Why It Took Germany So Long to Face the Truth About Hitler

Steve Crawshaw, in the (London) Independent (July 13, 2004):

For 60 years, Germany has been feeling worried. Worried by its own criminal history, worried by the judgement of others - and worried that the lure of Adolf Hitler is not yet dead. Few Germans would seriously argue that modern German democracy is endangered. None the less, the just- in-case taboos remain in place, above all when it comes to the dictator himself.

Elsewhere in Europe, it is easy to find copies of Mein Kampf on the shelves. In the words of the English-language edition, "It remains necessary reading for those who care to safeguard democracy." In Germany, where it was once compulsory reading, it is considered too sensitive to put on sale. Even the dictator's image is subject to powerful taboos. English-language books on the Third Reich often have photographs of the Fuhrer on the cover. When those same books are translated into German, the pictures of Hitler and the swastikas vanish, to be replaced with something more anodyne. Several decades after the war, a German commentator explained why he believed the ban on Mein Kampf to be essential: "The bacillus is too lively, the danger of infection too acute." Even in the 21st century, that fearful logic - though rarely made so explicit - remains in place.

Now, however, remarkable change is on the way. Two new German films both put the Fuhrer unashamedly centre screen. Heinrich Breloer has filmed a huge documentary drama focusing on the role of Albert Speer, Hitler's star architect. Speer and He will be screened on German television in the spring, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Hitler's death.

As Der Spiegel points out, Breloer's three-part, EUR12m (pounds 8.5m) documentary series breaks with a long German tradition: "If the dictator appeared at all, then only for a few seconds and usually without words." Demystification is the key. In preparation for the role, Tobias Moretti, who plays Hitler, listened for hours to a unique tape recording, secretly recorded by a Finnish radio technician in 1942: Hitler not as the demagogic orator, but speaking in the voice of an ordinary human being. A second film, Bernd Eichinger's The Downfall, focuses on the last days in the bunker. Bruno Ganz, star of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, takes the role of Hitler.

As Frank Schirrmacher, the publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has noted, the release of the films will mark an important turning point. "A type of pictorial fear was at work here; a dread of turning the man who has dominated German imagination to the present day into a product of artistic imagination. This is over now." Schirrmacher suggests that these are "the most important historical projects in many years".

These changes do not take place in isolation. Germany's new relaxation is everywhere - in film, literature, and politics. The old taboos are crumbling month by month, day by day. Confrontation with the past, and confrontation with German worries about the past, are inextricably intertwined.

The story of Germany since 1945 has, in many ways, been a story of changing taboos with regard to Hitler and his legacy. Initially, those taboos sought to avoid acknowledging the depth of the crimes that so many Germans had, by their action or inaction, allowed to take place. Reading the West German school- books of the 1950s and 1960s is to expose oneself to a tissue of half-truths, at best. Hitler himself is portrayed in an almost rosy light - the peacemaker, whose efforts were thwarted by a war-hungry Churchill, to whom Hitler "offered peace in vain". (Churchill "knew that England had time, and that the United States would help".)

Where Hitler's crimes are alluded to in passing, the reader is constantly assured that Germans knew little or nothing of what was happening - and that they could, in any case, have done nothing even if they had known. The mass murder of millions, planned with such unique thoroughness, is often passed over in barely a sentence. The German resistance movement, so terribly isolated, receives copious coverage, as does German suffering. Thus, a long catalogue of casualties in the Second World War in a 1956 schoolbook (including, for example, the number of Germans who lost a limb) concludes with the brief postscript: "In addition came the victims who were killed in the concentration camps, the labour camps, the death chambers etc." Whereupon the author returns to safer ground, telling us how much property was destroyed. One book talks at length of the "horrific suffering, such as the world no longer believed possible in the twentieth century". The reference is not to the Holocaust or any other aspect of Nazi crimes, but to what the Germans themselves had gone through.

The fathers-and-children revolution of 1968 and the years that followed - a generational confrontation more dramatic in Germany than anywhere else in Europe or the United States - began to chip away at the lies. The 1968 effect was by no means immediate. (The Baader-Meinhof terrorism of the 1970s, which theoretically demanded more openness about the past, perhaps slowed down the process of change.) When Basil Fawlty goosestepped his way past the German guests in the Fawlty Towers dining room, muttering (not quite sotto voce) "Don't mention the war", he was partly right, despite his buffoonishness, to believe that the Germans were still in denial at that time, in 1975.

Only at the end of the Seventies did the greater openness began to be real. In 1977 came the publication of What I Have Heard about Adolf Hitler, a 350-page book consisting of quotations from a series of school essays on the above theme. The answer to the question was: not much. Hitler was Swiss, Dutch, or Italian; he lived in the 17th century, the 19th century, the 1950s; he was a First World War general, the founder of the East German Communist Party, a leader of German democracy. The ignorance was easily explained. The subtitle of the book, which had a dramatic impact when it was published, was simple: "Consequences of a Taboo." Two years later, the screening of Holocaust - a US television mini-series derided elsewhere as "genocide shrunken to the level of Bonanza with music appropriate to Love Story" - brought the human impact of Hitler's crimes into German homes for the first time. In the words of one of several German books devoted to the extraordinary Holocaust effect: "A whole nation began - as a result of a television film - suddenly to discuss openly the darkest chapter of its history."

The underlying reason for this new openness, which grew through the 1980s, was the change of generations. The children of those who had committed crimes, or who had stood by while crimes were committed, were eager to confront the past in a way that their parents were so reluctant to do....