When a group of Gymnasium pupils begged permission in the eighties to consult the archive for a research project on National Socialists in town, it was denied. Reprints of “Hitlers Tischgespräche“, a highly controversial 1951 edition, were still on sale in the newspaper’s front room. Generally, however, the new rules of discourse were accepted. It helped that the swift economic recovery in the 1950s seemed to reward compliance, while the American patterns of mass consumption and entertainment (imagine: chewing gum, fashionable hair cuts and dresses, fridges, cars, movies, jazz, swing and rock & roll) provided new, private, apolitical aspirations and levels of satisfaction. It may be assumed that many had donned a Nazi uniform and accepted Nazi ideology because of career options after a long period of economic insecurity. Post-war prosperity rendered Nazi ideology unattractive.
A significant part of the local population wouldn’t resume any position in the new normal of public life. Traditionally, the town marketplace had been a center of cattle trade, dominated by Jewish families. Nazi rule swiftly squeezed out all members of the established Jewish community, disowned, forced into exile or deported and murdered. Some must have returned after the war, successfully claiming their property and real estate but remaining invisible and tacit. A bakery in our neighborhood, famous for its delicate “Leidenschaften” puff pastry pretzels, had industrially produced Matzen bread in yellow packages on its shelves. My mother sternly advised against acquiring it, vaguely mentioning they were reserved for particular people. I never saw anyone buying it. But the matzen must have found consumers. In the 1980s, those killed were honored by a bronze memorial, modest but telling, situated near our family home, leaning against the jailhouse wall, around the corner of the war memorials. I had had my braids cut and left town by then. On my rare visits, I never found any pebbles placed on the bronze slabs of the memorial.
Memorial to the murdered Jews of Jever- The bronze slabs symbolize files indicating their status to the persecutors. Their names are cast on the file backs, 67 in all. Artist: Udo Reimann. Author: Gregor Helms
There was one notorious exception breaking the truce of silence in town, a self-declared homesick maverick, returning from exile in Shanghai and San Francisco in 1952, single-handedly cracking open the ossified local mental structures, paving a way into a democratic future for a younger, enterprising generation before finally breaking away.
Fritz Levy- Riding his bike with a bamboo stick was a technique acquired in Shanghai exile. It may have served as a weapon for self-defense, too. Just in case. Courtesy Helmut Burlager
Fritz Levi’s life and situationist interventions (like blocking the staircases to the town hall with manure) are worth another story, kept in mind by bold supporters, told through a documentary, a novel, a New York Times article, and a Wikipedia entry. Thanks to an idolizing youth and courageous and tenacious citizens, local historical awareness focused, at last, on the Nazi entanglement of the town elites and the expulsion of the Jewish townspeople. The Jewish cemetery was restored, survivors in exile were invited to a town hall reception, a plaque was mounted at the site of the destroyed synagogue, and research started on museum objects stolen from Jewish households. The deeds can’t be undone, but historical research and analysis can discover new stories of the past, and mindful action can raise awareness of these stories, and the causes and consequences of political thought and action.
“Ich bete an die Macht der Liebe”— Silence (and manure) can generate constructive power. But this takes more than the time of one generation. Meanwhile, the drummers and pipers keep marching, and the marksmen keep aiming but are no longer marching through town.
In 2022, the Association of German Marksmen (Deutscher Sportschützenbund) counted more than 1.3 million members. (Bestandserhebung 2022 Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund)
“Jeversche Leidenschaften” puff pastry
0 Comments