The American “Good War” vs. the German “Bad War”: World War II Memory Cultures

Germany had tried to conquer Europe twice in the first half of the twentieth century and failed. After World War II a four-power occupation divided the country along Cold War ideological fault lines. In West Germany the Anglo-American presence left an extraordinary legacy. A careful planned -- and initially stern -- occupation regime launched the "politics of de- and dis-." With the initial purge of denazification the Western zones were democratized, holding their first free election in 1949. Twenty-two top-Nazi leaders were put on trial at Nuremberg and twelve of them hanged for starting a war of expansion and annihilation and committing crimes against humanity.

Meanwhile New Deal-type programs began decartelizing the German economy while at the same time reconstructing it with Marshall aid and feeding the German population through the hunger years of the immediate postwar period. West Germany was rapidly "Americanized" and Coca-Cola colonized with an avalanche of popular culture and consumerism. In the words of historian Reinhold Wagnleitner, the highly successful "Marilyn Monroe Doctrine" replaced the "Monroe Doctrine." West Germany became the U.S.'s most reliable ally on the continent.

A strict disarmament of Germany was launched, yet both German states were rearmed by the mid-1950s and incorporated in the postwar alliance systems, NATO and the Warsaw Pact. West Germany was closely supervised with the West's ingenious "dual containment" strategy (contain the Soviet with German manpower while containing the Germans within the NATO framework). To this day the Germans are prohibited from building ABC weapon systems (atomic, biological, and chemical weapons).

The most important legacy of the postwar occupation may well have been an ever more prevalent German pacifism in all political camps (not only in the Green Party where it is strongest). Only in the post-Cold War era have Germans begun to participate in "out of area" Western military interventions (Kosovo, Afghanistan). Young Germans abhor war and would rather not serve in the military and since the Vietnam War have become ever more critical of American military adventures abroad. The formerly deeply rooted Prussian military tradition was obliterated by the highly successful Anglo-American postwar occupation regime that produced prosperity and the "Wirtschaftswunder" instead of resentment and rejection.

A post-Nuremberg memory culture was forced on the Germans that stressed the horrid war crimes committed by Germans during war. The German memory regime of World War II for the past fifty years has stressed the "bad war." The concentration camps and the memory of the Holocaust have become central sites of German World War II memory. While in 1994 the Anglo-Americans celebrated their fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day invasion at the cemeteries in Normandy in their usual martial fashion with parades and presidential speeches of soldierly sacrifice and valor, the Germans commemorated a rare "good" memory event of the war - the assassination attempt by officers on Hitler on July 20. In the second half of the 1990s a powerful exhibit documenting the war crimes of the German Wehrmacht traveled through Germany and Austria. Veterans organizations tried to stop it but failed. It is this memory of the terrible German World War II past more than anything that has so deeply ingrained the postwar pacifism among younger Germans.

Meanwhile the United States has become a militarized society in peacetime and sports a martial pride and attendant hyperpatriotism in its mainstream culture and ethos that is reminiscent of old Prussia. As the leader of the Western world, the U.S. has built the most powerful armed forces and destructive weapons systems the world has ever seen. During the Cold War the Americans spent up to 30 percent of its budget on the military. They established an awesome global base system that allows the U.S. to project its power swiftly and devastatingly when needed. It has fought long wars in Korea and Vietnam and intervened dozens of time around the world when it saw its national interests threatened.

This acceptance of a permanent peace-time military establishment and global power projection after World War II has much to do with the hard-won victories and the subsequent American memory regime of the "good war." Actually, the cultural production in the years after the war maintained an ambivalent and darker view of the war which had dehumanized so many of its young soldiers in the epic battles in the Pacific and in Europe. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 stand for this darker view.

But since the 1980s D-Day commemorations turned uncompromisingly patriotic and the cultural production celebratory of the "greatest generation" that lived through the Depression and rose to victory during World War II. Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and the ten-part TV series "Band of Brothers" signify a patriotic memory of World War II that celebrates the "good war." The late historian Stephen E. Ambrose has done more than anyone to enshrine this new view in his books and in the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. In the words of historian Chad Barry "the good war thesis became a powerfully seductive and intoxicating view of an idealized past and a golden age."

A major turning point in enforcing this new "good war" memory regime was the controversy over the "Enola Gay" exhibit in the Smithonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Whereas the initial more scholarly concept envisioned placing the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima fifty years ago within the larger concept of the racist and dehumanizing "war without mercy" in the Pacific theater, the veterans' lobbying groups forced this concept to be ditched. Instead, a filiopietistic much smaller exhibit was shown beholden to the "good war" paradigm. While in Germany the veterans' organization had failed to salvage their selective memories of the killing fields on the Eastern front, in the United States the veterans succeeded in enforcing their one-sided memory of heroic marines and valiant sailors. Their killing frenzies in the island campaign and trophy taking of Japanese body parts was purged from the public memory.

While the upcoming sixtieth anniversary celebrations in Normandy surely will continue to invoke the "good war" and the "Prussian" martial ethos at a time when America is at war again in Iraq, in democratic Germany an anti-war pacifism is stronger than ever. Little did the Austrian observer quoted above know how clairvoyant he would was in predicting two compelling trajectories of the postwar international world.