Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is Albert Guérard Professor in Literature at Stanford University. His books in English include In 1926 (1998), Production of Presence (Stanford, 2004), In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006), and Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (Stanford, 2012).

AFTER 1945

Latency as Origin of the Present

By Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8518-1

Contents

One Car Away from Death: An Overture…………………………………11 Emergence of Latency? A Generation’s Beginning………………………52 Forms of Latency…………………………………………………313 No Exit and No Entry……………………………………………..394 Bad Faith / Interrogations………………………………………..715 Derailment / Containers…………………………………………..1126 Effects of Latency……………………………………………….1527 Unconcealment of Latency? My Story with Time………………………..160The Form of This Book………………………………………………211Bibliography………………………………………………………217Index…………………………………………………………….221

CHAPTER 1

EMERGENCE OF LATENCY?

A Generation’s Beginning

June 15, 1948, was a bright yet muggy Tuesday in Bavaria.what would become of Germany appeared altogether uncertain:the nation’s immediate past weighed heavily, even if people hardlytalked about it. Nobody seemed aware—perhaps no one really cared—thatjust one week later the future would be determined. The front page of theSueddeutsche Zeitung—Muenchner Nachrichten aus Politik, Kultur, Wirtschaftund Sport looked much the same then as it does now, except that on this dayit featured a black-and-white photograph of Carl Zuckmayer (a German-bornauthor who had become American) with his wife and his daughter, and theprice was just twenty Pfennig. At the top of the page, five articles presentedthe key political news of the moment, in Germany and abroad, in a strangelydetached fashion. It was announced that preparations for currency reform(Waehrungsreform) in the three zones occupied by Allied forces had now beenfinished; all that remained was to wait for official word about the exact datethe new monetary order would go into effect. Another article covered a campaignspeech President truman had delivered in Berkeley, California, wherehe appealed to the Soviet Union not to abandon the collective effort to securethe democratic future of a united Germany. (In all likelihood, the westernallies and Soviet Union were equally inclined to partition the country, eventhough, for reasons of political gamesmanship, each side had to impute theplan to the other one.) two brief items reported that the French Parliamentwas hesitant to ratify the initial political steps necessary to establish a westGerman state, despite the decision reached thirteen days earlier in Londonby the other western allies and Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg. Finally,the American Military Governor, General Clay, was quoted in a press conferencepromising that the United States would make every effort to assure”east German representation” in the new state. Four of these five articles werecomposed in the neutral style typical of press agencies—indeed, they camefrom AP, Dena-Reuter, and UP. The sole item to be written by newspaperstaff, although it discussed imminent economic reform—and therefore a matterof vital existential concern—may well have struck the most dispassionatetone of all. Elsewhere on the page, two other features adopted a somewhatlivelier—and occasionally aggressive—style, even though they addressed topicswarranting greater tact and reserve from the German editors. The firstwas the well-known column on the left (which still runs today) entitled “DasStreiflicht” [“the side-light”]. On June 15, 1948, the column voiced criticismof American geopolitical strategy; in particular, it objected to the fact thatthe U.S., through a foreign Legion approved by the Senate, was lendingsupport to the Jewish State, which had been founded in the former Britishprotectorate one month and one day earlier. With unabashed anti-Semitismconcealed by a pacifistic veneer, Streiflicht mocked sixty-four non-JewishGermans who had volunteered to fight for the cause and been rejected byIsraeli authorities: “We Germans could not have wished for a better way torid ourselves of the lingering element of military aggression in our society.”the most space—and self-congratulatory enthusiasm—was devoted to the”Second International youth Manifestation” taking place in Munich, wherefourteen hundred participants had gathered from twenty-one countries.the guests of honor included thirty German prisoners of war the French authoritieshad released for the occasion. Carl Zuckmayer received thunderingapplause when he declared that the youngest generation of Germans couldnot be held responsible for the most recent chapter of the nation’s past. Thefollowing day, as part of the “Manifestation,” the University of Munich wasscheduled to confer, with full academic pomp and ceremony, an honorarydoctorate upon the French novelist Jules Romains. Surprisingly, a belateddelegation was announced from Spain—from a country, that is, where themilitary government (which had supported Hitler) was completely isolatedfrom the emergent political order in western Europe. This delegation receiveda particularly emotional welcome.

The young people gathered in Munich, the newspaper reported, “spokeof their German friends with great respect”; they wanted to be “good neighbors,”and they were “even impressed by the quality of the rationed foodsupply.” the matter of obtaining food—where and how to do so—was aconcern of the first order for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and its readers. Alengthy article on page three (of the four pages comprising that day’s edition)discussed the legally sanctioned opportunity to buy meat from diseasedanimals [Freibank]; it made light of the physical needs the measure impliedby describing, with ironic undertones, more than three thousand personswaiting in line. Culture, like food, received attention in terms of supply andquantity. Under the rubric, “High tide for Cabarets,” three evenings of politicalcabaret in Munich were written up. The paper also reported on severalnew productions of classical dramas—plays by Lope de Vega and Henri deMontherlant, whose works were ubiquitous at the time. (without a doubt,French culture enjoyed unrivaled prestige, as had always been the case inGermany before 1933.) the newspaper also ran a story on the exhibitionat Haus der Kunst—opened by none other than General Clay—featuringworks by renaissance masters that American authorities had returned to theState of Bavaria. Even for a paper of just four pages, the sports section occupiedlittle space, at least by today’s standards. It opened with the program ofa boxing contest—boxing was probably the most popular sport in Germanythen—that involved the cities of Zurich and Munich; the article applaudedthe event as a generous gesture on the part of the Swiss to end the banon German athletes at international events. In contrast, a strangely elegaictone permeated the soccer coverage: “The team from Mannheim, despite amore mature style, did not manage a single goal; Munich 1860 scored once.One hopes that their offense, which left so much to be desired, will returnto form one day.” The bottom half of the same page was completely filledby ads for vacant positions. The most sought-after parties were men andwomen competent in business, administration, and typewriting, and “girls”to work as housekeepers (Alleinmaedchen). That day, the paper ran no adsfrom people seeking employment.

Without knowledge of local and historical context, a reader would havebeen hard pressed to imagine that the Sueddeutsche published on June 15,1948, was written, printed, and distributed in a city whose urban center stilllay in ruins from air raids. This city had been the official home of the GermanNational Socialist Workers’ Party—the party of Adolf Hitler and HeinrichHimmler—which had unleashed upon humanity crimes of unprecedentedtechnological perfection. It would have been even more difficult forthe average reader to find signs of the truly miraculous (more than simply”dramatic”) turnaround that Munich and the country as a whole were soonto experience. It seems that those who had survived the war were so busyscrambling to survive in the new, everyday reality of peace that they couldnot appreciate their own achievements. Still less, it seems, could they gaugetheir own blindness. On that day late in spring, when the horrors of thepast stood to one side and future success lay on the other, life likely felt asflat and pointedly featureless as the music broadcast on the American forcesNetwork—for example, Benny Goodman’s “On a Slow Boat to China.”

* * *

The new currency, called Deutsche Mark, began to circulate under rainy skiesin the American, British, and French zones on Sunday, June 20, 1948. Eachcitizen had the right to exchange up to forty old Reichsmark for the sameamount in new money. A further allocation of twenty marks was scheduledfor August. Larger amounts of cash could be traded at the rate of a hundred(old) to five (new); for checking and savings accounts, as well as outstandingpayments, the rate stood at ten to one. Rationing restrictions were liftedon more than four hundred kinds of goods. Although the measures wereaccompanied by fear and a rise in unemployment, they proved effective incutting ties to a debilitating part of the country’s past and paved the way forthe “economic miracle” that would set the existential tone for the first yearsof the federal republic.

The speed of Waehrungsreform in the west caught the administration ofthe country’s eastern half off-guard. Three days later, in order to protect theSoviet zone from being inundated with old—and now worthless—Reichsmarks,currency reform was implemented here, too. Economic transitionin the East differed from its Western counterpart inasmuch as the authoritiespursued the objective of social justice by offering better exchange ratesto people with smaller amounts of money at their disposal. One day later,on Thursday, June 24—intensifying a tendency to intervene politically andmilitarily in response to world-political threats—the Soviet Union interruptedall land, rail, and water traffic between the western part of Germanyand Berlin. Despite doubts that were logistical, technical, and, above all,strategic in nature, General Clay, with the support of the British authorities,immediately ordered that an air bridge to Berlin be struck. Within a fewweeks, two hundred sixty-nine British and three hundred fourteen Americanaircraft were making some five hundred and fifty flights a day. These missions,which went from Frankfurt, Hannover, and Hamburg to three westBerlin airports (Tempelhof, Gatow, and, beginning in December, Tegel), reestablishedcontrol over the former capital’s western sectors and secured thesurvival of its population. Within less than a hundred hours between June20 and June 24, 1948, the postwar had ended, and the Cold War (which hadalready been discerned as a nightmarish possibility for world affairs) beganto materialize as the new reality. Before the end of the month, the Committeeof the eastern European Communist Parties under the leadershipof the Soviet Union (Kominform)—seemingly obsessed with drawing sharpdivisions on the political landscape—had excluded Yugoslavia’s CommunistParty on the grounds that it harbored “Anti-Soviet and Anti-Internationalistattitudes.” Less than two months later, the countries occupying the westGerman zones announced the surprising decision that deliberations aboutthe new constitution would take place in Bonn, a small university town nearCologne.

* * *

If, in the few weeks it took for the contours of a new world order to becomevisible, people seemed strangely unaware of the tensions that shaped theiractions, the final months of the war had witnessed scenes of grotesque simultaneitiesand hysteria. Consider, for example, the chilling photographfrom April 1945, in which Adolf Hitler—looking frail and much older thanhis fifty-six years—shakes hands with a line of boys in uniform, as if theywere real soldiers, as if he still had any military (or even paternal) authority,as if the war were not long lost, and as if the youths actually believed therewas any point to sacrificing their lives. Does this “as if” concern our impression,today, that certain gestures seem out of place, unsuited to the environmentin which they occurred? Or is the “as if” an approximate formula(however inadequate) for the combination of helplessness and cynicism thatmarked the moment itself and the way it was experienced? Is it possible that,by the spring of 1945, Hitler still believed in his calling? Is it possible that theboys trusted him? Were the Germans who—a few days after unconditionalsurrender—were forced to walk through the concentration camps that theirgovernment and fellow citizens had built, actually being sincere when theyclaimed to have been unaware of these massive engines of death? what weremy parents thinking when they sent friends and relatives cards of handmadepaper (Buettenpapier) inscribed with Gothic letters to announce theirengagement party on April 20, 1945? Even though they were not particularlyactive in the Party, this was Hitler’s birthday, and festivities were scheduledto take place in Dortmund, where one of the fiercest battles of the war hadraged until only a few days before. Did they see any problem at all? Did itcross their minds that the damaged houses where they would be sleeping,eating, and having sex were somehow mismatched with the overly formalinvitation cards? Or did they act as if nothing were happening because theabyss was simply too deep—and too near—to confront? Did ignorance enablethem to survive? was Hitler or anyone else in his piteous, subterraneanBunker really convinced, “philosophically” or “religiously” (if such adverbsare admissible in this context), when they claimed it was necessary and justfor the German “race” to perish—to be physically destroyed and removedfrom the face of the planet—because it had proven weaker than other “races”and therefore unworthy of dominance?

* * *

The grotesque stridency of the final stage of war was fated to disappear afterthe unconditional surrender of May 8, 1945. However, the “as if” of aggressivelyignoring continued among survivors as the conditions of life grewworse than anyone could have anticipated. Such was the impression that thetwenty-three year old Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman (Deutscher Herbst’46) took away from his visit to Germany. Dagerman came during the autumnof 1946 to report on the situation—in all likelihood, one without historicor existential precedent—in a series of thirteen articles that appearedin Stockholm the following year. In merciless detail, Dagerman describedthe everyday life of a family inhabiting a ground-floor apartment that waspermanently flooded. To say they were living under “prehistoric conditions”would be insufficient: they were people from a modern civilization who hadbeen violently pushed back into cave life. Every step posed a risk, they hadlearned how to sleep without moving, and the threat of disease lurked everywhere.Instead of going to school or exercising a profession, children andgrown-ups had to hunt for food; they spent their days gathering fuel for fire;occasionally, they bartered what they had found for clothing. No one hadthe time, energy, or desire to consider what might have caused their situation.Life was simply a matter of escaping death, every day. The few Germanswho had the luxury of an occasional pause accepted, without protest,that the Allies held absolute control over what had been “their” country. Atthe same time, it must have felt natural for them to tell the foreign observerthat they were being treated unfairly. Were they speaking truthfully and ingood faith when they asked Dagerman whether they were responsible forHitler and twelve years of Nazi rule? Were they acting honestly when theyobserved that the Germans, after their own military victories, had nevertreated other nations with comparable severity?

With the exception of the Nuremberg trials, the Allies let German lawyers”with a clean record” preside over “de-nazification”—a process that providedthe inevitable condition for reentry into professional and civic life.Dagerman took a dim view of this logistical decision. While he did notaccuse the new civil servants (who, for the most part, had exercised the sameprofession before 1945) of blatant injustice or cronyism, he found that theylacked the passion and dedication necessary to detect and punish the crimesof the past; he thought they were failing to make a break comparable to thesplit that was to occur in the economic system some eighteen months later.Finally, Dagerman noticed mounting tension between two generations ofGermans. Those between the ages of fifteen and thirty clearly blamed theirolder siblings and parents—that is, the people who had been in charge ofthe country between 1933 and 1945—for jeopardizing the present and future.In contrast—and more surprisingly—many older Germans believed that theyounger generation should have protected (or even freed) the nation fromNazi rule. As Dagerman observed, no one really felt responsible.
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