Session One:
Fonner West Gennans and Their Past
Edith Kurzweil:
Dr. Webb is going to moderate the first session of the
conference. The panelists will be Dr. Margarete Mitscherlich, Professor
David Gress, and Professor Burkhard Koch.
Igor Webb:
In
today's format, the panelists will present their papers,
and then comment on each other. Mter that the floor will be open for
discussion. First, we will hear from Margarete Mitscherlich on "How Do
Germans Face Their Guilt?" She is one of the leading German psycho–
analysts, editor of
Psyche.
David Gress is Olin Professor at Adelphi. He has
written, among other books, a definitive history of West Germany. He
will speak on "Political Uses of the Past." Burkhard Koch is Professor of
History at Humboldt University in Berlin. He has been a visiting scholar
at the Hoover Institute and at Georgetown University, and will be
talking about "East Germans' Conflicts with Nazi and Communist
Legacies."
Margarete Mitscherlich:
I
thank you very much for the invitation,
which I accepted with pleasure.
In
1945, Germans found themselves confronted with the total col–
lapse of their nation, and the world looked on aghast at the revelation
of the inconceivable atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, by the SS, and
also by certain divisions of the German
Wehrmacht
-
the armed services
of the Third Reich without whose active assistance Hitler could never
have started the war. No longer could the German people plausibly
protest ignorance of the genocide committed in their name. And yet the
majority of them still behaved as if Hitler's Reich and its crimes had
never existed - an attitude that became even more pronounced after the
currency reform, the beginning of the Cold War, and during the years of
the "economic miracle."
One result of this negation of the past was the Germans' inability to
mourn for their dead. With the cult of the Fuhrer exploded, it was no
longer possible to uphold the idealization of the soldiers killed in the
war as heroes who had died for a noble cause. These fathers, husbands,
and sons had lost their lives for nothing. This truth was difficult to face.
Like the extermination of the Jews, it was not so much repressed as
negated. For many Germans the only way of coping with the total de–
valuation of ideas of national grandeur was either to forget the past al–
together or to entertain as cloudy a vision of it as possible. On her first
