Postwar

The Socialist leader Kurt Schumacher, on the other hand, had been a resolute anti-Nazi from the outset. In the Reichstag on February 23rd 1932 he had famously denounced National Socialism as ‘a continuous appeal to the inner swine in human beings’, unique in German history in its success in ‘ceaselessly mobilizing human stupidity.’ Arrested in July 1933 he spent most of the next twelve years in concentration camps, which permanently damaged his health and shortened his life. Gaunt and stooped, Schumacher, with his personal heroism and his unswerving insistence after the war on Germany’s obligation to acknowledge its crimes, was not just the natural leader of the Socialists but the only national politician in postwar Germany who might have provided his fellow Germans with a clear moral compass.

But Schumacher, for all his many qualities, was curiously slow to grasp the new international regime in Europe. Born in Kreisstadt, in Prussia, he was reluctant to abandon the prospect of a united, neutral Germany. He disliked and distrusted Communists and had no illusions about them; but he seems seriously to have believed that a demilitarized Germany would be left in peace to determine its fate, and that such circumstances would be propitious for the Socialists. He was thus virulently opposed to Adenauer’s Western orientation and his apparent willingness to countenance an indefinite division of Germany. For the Socialists, the restoration of a sovereign, unified and politically neutral Germany must take precedence over all international entanglements.

Schumacher was particularly aroused by Adenauer’s enthusiasm for the project of West European integration. In Schumacher’s view, the 1950 Schuman Plan was intended to produce a Europe that would be ‘conservative, capitalist, clerical and dominated by cartels.’ Whether or not he was altogether mistaken is besides the point here. The trouble was that Schumacher’s Social Democrats had nothing practical to offer instead. By combining their traditional socialist program of nationalizations and social guarantees with the demand for unification and neutrality they did respectably in the first FRG elections of 1949, receiving 29.2 percent of the vote and the support of 6,935,000 voters (424,000 less than the CDU/CSU). But by the mid-fifties, with West Germany firmly tied into the Western Alliance and the incipient project of European union, and with the Socialists’ doom- laden economic prophecies demonstrably falsified, the SPD was stymied. In the elections of 1953 and 1957 the Socialist vote increased only slightly and their share of the electorate stagnated.

Only in 1959, seven years after Schumacher’s premature death, did a new generation of German Socialists formally abandon the party’s seventy-year-old commitment to Marxism and make a virtue of the necessity of compromise with West German reality. The function of Marxism in post-war German socialism had only ever been rhetorical—the SPD had ceased to harbor genuinely revolutionary ambitions by 1914 at the latest, if indeed it ever really had any. But the decision to relinquish the ageing formulas of Socialist maximalism also released Germany’s Socialists to adapt the substance of their thinking. Although many remained unhappy with Germany’s role in the new European Economic Community, they did reconcile themselves both to Germany’s participation in the Western Alliance and to the need to become a cross-class Volkspartei—rather than rely on their working-class core—if they were ever seriously to challenge Adenauer’s monopoly of power.

In due course the SPD reformers were successful: the improvement in the Party’s performance at the elections of 1961 and 1965 led to a ‘grand’ coalition government in 1966 with the Social Democrats, now led by Willy Brandt, in office for the first time since Weimar days. But they would pay an ironic price for this improvement in their prospects. So long as Germany’s Social Democrats maintained their principled opposition to most of Adenauer’s policies, they contributed inadvertently to the political stability of the West German Republic. The Communist Party had never done well in the FRG (in 1947 it received just 5.7 percent of the vote, in 1953 2.2 percent, and in 1956 it was banned by the West German Constitutional Court). The SPD thus had a monopoly on the political Left and absorbed within itself whatever youthful and radical dissent there was at the time. But once it joined the Christian Democrats in office and adopted a moderate and reformist agenda, the SPD lost the allegiance of the far Left. A space would now open up outside parliament for a new and destabilizing generation of political radicals.

West Germany’s political leaders did not need to worry about the rise of a direct successor to the Nazis, since any such party was explicitly banned under the Basic Law of the Republic. There were, however, many millions of former Nazi voters, most of them divided among the various parties of the mainstream. And there was now an additional constituency: the Vertriebene—ethnic Germans expelled from East Prussia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Of the approximately thirteen million German expellees, nearly nine million had initially settled in the western zones; by the mid-1960s, with the steady flow of refugees west through Berlin, a further 1.5 million Germans expelled from the eastern lands had arrived in West Germany.

Predominantly small farmers, shopkeepers and businessmen, the Vertriebene were too numerous to ignore—as ‘ethnic Germans’ (Volksdeutsche) their rights as citizens and refugees were enshrined in the 1949 Basic Law. In the early years of the Republic they were more likely than other Germans to be without proper housing or employment, and they were strongly motivated to turn out at elections, their politics shaped by one issue above all others: the right of return to their land and property in the countries of the Soviet bloc, or, failing that, the claim to compensation for their losses.

In addition to the Vertriebene there were the many millions of war veterans— even more after Khrushchev agreed to return the remaining POWs in 1955. Like the expellees, the war veterans and their spokesmen saw themselves above all as the unjustly abused victims of the war and the post-war settlement. Any suggestion that Germany, and especially the German armed forces, had behaved in ways that precipitated or justified their suffering was angrily dismissed. The preferred self-image of Adenauer’s Germany was that of a victim thrice over: first at Hitler’s hands—the huge success of films like Die Letzte Brucke (The Last Bridge, 1954), about a female doctor resisting the Nazis, or Canaris (1955) helped popularize the notion that most good Germans had spent the war resisting Hitler; then at the hands of their enemies—the bombed-out cityscapes of post-war Germany encouraged the idea that on the home front as in the field, Germans had suffered terribly at the hands of their enemies; and finally thanks to the malicious ‘distortions’ of post-war propaganda, which—it was widely believed— deliberately exaggerated Germany’s ‘crimes’ while downplaying her losses.

In the early years of the Federal Republic there were some indications that these sentiments might translate into a significant political backlash. Already at the 1949 elections 48 parliamentary seats—three times as many as the Communists and almost as many as the Free Democrats—went to various populist parties of the nationalist Right. Once refugees were permitted to organize politically there emerged the ‘Bloc of Expellees and Disenfranchised’: in local elections in Schleswig-Holstein (formerly a rural stronghold of the Nazi Party) the ‘Bloc’ won 23 percent of the vote in 1950. The following year, in nearby Lower Saxony, a Sozialistische Reichspartei—appealing to a similar constituency—scored 11 percent. It was with this by no means insignificant constituency in mind that Konrad Adenauer took great care to avoid direct criticisms of the recent German past, and explicitly blamed the Soviet Union and the Western Allies for Germany’s continuing problems, especially those resulting from the Potsdam accords.

To assuage the demands of refugees and their supporters, Adenauer and the CDU kept a hard line towards the East. In international relations Bonn insisted that Germany’s 1937 frontiers remain legally in force until a final Peace Conference. Under the Hallstein Doctrine propounded in 1955, the Federal Republic refused diplomatic relations with any country that recognized the GDR (and thereby implicitly denied Bonn’s claim under the 1949 Basic Law to represent all Germans). The only exception was the Soviet Union. Bonn’s rigidity was demonstrated in 1957 when Adenauer broke off diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia after Tito recognized East Germany. For the next ten years Germany’s relations with eastern Europe were effectively frozen.

In domestic affairs, in addition to devoting considerable resources to helping the refugees, returning prisoners and their families integrate into West German society, the governments of the nineteen-fifties encouraged a distinctly uncritical approach to Germany’s recent past. In 1955 the Foreign Ministry formally protested against the showing at that year’s Cannes Film Festival of Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog. With the Federal Republic about to enter NATO as a full partner the film could harm West Germany’s relations with other states: in the words of the official protest it ‘would disturb the international harmony of the festival by its emphatic reminder of the painful past.’ The French government duly complied and the film was withdrawn .[97]

This was no momentary aberration. Until 1957 the West German Ministry of the Interior banned any screenings of Wolfgang Staudte’s (East German) film of Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan (‘Man of Straw’, 1951)—objecting to its suggestion that authoritarianism in Germany had deep historical roots.