nostalgic domestic films. These, the so-called ‘Heimat’ (‘homeland’) cinema, were typically set in the mountain landscapes of southern Germany and featured tales of love, loyalty and community, in period or regional costume. Shamelessly kitschy, these hugely popular entertainments were often close copies of Nazi-era films, sometimes with identical titles (e.g. Black Forest Maiden, of 1950, a re- make of a film with the same title from 1933): the work of directors like Hans Deppe, who had flourished under the Nazis, or else younger men like Rudolf Schundler who were trained by them.
The titles—Green Is the Heath (1951), Land of Smiles (1952), When the White Lilacs Bloom Again (1953), Victoria and Her Hussar (1954), The Faithful Hussar (1954), The Gay Village (1955), When the Alpine Roses Bloom (1955), Rosie from the Black Forest (1956) and dozens more in this vein—evoke a land and a people untroubled by bombs or refugees, ‘deep Germany’: wholesome, rural, uncontaminated, happy and blond. And their very timelessness carried comforting intimations of a country and people free not just of occupiers from East and West but clean, too, of guilt and undefiled by Germany’s recent past.
The Heimat films reflected the provinciality and conservatism of the early Federal Republic, a heartfelt desire to be left alone. This demobilization of Germans was perhaps facilitated by the disproportionate presence of women among the adult population. In the first post-war census of 1950, one-third of all West German households were headed by a divorced woman or a widow. Even after the surviving prisoners of war returned from the USSR in 1955 and 1956, the disproportions remained: in 1960 females in the Federal Republic outnumbered males in a proportion of 126:100. As in Britain or France, only more so, family and domestic concerns were uppermost in the public mind. In this world of women, many of them in full-time work and raising children alone[100]—with terrible private memories of the last months of war and the immediate post-war era—the rhetoric of nation, nationalism, rearmament, military glory or ideological confrontation held little appeal.
The adoption of substitute public goals to replace the discredited ambitions of the past was quite deliberate. As Konrad Adenauer explained to his cabinet on February 4th 1952, when outlining the Schuman Plan’s importance for his countrymen: ‘The people must be given a new ideology. It can only be a European one.’ West Germany was distinctive in that it alone stood to recover its sovereignty by joining international organizations; and the idea of Europe could itself substitute for the void opened up in German public life by the evisceration of German nationalism—as Schuman explicitly hoped that it would.
For the intellectual and political elites, this diversion of energies proved effective. But for the woman in the street, the real substitute for the old politics was not the new ‘Europe’ but the business of surviving—and prospering. At the end of the war, according to the British Labour politician Hugh Dalton, Winston Churchill had expressed the wish that Germany might grow ‘fat but impotent’. And so it did, faster and to greater effect than Churchill could have dared to hope. The attention of West Germans in the two decades after Hitler’s defeat did not need to be diverted away from politics and towards producing and consuming: it moved wholeheartedly and single-mindedly in that direction.
Making, saving, getting and spending became not just the primary activity of most West Germans, but also the publicly affirmed and approved purpose of national life. Reflecting many years later on this curious collective transformation, and on the concentrated zeal with which the citizens of the Federal Republic went about their work, the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger observed that ‘one cannot understand the puzzling energy of the Germans if one resists the idea that they have turned their defects into virtues. They had, in a quite literal sense, lost their minds and that was the condition of their future success.’
Internationally condemned after Hitler’s fall for blindly obeying immoral orders, Germans thus turned the defect of their industrious obedience into a national virtue. The shattering impact of their country’s total defeat and subsequent occupation made West Germans amenable to the imposition of democracy in a way that few could have imagined a decade earlier. In place of the ‘devotion for its rulers’ that Heine had first observed in the German people a century before, Germans in the nineteen-fifties attracted international respect for their similarly wholehearted devotion to efficiency, detail, and quality in the manufacture of finished products.
By older Germans especially, this newfound devotion to building prosperity was unambiguously welcome. Well into the nineteen-sixties, many Germans over sixty years old—which included almost everyone in a position of authority—still thought that life had been better under the Kaiser. But in view of what had followed, the security and tranquility afforded them by the passive routines of daily life in the Federal Republic were more than acceptable as a substitute. Younger citizens, however, were more suspicious. The ‘skeptical generation’—men and women born in the last days of the Weimar Republic, and thus old enough to have experienced Nazism but young enough to bear no responsibility for its crimes—were particularly mistrustful of the newfound German order.
For men like the writer Gunther Grass, or the social theorist Jurgen Habermas, both born in 1927, West Germany was a democracy without democrats. Its citizens had vaulted with shocking ease from Hitler to consumerism; they had salved their guilty memories by growing prosperous. In the German turn away from politics towards private accumulation, Grass and others saw a denial of civic responsibilities past and present. They ardently seconded the dissent from Bertold Brecht’s aphorism ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral’ (‘Eating comes first, then morality’) expressed by Ernst Reuter, the mayor of West Berlin, in March 1947: ‘No sentence is more dangerous than “Eating comes first, then morality”. We are hungry and freezing because we permitted the erroneous doctrine which this sentence expresses.’
Habermas would later be closely identified with the search for Verfassungspatriotism (‘constitutional patriotism’), the only sort of national sentiment that he felt it appropriate—and prudent—to encourage in his countrymen. But as early as 1953 he came to public attention for an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung attacking Martin Heidegger for allowing his Heidelberg lectures to be republished with the original allusions to the ‘inner greatness’ of Nazism. At the time the incident was isolated—it aroused little international attention. But it put down a marker all the same, foreshadowing the bitter interrogations of a later decade.
In his 1978 film The Marriage of Maria Braun, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (born in 1945) acidly dissects the serial defects of the Federal Republic as they appeared to its youthful critics. The eponymous heroine picks up her life in the rubble of defeat, in a Germany where ‘all the men look shrunken’, and coolly puts the past behind her, announcing that ‘it’s a bad time for emotions’. Maria then devotes herself with unflinching single-mindedness to the national preoccupation with making money, at which she proves strikingly adept. Along the way the heroine, her initial vulnerability now encrusted with cynicism, exploits the resources, affections and credulity of men—including a (black) American soldier—while remaining ‘loyal’ to Hermann, her German soldier-husband incarcerated in the Soviet Union and whose wartime exploits are left studiously vague.
All Maria’s relations, achievements and comforts are measured in cash, culminating in a new, gadget-filled house into which she plans to welcome her restored husband. They are about to be reconciled in connubial bliss when they and their worldly goods are blown to pieces by an oversight: an open gas tap (sic) in their ultra-modern kitchen. Meanwhile the radio acclaims hysterically West Germany’s victory in the 1954 football World Cup. For Fassbinder and a coming generation of angrily dissenting West Germans, the newfound qualities of the new Germany in its new Europe—prosperity, compromise, political demobilization and a tacit agreement not to arouse the sleeping dogs of national memory—did not deflect attention from the old defects. They were the old defects, in a new guise.
