The Production of “Official Memory” in East Germany: Old Communists and the Dilemmas of Memoir-Writing

1999 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Third ◽  
Museum Exhibitions ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Ruling Party ◽  
Socialist Unity

In East Germany, official memory was reputedly embodied in Old Communists, those men and women who had joined the German Communist Party (KPD) before Hitler's rise to power in 1933. After 1945, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), East Germany's ruling party, exploited the tragic experiences of Old Communists during the Third Reich—exile, resistance, and concentration–camp incarceration—to foster a triumphant official memory of heroic, Communist-led antifascist struggle. Intended to legitimate the SED regime, this official memory was rehearsed in countless “lieux de mémoire,” including films, novels, school textbooks, museum exhibitions, and commemorative rituals. Concurrently, party authorities encouraged Old Communists to share their past lives with younger East Germans; in particular, they urged Old Communists to write memoirs of their participation in the antifascist struggle against Hitler.

Suicide in Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-9

2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Goeschel
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
And Control ◽  
Good And Evil

Too often histories of the concentration camps tend to be ignorant of the wider political context of nazi repression and control. This article tries to overcome this problem. Combining legal, social and political history, it contributes to a more thorough understanding of the changing relationship between the camps as places of extra-legal terror and the judiciary, between nazi terror and the law. It argues that the conflict between the judiciary and the SS was not a conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as existing accounts claim. Rather, it was a power struggle for jurisdiction over the camps. Concentration camp authorities covered up the murders of prisoners as suicides to prevent judicial investigations. This article also looks at actual suicides in the pre-war camps, to highlight individual inmates’ reactions to life within the camps. The article concludes that the history of the concentration camps needs to be firmly integrated into the history of nazi terror and the Third Reich.

scholarly journals Share of death: Care crosses camp

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 629-648
Author(s):  
Georgios Tsagdis
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Total Power ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Death Care

The essay thematises the question of care in conditions of total power - not merely extra muros, in the everyday life of the Third Reich, but in its most radical articulation, the concentration camp. Drawing inspiration from Todorov?s work, the essay engages with Levinas, Agamben, Derrida and Nancy, to investigate Heidegger?s determination of Dasein?s horizon through a solitary confrontation with death. Drawing extensively on primary testimonies, the essay shows that when the enclosure of the camp became the Da of existence, care assumed a radical significance as the link between the death of another and the death of oneself. In the face of an apparatus of total power and its attempt to individuate and isolate death, the sharing of death in the figure of care remained one?s most inalienable act of resistance and the last means to hold on to death as something that could be truly one?s own.

scholarly journals “… and he flew out of the window on a wooden spoon”

2007 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Gaby Thomson-Wohlgemuth
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
The Third ◽  
East German ◽  
The Third Reich

Abstract Translation may be viewed in part as a transfer of cultural elements from one text to another and, under certain circumstances, this may occur between texts written in the same language. This is indeed the situation researchers find when analysing the early East German versions of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales and comparing them with their (same language) originals. East Germany was a country with a mission to overcome capitalist thinking and to create a new kind of society. Motivated by this, the establishment permitted only certain kinds of texts to reach their audiences. One of the genres vehemently debated in the early days was fairy tales and particularly so the Grimms’ tales due to their high standing in the Third Reich. This article explores the first ‘translations’ of the Grimms’ fairy tales in East Germany, investigating elements that were regarded as ideologically valuable and hence emphasized in the texts and those that were deemed harmful to a socialist education and hence modified.

The Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

1994 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-459
Author(s):  
Andrew Chandler
Keyword(s):  
Air Force ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Secret Agent

Early in April 1945 a little collection of political prisoners, including a British secret agent, a Russian air force officer and a German general, were driven by their guards across the diminishing face of the Third Reich. Among them was the thirty-nine year old theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was curious company for a German pastor. Bonhoeffer had joined the group at Buchenwald concentration camp on 7 February. In April he and his new friends were moved to Regensburg, and from there to Schönberg. On 8 April 1945 Bonhoeffer was abruptly separated from the other prisoners. As he was about to leave, he turned to the British agent, Captain Payne Best, and said a few words. The next day he was hanged at Flossenburg with the former head of German Military Intelligence, Admiral Canaris, and Colonel Hans Oster. An SS doctor saw the execution, and was struck by the religious devotion, and the spiritual trust, of the victim.

scholarly journals Turn the pain and affliction into thinking about the beauty

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-560
Author(s):  
Bogusława Filipowicz
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Teaching Staff ◽  
Female Prisoners ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
The Third ◽  
Female Teachers ◽  
Medical Experiments ◽  
War Memories ◽  
The Third Reich

Abstract: The article reflects on the importance of opposing Polish women - prisoners of the German Nazi concentration camp FKL Ravensbrück - to the practices of the German authorities (guards and medical staff of this camp) used against prisoners. One of the forms of opposing the totalitarianism of the Third Reich was secret teaching. At FKL Ravensbrück, female teachers taught fellow prisoners - “the rabbits”. This term was used to describe the women who underwent medical experiments in the camp: 74 Polish women and 12 women of other nationalities. Professor Karolina Lanckorońska found herself in the camp's conspiratorial teaching staff. The source base for the analysis are the war memories of female prisoners, including Dr. Wanda Półtawska and Dr. Urszula Wińska. The summary shows the issue of the protection of values by people subjected - against their will - to life in extreme conditions.  

EXPLAINING THE THIRD REICH: ETHICS, BELIEFS, INTERESTS

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEVIN O. PENDAS
Keyword(s):  
Recent Literature ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Central Characteristic ◽  
The Third Reich

In recent years, the historiography of Nazi Germany has taken what Neil Gregor has called a “voluntarist turn.” By this, Gregor means that the recent literature on Nazi Germany has emphasized “that the panoply of organizations actively involved in occupation and murder, the number of German men and women who actively participated in these crimes, and the range of places in which they committed them, was much, much greater than has hitherto been acknowledged.” In the first instance this voluntarist turn has meant an increased stress on the centrality of Nazi criminality and atrocity to the regime, not as one feature, but as the central characteristic, of the Third Reich. Alongside this, however, has come an increased insistence that these criminal policies were both widely known at the time and broadly popular among Germans. As Saul Friedländer has put it, “the everyday involvement of the population with the regime was far deeper than has long been assumed, due to the widespread knowledge and passive acceptance of the crimes, as well as the crassest profit derived from them.” In short, then, the most recent trend among historians of the Third Reich is to insist that people believed in the Nazi project, including its criminal aspects.

East German Higher Education Policies and Student Resistance, 1945–1948

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Connelly
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Political ◽  
Student Resistance ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
Higher Education Policies ◽  
East German ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Disproportionate Number ◽  
Socialist Unity

Those who opposed Communist rule in East Germany often did so because Communism in practice strongly reminded them of the fascism they had experienced in the Third Reich. The new East German regime was also one that attempted total control of people's lives; therefore it became natural to describe it as totalitär. Most sensitive to the similarities between the old and new regimes were university students. They displayed stronger direct opposition to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in the years from 1946–1949 than any other social group. This is reflected in the political battles that were fought in universities during these years, leading to SED election failures in the elections of the postwar years: 1946/47 and late 1947. The latter were the last freely contested elections in East Germany until 1989. It is also reflected in the disproportionate number of students arrested by Soviet and East German authorities in the early postwar years.

Placement and Displacement

2019 ◽  
pp. 12-37
Author(s):  
Emily Richmond Pollock
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
The West ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Third ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Third Reich

This chapter explores the historical and institutional basis for the West German renewal of opera in the postwar period. The chapter presents narratives of individuals involved in the creation of opera to contextualize opera’s restoration after 1945. Significant personnel continuity in the operatic ecosystem before, during, and after the Third Reich meant that the postwar opera industry was populated by men and women whose recent experiences included National Socialist ideology, military service, Allied bombing, the loss of family members, displacement, hunger, forced labor, imprisonment, and denazification. The chapter also sketches the institutional basis of contemporary opera, discussing seven opera companies and surveying the position of new and recent works within the postwar repertoire. From this survey, we see how the production of new operas enhanced companies’ prestige and was motivated by a perceived duty to promote modern composers, to challenge audiences, and to advance opera as a living art form.

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