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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (November 2004)
Christel Weiss Brandenburg. _Ruined by the Reich: Memoir of an East
Prussian Family, 1916-1945_. Jefferson and London: McFarland and Co, 2003.
vi + 218 pp. Notes, index. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 0-7864-1615-7.
Reviewed for H-German by Stefan Gunther <sgunther@jhu.edu>, Advanced
Academic Programs, Johns Hopkins University
Too Close for Comfort
A casual Google search with the search terms "memoir" and "Nazi Germany"
renders about 19,000 returns--a result that speaks to our long-standing
desire to explicate the atrocities of Nazi Germany in general and a more
recent, and, it seems, an increasingly more urgent, concern with the fate
of individuals (both perpetrators and victims) whose lives intertwined
with those horrors. We have come a long way from the time, up until the
Eichmann trials, when the memoirs of Holocaust survivors constituted the
overwhelming majority of first-person narratives about the Holocaust and
Nazi Germany.
An emerging sub-genre among WWII memoirs is that which seeks to
demonstrate that at least some Germans were among the victims, if not of
the Nazis, then of the Allied reaction unleashed by German aggression.
Most notably, in Germany itself they contribute to a larger body of
literature that has been at the heart of a discussion about German
victimhood during World War II. Beginning with W. G. Sebald's _On the
Natural History of Destruction_ (published as _Luftkrieg und Literatur_ in
Germany in 1999), which marveled at what Sebald saw as the unwillingness
of German literature after WWII to reflect the war's effect on Germany and
Germans, a debate has arisen that has been discussing questions that up to
that point had been relegated to the rhetorical domain of the far right
and the neo-Nazis.
Asking questions about the putative victimization of German civilians by
Allied bombardments (explored in Joerg Friedrich's _Der Brand_) and the
expulsion of populations from the eastern reaches of the _Reich_ (the
backdrop for Guenter Grass's _Crabwalk_) has violated a German taboo that
had been operative for almost sixty years: in the face of the atrocities
Germany visited on its victims, talking of German victims would constitute
a relativization of German crimes. When the subject did arise, it was in
the context of far-right arguments, as Ian Buruma notes: "German
victimhood--of allied bombs, or ethnic cleansing in Poland and
Czechoslovakia--has been dwelled upon for years by rightwing revanchists,
and self-pitying nationalists. Rancid little papers like the
_National-Zeitung_ specialise in articles about alleged allied war
crimes."[1] While Friedrich's book was serialized in the populist German
daily _Bild_, it would be, it seems to me, a misreading to attribute
purely apologetic tendencies to the books mentioned; they do not necessarily
seek to even the scales of historical cuplability, nor do they routinely
ignore the chronological and causative logic of German crimes causing the
Allied response. Typically, the Nazi atrocities form an indelible
backdrop to the events desrcibed, and the notion, expressed by Grass, that
German suffering during WWII needs to be addressed in order to wrest this
discourse from those intent on relativizing is a laudable, albeit
problematic, one.[2]
Where then, does a memoir like Brandenburg's fall in the discussion about
guilt, suffering and relativizing? As is likely for a first-person
account, _Ruined by the Reich_ does not rise to the same level of
complicated cogitation the books quoted above display. The book starts
off with a rambling introduction by Daniel Laing who alternates between
intentionalist readings of Nazi history and unawareness of recent
scholarship about Nazi Germany. ("When the Fuehrer's dictates were passed
down the chain of command [in the Wehrmacht], there was little choice but
to obey without question" [p. 4]; "In many ways Nazi fascism was modeled
after Stalin's form of bloody communism" [p. 5].) Brandenburg's treatment
does occasionally reflect an understanding of the ultimate causes for the
author's family's suffering (namely German aggression against the Soviet
Union), but primarily attempts to portray this suffering through the eyes
of the author's younger, uncomprehending self (whose contemporary narrator
version does, however, occupy a rhetorical position in the "German
suffering" debate--see below).
Brandenburg structures her account chronologically; the rhetorical thrust
of her argument becomes evident at the end of chapter 1, which covers the
final years of WWI. Not taking into account much recent scholarship by
Christopher Browning and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Brandenburg argues that
"a true conspiracy against the weak [Weimar] democracy was contrived in a
smoky beer-graden by angry men, led by this tee-totaling fanatic [Hitler]"
(p. 18). She further draws a distinction between the Nazis and "peaceful,
law-abiding German families" (p. 18)--clearly, we are here thrown back to
arguments that dominated much outdated scholarship about the Third Reich,
[in this case] to the one about decent Germans being led astray by the
Nazis.
Brandenburg squarely locates her own family within the camp of "peaceful"
Germans when she claims that "the teachings of Christ and the Ten
Commandments continued to mean far more to my parents than any of
Goebbel's [sic] propaganda statements" (p. 40). Despite this professed
distance from Nazi ideology, this narrative occasionally still finds
itself within the thrall of what it explicitly rejects. When covering the
invasion of France, the narrator feels compelled to mention that "what
started as grudging acceptance by the pragmatic French eventually turned
into outright collaboration.... As well, many of their young women
developed dangerous liaisons with our handsome spirited soldiers" (p. 51).
No mention is made of the French Resistance, nor does the author appear
intent on maintaining a critical distance to the rhetoric of adulation for
the Wehrmacht, a position that should have become untenable after the
_Wehrmachtsausstellung_. (This position is reiterated when, during the
chapter on the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht is contrasted
with "the racist occupation forces who followed the army" [p. 64].)
Brandenburg's description of the terror brought to the Reich by the
advancing Red Army is harrowing and sobering; her account clearly is
better suited to describing what befell her family directly than to
pondering the intricacies of historical developments. Even so, the
emotional impact for the reader of how her family suffered is once
more qualified by phrases that seem to question her ultimate
distance from racist (and Nazi) rhetoric. Decribing Russian soldiers as
"animals" (p. 141) and referring to "Prussia's ancient, feared enemies,
Cossacks, Tartars, and Mongol tribesmen" (p. 155) hews uncomfortably
close to the ideology the author purports to disavow.
This tendency connects with a penchant for exaggeration when German
suffering is concerned: for instance, the author claims that the "Allied
firestorm" that incinerated Hamburg caused the death of "hundreds of
thousands of civilians" (p. 188), when most historians tally the total
victims of "Operation Gomorrha" (the July 25, 1943 bombing raid) at about
18,000. Brandenburg also muses that "perhaps whatever terrible things had
happened [in POW camps] in occupied Germany could also [like the Germans
intended for their crimes] have been hidden from the rest of the world"
(p. 201).
Without, it seems, an intent to sound willfully incendiary, the author,
through her rhetoric and exaggerations, falls short of the desirable goal of
locating the suffering of German civilians within the overall context of the
war of aggression begun by Nazi Germany. Instead, her account lacks the
proportionality necessarily to discuss soberly how and why German
civilians suffered. In addition, this text could have used a more
thorough editor: it is replete with misspellings and grammatical problems.
As mentioned before, applying the rigorous standards of historiography to
a memoir may not be fair; however, an awareness by Brandenburg of the
epistemology of memoirs would not have been misplaced. After all, "no
matter how successful we may believe ourselves to be in 'explaining' the
course of our own histories, the 'interpretive' dimension of the venture
remains unsurpassable."[3]
Notes
[1]. Ian Buruma, "Germany's Unmourned Victims.," _The Guardian Unlimited_,
online, http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,847866,00.html .
[2]. Alan Riding, "Guenter Grass Worries about the Effects of War, Then
and Now," _The New York Times_, online,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/books/08GRAS.html .
[3]. Mark Freeman, _Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative_
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 119.
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