A Return to Germany

The journey that I am making is by no means comprehensive in the sense of visiting the entire terrain of the Holocaust or of the reign of the Nazis. My time and means absolutely preclude such a trip. Rather I am venturing into a small circle of places from which the murder of Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, black people, the disabled, and other “undesirables,” as well as the subjugation of the native populations east of Germany to the level of slave labourers, were planned and facilitated. Central to this organization was Berlin. Over the past several years I have read and enjoyed a number of novels in which Berlin figures because of its centrality during the “Cold War” between the West and the USSR that dominated global relations following WWII. In April 1945 Berlin was overrun by the Soviet army; Hitler committed suicide in his bunker; and, Germany surrendered. According to an agreement made among the Allies prior to these events, Berlin was divided into four spheres of control: Soviet, American, British, and French. The country itself quickly settled into two separate entities becoming what we then called East and West Germany. As Berlin is situated in the eastern part of the country it fell within the Soviet-held region of Eastern Germany despite its division among the powers. It was an island, an anomaly in otherwise clearly delineated political spheres. Over the next four and a half decades which preceded the collapse of the USSR and the destruction of the infamous Berlin Wall, relations among the controlling powers shifted, forming in the city itself a kind of microcosm of global political dynamics.

The four spheres of control became two: Soviet-held East Berlin and an amalgamated West Berlin, held and protected especially by the post-WWII powerhouse, the USA. Reading in these stories about the mechanics and cultures of spying and the ideologies of the major “Cold War” antagonists, I found myself drawn into an interest in Berlin itself. In time this became a desire to visit and explore its present and past, an inclination that greatly surprised me due to my earlier sense of revulsion from all things German. I had been in Germany only once before, in 1988, while on a bus tour of Western Europe with my then 11 year old daughter, Elizabeth. It was a brief and entirely tourist-type of visit. I believe that we were only there for one night, staying at an inn near Heidelberg, visiting the cathedral in Cologne, and having a two hour boat ride on the Rhine. I found just being in the country difficult – not something that I had considered when arranging for our travel. I was constantly aware despite the prosperity and the loveliness of the scenery especially along the Rhine, that I was visiting places where terrible, almost unimaginable atrocities had occurred just decades earlier. I felt oppressed by this awareness and was unable to enjoy any aspect of the country. Since, when considering places to travel and explore, I have never envisioned going to Germany again.

Germans themselves, primarily West Germans prior to the re-unification of the country, have had to gradually acknowledge and come to terms with their own history in the 20th century. This is an on-going process that was facilitated by the entry of their country into the political hub of the USA in post war Western Europe and by the passage of time. Traumatized by the carnage inflicted on their own homeland and by the failure of the promised millennium, most wanted to simply put the near past behind them and work toward a restoration of “normality” in domestic and political spheres. There was wide spread denial of the reality of the mass murders conducted by German troops, in particular by the SS and their special killing squads. A friend who as a child and adolescent lived in Germany until 1953 says that the subject of Jews during that period was taboo in polite society and in his school. At home his mother would rail against the Jews and the Russians as the causes of her problems. Over time, however, questions that refused to go away, brought forward by German and international critics of the period as well as by their own children, forced many toward a deepening acknowledgement of the broad range of complicities with the Nazi regime. Under their Soviet-controlled government Eastern Germans were allowed a different view of the events of the war period. According to this version there were “bad people,” the fascists, the Nazis, who perpetrated all of the evils of the war and of the Holocaust. The German people as a whole knew nothing of these things and were basically blameless. Establishing relations with their new “partners,” i.e., subject states, required a condemnation of the Nazi perpetrators but an acceptance of the people themselves. This reading allowed a level of complacence in Germans in the east with respect to their past that continued to the re-unification.

A text central to my preparation for my journey was Martin Gilbert's Atlas of the Holocaust. In the next several posts I will write of his research and findings.