We are delighted to announce that the second issue of the Close Encounters in War Journal has been published online. This issue marks the real start of our project and is devoted to a topic that seemed relevant to us both for its historical meaning and its topicality. In fact, the issue hosts five contributions by authors who consider the theme of close encounters, displacement and war from a great variety of angles and in different disciplines.
Displacement and forced migration represent some of the most worrying issues of the contemporary world: according to data published by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) there are currently 70.8 million forced migrants globally (Figures at a Glance, 2019) and its reports also show that wars, persecutions, violence and human rights violations are among the main causes of current forced migrations. The current crisis is unprecedented and calls for a deep reflection on how to face its urgency, particularly in relation to the situation of the people involved and the humanitarian emergency. In this special issue we look at displacement and forced migration caused by war and conflict in the contemporary era, with a particular focus on the challenges met by those who experienced it.
The five articles collected in the present issue cover a number of case-studies of displacement that vary as to geographical and chronological context, methodological approach, and specific disciplinary field, as far as they range from oral history to cultural history, and cultural studies.
The author of the first contribution, Christoph Declercq, focuses on the “odd case” of Belgian refugees in the United Kingdom during WW1, a small community of displaced people who were warmly welcomed and rather well absorbed in the British daily life, but who were soon after their repatriation forgotten. As Declercq claims, “the destitute Belgians had been used as a tool of warfare and when the war was finally over, those tools were hastily discarded, and all the stories that came with them suppressed” (infra, p. 14), which was one of the reasons why this group of displaced people remained so long forgotten by historians. Actually, as the author shows, the story of this group was more complex than a simple mass movement from Belgium to UK, and the figures of the mobility are therefore analysed thoroughly in order to understand what actual perception the Britons had of this phenomenon of displacement.
In the second article, Simona Tobia presents a number of case-studies deriving from oral history interviews that cover the displacement of Jewish Europeans fleeing from Nazi Germany to the United States before and during WW2, facing very challenging experiences of adaptation and integration. The author opens her article by discussing a number of methodological issues of oral history in order to theoretically frame her work and the use she makes of her sources. Tobia’s main concern is the emotional impact that displacement has on those who experience it, which often affects their ability to remember and share effectively the most traumatic aspects of their journey. She therefore claims that any oral history of displacement must take into account not only the cultural issues related to oral narrative but also the emotional impact of being displaced in terms of identity-building and memory, because “the strategies of memory composure that the narrators in these case studies used revolve around cultural knowledge, on the one hand, and emotions and feelings, on the other” (infra, p. 44).
The author of the third article, Barbara Krasner, touches upon another rather neglected scenario of displacement, namely that of Polish citizens who were caught between Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes in 1939, when Poland was invaded by the Wehrmacht from the west and by the Red Army from the east. This form of displacement concerned above all the Jewish population of the town of Ostrova, who found themselves trapped between two invaders who equally threatened their survival. Thus, “the decision to cross or not cross the border in the first three months of Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland had longer-term consequences for the Jews of Ostrova” (infra, p. 63), which reminds us that displacement is a multi-faceted phenomenon that can be very different from case to case. Displacement can turn itself into a deadly condition for those groups of people that for racial, ethnic, religious or political reasons are particularly exposed to persecution both in the place they flee from and in those they try to enter.
The fourth article by Elisheva Perelman takes us in Japan in 1945, when the country is occupied by the American troops and the encounter between the soldiers and the civilians gives birth to the need for normalizing gendered relationships between America and Japan. To cover this topic, Perelman chooses to focus on a well-known post-war product of American pop culture, i.e. the cartoon Babysan, first published in 1951 and depicting the regime of occupation in a palatable way, which means in a sexually hegemonized way. Babysan made thus an ideal ethnographic object through which the Americans could look at defeated and occupied Japan in terms of naivety and objectification. Perleman also shows that the experience of displacement can occur without being removed from one’s own place. Babysan depicts a culture that has been displaced by the very glance that the occupiers have cast on it. As a “symbol of occupation and subjugation, of racism and misogyny” (infra, p. 81), Babysan reveals much about the complex reality of displacement in war.
The fifth and last article considers a more recent scenario, i.e. the worldwide diaspora of Somali citizens in the wake of the Somali civil war. Natoschia Scruggs takes into account testimonies of Somali displaced people resident in the United States, some of whom, though, have had previous experience of displacement in Europe and other countries in Africa or the Middle East. Once again, this article shows that displacement triggers a long chain of identity-related issues in those who are involved, in particular for people coming from cultural milieus where “clan affiliation and one’s immediate family are significant sources of personal identity and security” (infra, p. 92). What emerges is that generalisation is not useful when one attempts to understand the impact of displacement on such aspects as identity-building, self-perception, or social relationships, which are largely dependent on the cultural milieu of origin.We wish to extend a warm thank you to all the people who work with us to realize this project: our Editorial Board, the many scholars who accept to act as peer reviewers, and all those who have supported our project with counsel, criticism and constructive dialogue. And above all, the contributors, who have allowed us the privilege to read and publish their excellent academic work.
Nuto Revelli’s Il disperso di Marburg after 25 years. Marburg, July 18, 2019
Nuto Revelli.
Nuto Revelli
(Cuneo 1919-2004) was an officer of the Italian Royal Army and fought in Russia
in 1942-1943. Following the armistice of September 8, 1943 between Italy and
the Allies, Revelli joined the anti-fascist partisan groups and fought as
commander of the 4th GL Band (later renamed “Carlo Rosselli”
Brigade) until the liberation of Italy in April 1945. The experience of war engendered
deep hatred against the Germans, which Revelli had met on the Russian front as
allies and then as enemies in the mountains of his region (Piedmont). For
decades this hatred remained unchanged and the intensity of such feeling was
captured in the first books that Revelli published in the post-war period, Mai
tardi (1946 and then republished in 1967) and La guerra dei poveri (1962).
In these books the Germans are represented as cruel beasts, enemies to hate and
despise.
In the 1980s,
while collecting oral accounts from peasants in the Alpine valleys of Piedmont,
Revelli heard from a former partisan a strange war story, the legend of a
German officer who rode off in the countryside and who was kind to the local
inhabitants and children, a peaceful and apparently “good” man. One day of 1944
this man disappeared, possibly killed in an ambush of partisans, and since then
no one knew anymore about him. This legend disturbed Revelli because it challenged
his memories of war and seemed too lenient to be true. Nevertheless, it was the
story of a missing-in-action soldier. The memory of soldiers missing in Russia
during the retreat from the Don River had tormented Revelli since the end of
the war. A missing soldier, the writer said, is the cruellest legacy of any
war.
Thus, he decided
to engage in the search for the identity of this missing man, and after ten
years of work, oral interviews with witnesses and research in German military
archives, he succeeded. He discovered that the missing man was a 23-year-old
German officer, a student who had not joined the National Socialist Party, who was
not enthusiastic about the war and had already lost his older brother in
Russia. A young man like so many others, who had been involved into the
enormity of the war and had been overwhelmed by a cruel fate.
Fifty years after the war, Revelli thus found the way to reconcile with the hated enemy through a historical quest that in the end also turned out to be an experience of friendship, as far as he befriended the German historian Christoph Schminck-Gustavus, who remained close to Revelli. And, above all, this was a story of reconciliation with the human side of the so-called enemy. The book that tells this story, Il disperso di Marburg, was published in 1994 and for the occasion Revelli visited the German town of Marburg where Rudolf Knaut, the missing officer, was born. This year, on July 18, Marburg hosted an event dedicated to Revelli and to Il disperso di Marburg to celebrate the centenary of the writer’s birth (July 21). Gianluca Cinelli gave two lectures at the Institut für romanische Philologie at Philipps-Universität Marburg and at the Technologie- und Tagungszentrum in the presence of a large audience.
Das Bild des italienischen Soldaten im deutschsprachigen Diskurs über die Vergangenheitsverwaltung, in Aufgeschlossene Beziehungen. Deutschland und Italien im transkulturellen Dialog. Literatur, Film, Medien, ed. by Tabea Meineke, Anne-Rose Meyer-Eisenhut, Stephanie Neu-Wendel and Eugenio Spedicato, Würzburg, Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2019, 67-80
Among the contributions appeared in the book Aufgeschlossene Beziehungen (Open-minded Relationships), devoted to the exploration of the way in which the Italian and German cultures have built their transcultural dialogue since WW2, one chapter by Gianluca Cinelli investigates how German post-war narratives, both literary and historical, represented the Italian soldiers in a very negative way, thus paving the way to the consolidation of an old anti-Italian prejudice spread all over Germany. The German combatants came across the Italians during WW2 as allies between 1940 and September 8, 1943, when Italy surrendered to the Allies. What emerges from this contribution is that little attention has been paid in Germany to this topic. Nonetheless, Italian soldiers were represented as lazy and unfit for war, unworthy in battle and unreliable as allies, cowardly and too soft to endure the hardship of modern warfare. And even worse, they were depicted as traitors following Italy’s withdrawal from the conflict in 1943, after which a remarkable number of Italians began to fight against the Germans as partisans.
The chapter builds on historical and literary sources, by combining the testimonies of former German cambatants (from privates of the Afrikakorp to memoirs of such Whermacht higher officers as Rommel or Kesselring) with historic evidence collected by mainly German scholars (from Hammerman to Klinkhammer and Schlemmer). The main thesis of the chapter consists in claiming that the anti-Italian prejudice largely depended on the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda and on the circulation of a number of testimonies that depicted the Italians as inferiors not only as for their military virtues but also on a racial basis. In the end, only the massive integration of Italian immigrants starting from the 1950s began to challenge the dominant stereotype and to rehabilitate the memory of the former allies-and-enemies as human beings and fellow citizens.
The Oresteia
by Aeschylus, like every Greek tragic trilogy, represents a series of
catastrophes and grieves provoked by the violent feeling of revenge that
prevents reason from evaluating the best actions to take. Orestes is
hunted and tormented by the Erinyes because he killed his mother, who
assassinated her husband, who originally sacrificed their daughter
Iphigenia, Orestes’ sister.
In
the last tragedy of the trilogy, however, a fundamental event happens:
Athena, goddess of reason and justice, enters the scene as the judge of a
regular process, during which a jury composed by twelve Athenians and
the goddess herself has to judge whether to condemn or to absolve
Orestes and therefore whether to stop the Erinyes hunting him. Orestes
is eventually absolved and the long chain of sufferings and grieves is
broken: the Erinyes are transmuted into Eumenides and Orestes, the last
descendant of Agamemnon’s dynasty, finds peace.
The
importance of this myth lies on the fact that it represents the passage
from the habit of perpetuating the state of conflict throughout the
violent reaction of revenge, which derives from the incapacity to limit
the feeling of hatred, to the habit of mitigating the natural emotional
reactions of hatred, violence, and resentment throughout rational
thinking.
The
myth of Orestes brings us to reflect on a number of fundamental aspects
of the human character and on the building of our social habits, based
on the capacity of feeling emotions and empathy in a balanced way,
always in combination with the critical thinking of reason.
What
can one do in the case of suffering from violence, or of having
witnessed or perpetrated violent actions? In the ancient Greek society,
violence (bia) was known as
the mother of tyranny and defeat, while on the opposite end there was
democracy, viz. a society based on free discussion and exchange of
opinions. However, the statement according to which violence brings violence
is only partially true. Any violent act begets revenge when the agent
believes that only by means of punishment grounded on the principle of an eye for an eye it is possible to act by justice and to restore peace. These ethical reflections on the Greek myth are once more expressed in Land of Mine, a historical movie from 2015, directed by Martin Zandvliet and nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards in 2017.
After
the surrender of Nazi Germany, the disposal of over two million
anti-personnel mines all along the Danish beaches immediately started.
German POWs were used for this dangerous work, many of whom were just
boys, the same ones that the Nazi regime had sent to war after the
Wehrmacht’s decimation.
At
the beginning of the movie, Sergeant Rasmussen savagely beats up one
German prisoner who is strongly holding the Danish flag, probably stolen
and kept as an ironic trophy. In order to understand this emotional
reaction, it is necessary to take into account the fact that at the end
of every war, the most common feelings toward the enemy army, guilty of
horrible crimes and atrocities, are hatred, resentment and the desire of
revenge. These feelings prevent empathy, compassions and sympathy for
prisoners to raise and consequently hinder the possibility to attribute
some value to their lives. At the beginning of the story, Sergeant
Rasmussen, appointed to lead a team of prisoners for clearing an area of
Danish beaches, is entirely dominated by these feelings as well as
Lieutenant Ebbe, who manifests a strong rancour and a firm will to take
revenge. However, being in daily contact with young prisoners, Rasmussen
notices that his team is formed by boys who call their own mother when
they feel pain and fear. Slowly, as Rasmussen grows aware of the
situation, his feelings change and his hatred, under the control of
critical reflection, turns into compassion. This allows him to act
wisely and prevents him from committing injustices in turn. Rasmussen,
insofar as Lieutenant Ebbe told him, promises his boys that once the
clearing is finished they will go home. Without asking for
authorisation, because his prisoners had not been eating for days, he
personally brings them some food taken from the military depot and
decides to relieve them from work on a Sunday so they can enjoy a
football game. The peak of this empathic feeling is reached when
Rasmussen provides moral support to one of his boys, who has just lost
his twin because of an explosion. It is undeniable that many Nazi soldiers that
many Nazi soldiers never had similar behaviours and that they almost
never developed a thought based on mercy and empathy, which permits us
to see ourselves mirrored in the others. The irrational and uncritical
acceptance of the false beliefs promulgated by Nazi propaganda (like
every uncritical acceptance of populist discourses) originated from the
fear that impels to look for strong certainties that might protect the
individual (or at least give an illusion of protection) as a part of a
group, even if this happens to the detriment of freedom of thought and
agency.
The
characters of the movie, moreover, are very young boys educated under
Nazism. Forged according to the principles of hatred, anti-Semitism,
violence and the crazy myths of the purity and supremacy of the Arian
race, the generations of the 1920s and 1930s developed their own image
of the world founded on the emotion of fear and on the feeling of hatred
against diversity: a concept of identity, in other words, which
contemplates alterity as something potentially dangerous, since the
other, being a stranger, is considered as a potential threat.
Hatred
generates hatred. There are two possible behavioural solutions for
Rasmussen: to take revenge on his prisoners for the evil produced by the
Nazi ideology that had been feeding them since they were born; or to
listen to his own feelings and reason, and to show them a different way
of life, built on humanity and wisdom. Rasmussen’s wisdom becomes
evident during the football game, when his dog gets killed by a missed
hidden mine which had remained undisposed. Suffering from the pain for
the death of his dog, after his first reaction of fury – the same he
felt when he beat up a prisoner at the beginning of the movie –
Rasmussen is able to understand that the prisoners had not premeditated
to let mines hidden in the sand and that it was just a human mistake.
Therefore, he can regain control over his own emotions and eventually
bring his duty to completion, viz. he grants the safety of the beach: he
decides that the prisoners will check the safety of the ground by
walking in a row all over the beach, but he does not take revenge or
punish them. He does not allow hatred to take over reason and justice.
Rasmussen
chooses, therefore, the second solution and thanks to his empathic and
rational behaviour he manages to provide the young prisoners with a new
perspective over life because he donates them an example of something
they have not yet experienced: the feeling of justice that paves the way
to democracy. In fact, as opposed to the violence of dictatorship,
democracy expects the existence of disputes, insofar as without
diversity there would never be changes or evolution. Democracy does not
mean simply putting the city government in the hands of the population:
this is, indeed, extremely problematic because the judgment of the
individual – who is part of a group – is influenced by rhetoric. The
propagandistic use of rhetoric is aimed at enhancing the passions in the
audience as to convey the general opinion toward a precise direction;
it is also aimed at diminishing the presence of a rational reflection
through which it is possible to see the errors of argumentation and to
eradicate prejudices, false beliefs and erroneous opinions. That
who does not develop such critical capacity risks having his-her
emotions manipulated and, therefore, emitting erroneous judgments. When
one is not aware of the importance and dangerousness of passions, it is
possible that one easily listens to and accepts the absurd
argumentations of propaganda, by approving and backing dictatorship and
consequently by renouncing freedom. By thinking on the power of
propaganda, Jaspers writes that the conflict of information, the
prohibition of free public discussion and finally the repetition of
falsehood might turn a community into an unresponsive dull mass (Karl
Jaspers, Vernunft und Widervernunft in unserer Zeit,
München, Piper, 1950). When the human being does not act like a
thinking individual, he falls in the trap of sophists whom Jaspers calls
the sorcerers, the enchanters that create illusion by promising knowledge and by claiming to act for the good of the others (Jaspers).
Such
“sorcerers” fight reason with the weapon of “anti-reason”, which
requires the enchanter’s and the enchanted audience’s cooperation: the
mediocre and undecided people who legitimate anti-reason by believing in
its absurdity and by adopting the rhetoric of scientific objectivity
(Jaspers).
Democracy,
then, means that everyone should develop critical capacity to have a
balanced interaction with their emotions, which are necessary for
judgment, without letting them prevail over reason. In this way, it is
possible within a group to compare different opinions based on knowledge
and on rational and critical evaluation, which time after time permits
to make decisions for the sake of social equilibrium.
This
is what Rasmussen does. Even if he is blinded by hatred and pain, he is
able to find an emotional balance between the feeling of grudge against
the prisoners and that of compassion towards the young men. Eventually,
reason prevails: it is right to punish those who are guilty of the evil
they have perpetrated, but that it would be wrong to take revenge: this
rational behaviour permits to break the same closed circle that
reproduces the violence in the Oresteia.
Against
the will of Lieutenant Ebbe, who instead of sending the young prisoners
home, after the clearing is finished, assigns them to clear another
beach, a much more dangerous one, therefore condemning them to death.
Rasmussen decides to keep to his promise; he goes and picks them up with
a truck and drives them a few metres away from the border with Germany,
where he sets them free. By doing so, he prevents the perpetuation of
the chain of hatred, which characterises Orestes’s myth according to
which the victims sooner or later become oppressors, and prevents his
own feeling of hatred from causing him to act unfairly.
The
movie shows that the ethical sentiment depends on the individual and
does not concern complying with laws and rules; these are fundamental
for organising societies but, being made by human beings, can be unjust
or wrong. Therefore, one must develop critical thought, which enables to
judge and act well. The only possibility for the young prisoners to
develop this feeling, in order to be rescued from an unjust system, is
to develop the maturity to understand that they were educated to hate
and to obey blindly. In other words, only by letting them modify and
improve the consciousness of themselves and others, to develop a better
conception of life through the experience of diversity and, above all,
of justice, the young prisoners have a possibility to direct their lives
toward wisdom.
On
22nd June 1941, the German armies overcame the Russian resistance on
the river Bug and started to penetrate in depth in Russia in a drunken
state of exaltation. It was the triumph of the Blitzkrieg
which many generals considered the only true form of military art,
according to the legacy of Clausewitz and Schlieffen: the dimension of
the attack was such that the commanders ignored what other units were
doing, and the common motto was “forward, no matter what the others do”,
in order to annihilate the enemy before this could strike back. For
many a soldier this unstoppable advance was just a leap into the void,
because after leaving the last villages of the Reich
they found themselves alone in the vastness of an unknown land. Erich
Kern remembers that people in Silesia greeted the marching troops in
frenzy: old veterans of the Great War advised about the way to
annihilate Cossacks and Russian infantry, women threw flowers and the
girls kissed the soldiers and gave cigarettes and food. Nonetheless,
smoke on the horizon and the feeble thunder of guns began to shake the
hearts.
The
encounter with war was, according to published memoirs that account for
those events, first of all an exploration of an unknown, hostile land.
The soldier’s life in the very first weeks of the campaign was reduced
to a handful of actions mechanically repeated: advancing, resting,
fighting, again and again, without knowledge of the final destination.
Passing from a victory to another, German soldiers advanced in a state
of exaltation and self-confidence. Thus, the narratives concerning the
first stage of the Operation “Barbarossa” present several
characteristics of romance:
“we were advancing into the gliding day – wrote Erich kern – we kept
going on and on along the road that stretched through a scary land”
(Kern, p. 55). These warriors believed to bear a new order. The “gliding
day” was the time of conquest and self-affirmation, and such an
expression corresponds to that symbolism which Northrop Frye called
“apocalyptic”, typical of high-mimetic romance that narrates the
adventures of heroes and expresses the force of desire through the
archetypes of the journey into a land of foes and dangers, of the fight
with chaos and finally of the apotheosis in victory and triumph. The
exaltation of the hero is one of the main characteristics of the memoirs
of the early stage of the Operation “Barbarossa”, although many a
witness remembers that the endeavour was also fearful and deadly.
The
protagonists of these narratives struggle with the enemy and with the
elements, dust and heath in summer, cold wind and snowstorms in winter.
Operation “Barbarossa” is depicted as a quest for
conquer and domination, as the victory on a bestial enemy and as the
liberation of the world from the deadly Communist menace. The conquerors
often looked at the vanquished with feelings of superiority and pride,
and one of them remembers that the exaltation and the disgust were the
most common emotions in those days, when “one could see everything as if
half-asleep” (Pabst, p. 20). The march into enemy land also brought the
German soldiers to an unexpected encounter with misery and violence:
devastated villages full of dead bodies, churches converted into
hospitals and piles of rotting corpses were the daily “images of horror
and madness” (Pater-Mater, p. 391).
On
the other hand, the steppe is represented as a mysterious and mythical
land: like the sea, it is immense and prompt to suddenly change itself
into a deadly and inhospitable place. The advance into this land is also
an ethnographic and geographical exploration of outer borders between
Europe and Asia, a barbaric and ancestral world of extreme
contradictions, from the unlimited plains to the highest peaks of
Caucasus; from the most advanced industrial area of Donetsk to the deep
poverty of rural population. Eastward of Lemberg, “the last city of
Europe” (Bauer, p. 34), Russia shows a “barbaric beauty” (p. 78) that
almost makes the soldiers forget what they are there for. But war is
inside the landscape, it is its “abuse” (p. 86): every hut and country
house conceals a bunker and although the peaceful peasants look harmless
they are instead partisans and soldiers ready to fight. For some
authors such as Bamm, the penetration into Russia was also a voyage into
myth: when he arrived in the Caucasus, he found out that the most
humble hut of peasants was probably the same as Adam’s nest (Bamm, p.
93). Thus, when he went back to Germany in leave, he described that
journey as Ulysses’ voyage to Ithaca. So far, the German war in Russia
appears as a juvenile and heroic adventure, as the epic of the German
people’s struggle for the conquest of its “vital space”.
Nazi
myths and mythologies, such as the defence of the Arian race and
Western civilization from the Asiatic hordes or the anti-Bolshevik
crusade, permeate these narratives. Some witnesses depict Russia and its
people from the point of view of the fanatical conqueror: the huts with
the straw on the roofs are compared with dogs-lairs and their
inhabitants are described as ragged, dirty beasts (Prüller, p. 84):
The
passive Slav acceptance was annoying to the more agile and questioning
Teuton mind and the ordinary soldiers could not comprehend how human
beings could be so lacking in human dignity or spirit that they could
accept to live in the primitive conditions which were encountered
throughout the conquered regions. In letters, diaries and reports the
German word Sauberkeit (cleanliness) was the most frequently recurring one when the writer dealt with the living conditions of the Russian peasant. (Lucas, p. 17)
Also
in the letters from the front the invasion was initially presented as a
just war waged in self-defence against communism and the
“Judaic-Bolshevik” plot (Buchbender, p. 72).
An NCO wrote on 10th July 1941: “the German people owes a great debt to
our Führer, because if these beasts that here are our enemy only
reached Germany, we would have such a slaughter like the world has never
before experienced” (p. 74). Propaganda imprints letters with its
racist arguments: Russians are called “Reds” and “Judaic-Bolshevik
gang”; Russia is depicted as a miserable, backward land, and the
soldiers portrait themselves as liberators and bearers of civilization
(Golovchansky, pp. 18-19). Soon enough, though, the war became brutal:
“dogs” and “beasts” were among the most common epithets for the enemy,
the metaphor of hunting began to form the core of a new way of
self-representation of the German soldiers, who also had to justify the
daily slaughter of political commissars, POWs, Jews and civilians. The
most fanatical combatants were students, above all those raised as
Catholics. Their first letters describe destroyed churches, ragged young
people who “bear the guilt of Communism” (Schleicher/Walle, p. 181),
and crowds of Russians who greet and cheer the German liberators (p.
182). These “crusaders” glorify the death of their comrades as
martyrdom, which is connected with “heroic death” (Heldentode), “loyalty” (Treue) and “sacrifice” (Opfer) (204). Nonetheless, when the Blitzkrieg failed
in autumn 1941 these champions of the faith vacillate (199), and the
rhetoric of the “crusade” completely disappeared from their letters by
the end of December, when the Wehrmacht was defeated in front of Moscow.
Not
all witness rets in this illusion of the beautiful adventure. The
campaign was not like the former ones in Poland and France: the loss
were high and a general crisis of the Wehrmacht was avoided only by
pouring more and more replacements in the decimated ranks (Alvensleben,
p. 190; Steets, p. 112). Many a veteran who had fought in the Great War
noted that this new conflict was much worse (Keppler, p. 62). The first
harsh impact with such horrifying nature of the war of annihilation
consisted in encountering the huge mass of Soviet POWs, in a scene that
recurs in many a narrative:
Without
exception, they all begged for a scrap of food or a cigarette. They
whined and grovelled about us to wheedle something out of us, they were
like whipped dogs, and it mingled pity and disgust became too much for
us and we did give them something, they would kneel and kiss our hands
and babble words of thanks which must have come from their rich
religious vocabulary, and then we just stood, we simply could not
believe it. These were human beings in which there was no longer any
trace of anything deserving the name human, they were men who really had
turned into animals. We found it nauseating, utterly repellent. (Zieser, pp. 58-59)
The clash with the Red Army is mostly remembered as a struggle with enemies more similar to beasts than to humans:
Kahl
geschorene Asiaten sind unsere Gegner, Menschen fast aus einer anderen
Welt; vorkämpft und trotzig, die Fäuste geballt, liegen sie zahllos im
Tod, furchtlose Soldaten, aber verschlagen und hinterhältig. Sie
schießen noch, wenn wir schon 50 Kilometer weiter sind, aus den
Kornfeldern und Wäldern. Aber man muss einmal vorn bei einem
Infanteriekampf gewesen sein, um das zu kennen, was hier Kampf ist; sich
gegenseitig steigernde Raserei, Gefangene werden nur selten gemacht auf
beiden Seiten. (Pater-Mater, p. 388)
Witnesses mostly pass over war crimes in silence and so does the official documentation (Bartov). Similarly, “the Einsatzgruppen reporters
for the most part did not simply record the killings, but felt the need
to use euphemisms in their report as to cover up the act of murder. In
the same way they always gave ‘reasons’ for their actions in order to
justify them” (Headland, p. 72). Among commanders, General Manstein
wrote in his memoirs Verlorene Siege that the “Kommissarbefehl”
was “non-military” in nature, and for that reason he prescribed his
officer not to carry it out (Manstein, pp. 176-177; see also Guderian,
p. 138). Nonetheless, he ordered on 20th November 1941, to persecute the
Jews, who were accused of being the juncture between the Red Army and
the partisans (Wette, p. 188). It seems less hard to come across some
criticism on war crimes in private writings such as letters (despite
censorship) and diaries.
In
general, the soldiers found it disturbing to show themselves in the
garb of brutal and insensible killers, especially because they were
fighting in a war largely justified by ideological hatred and contempt
for the enemy, as well as by racial prejudice. Self-censorship in
letters – but also in diaries and later on in autobiographical memoirs –
was as a defensive strategy against discouragement, after reality had destroyed
the false perspectives of propaganda. Therefore, shootings, hangings,
deportation, forced labour, mass mortality from starvation and disease
among the Russian POWs hardly make their way into the letters. When
the witnesses wrote about crimes, they often regarded them as something
for which “others” bear responsibility. Peter Bamm, in his memoirs,
calls the SS “the Others” (die Anderen)
to distinguish them from the ordinary (and honourable) German soldier
of the Wehrmacht. In other witnesses, a fortunate rhetorical device
consists in pointing out the “moral dilemma” of military obedience:
If
our unit had been given some hardcore Nazi troops, they would have
received a rough time from the other men. We were patriotic soldiers
fighting for Germany, not a bunch of Nazi brown shirts fighting for
Hitler. Most of the soldiers I knew did not support the Nazi Party, even
if the practical result of our military effort was to maintain the Nazi
regime in power. It is an irresolvable dilemma. When you want to serve
your country, yet oppose its political leadership. (Lubbeck, p. 194)
Also
the extermination of Jews rarely comes into the discourse (especially
in the letters) (Manoscheck; Letzel, p. 203) and it is quite rare to
come across explicit testimonies (Jarausch, pp. 291, 315, 316 and 341;
Hartlaub, p. 73):
Vor
und unter den Bastionen del Flußseite liegt ein altes Werk, das wohl
einst den Dünaübergang sperrte. Und dort unten hat man fünftausend Juden
eingepfercht, Männer, Frauen und Kinder, die, wie es heißt, mit
Abfällen ihre Tage und, wie die Gerüchte gehen, ihre letzten Tage
fristen. Wir sehen sie jeden Tag dort unten auf den Kasemattenhöfen
wimmeln. Ein furchtbares Menschengerücht dringt herauf. Das also ist der
Gestank der Weltgeschichte. […] Sieh dir das mit deinen Augen an: was
dort unten vor sich geht, versteckt und halb unter das Erde, das ist mit
anderem Gesicht, doch ebenso dumpf und verkrochen, zu allen Zeiten
gesehen, sooft Macht, Gewalt und Herrlichkeit über die Erbe rasselten.
Und was tust du, wacker Soldat, da oben auf dem Wall der Zitadelle von
Dünaburg? Du tust, was alle braven Söldner Babylons, alle redlichen
Legionäre Roms in solchen Augenblicken taten: du trittst von einem Fuß
auf den andern, du greifst mit zwei Fingern hinter die Halsbinde, um dir
Luft zu machen. Und schüttest nachher einen Becher Wodka hinunter. Mir
steht der Wodka in diesen Tagen bis zum Hals. (Matthies, p. 19)
From Matthies’ point of view, the German soldier appears as the perpetrator of a crime against mankind: “ich
schäme mich nicht meines Volkes, ich schäme mich nicht meiner Uniform,
aber ich schäme mich, hinter diesem Stacheldraht der Weltgeschichte,
meiner selbst bis in den Grund”
(Matthies, p. 26). It is rare to come across allegations directly
written in diaries or memoirs. Some witnesses refer to crimes by
attributing them to the allied, namely the Rumanians (Keppler, p. 82),
others recall those days by using the rhetoric of the “vagueness”:
Real
poverty was evident everywhere, and it did not need scientific
knowledge to realize that the harassed-looking people were starving en masse.
SS, German Field Police and Polish militia were patrolling the streets,
obviously working closely together and chasing people on wherever they
had collected in groups. Hollow-eyed children, often in rags, came
begging for bread. Not having any on us, we were of course in no
position to give them any, and though we had been told in special little
lectures before we were let out of our train that they were enemy
children, dangerous breeds, some of us found it hard to have to shut our
hearts. Some who still believed in the basics of Christ’s teaching,
must have wondered what had happened. A large part of the population was
Jewish who, we were told, lived together in the poorest part of the
city, the ghetto. The latter was no German creation, it had been set up
by the Polish authorities long ago and walking around the town, we found
that the Poles hated the Jews […]. Many of us had seen the odd Jew
wearing the yellow star in a German city; but this was all so different,
so incomparable in scale, and seeing them walking around in their
abject misery we did not know anymore whether we should hate these
people or feel pity for them. […] When the train later pulled away from
us and we saw the eerie, staring eyes from every one of the passing
openings, many of us felt uncomfortable, if not guilty, but none of us
said anything about the encounter. All of us had heard about
concentration camps, but the generally accepted understanding was that
only anti-social and anti-German elements, like Communists, homosexuals,
gipsies and such like, were being kept in there and forced to do a
decent day’s work for the first time in their lives. Though we were not
far from it, I am sure that most of us at that time had ever heard the
name Auschwitz. (Metelmann, pp. 30-31)
As
far as war crimes represent the darkest side of the German war in
Russia, the witnesses found no better way to deal with this disturbing
experience than understatement: “we knew, but only to a certain
extent…”, “we would have done something about that, but we could not…”,
“we supposed that Lagers existed only to re-educate antisocial
individuals…”, and so on. By pretending to be ignorant or by diverting
their attention from an uncomfortable truth, the witnesses claimed to be
innocent or at least not guilty, insofar as they claimed having fought
honourably for their country and not for the Nazi cause. But one of
them, recalling the image of a Russian child tore in pieces by a grenade
wrote: “though trained to be arrogant and overbearing, I knew I was guilty” (Metelmann, p. 70).
For further reading
U. von Alvensleben, Lauter Abschiede. Tagebuch im Kriege, Frankfurt am Main, Propyläen, 1971
P. Bamm, Die unsichtbare Flagge. Ein Bericht, München, Kösel, 1964
O. Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-45. German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, Basingstoke, Macmillan in association with St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1985
J. M. Bauer, Die Kraniche der Nogaia. Tagebücherblätter aus dem Feldzug im Osten, München, Herbig, 1942
O. Buchbender, and R. Sterz, eds., Das andere Gesicht des Krieges. Deutsche Feldpostbriefe 1939-1945, München, Beck, 1982
W. Chales de Beaulieu, Der Vorstoß der Panzergruppe 4 auf Leningrad – 1941, Neckargemünd, Vowinckel, 1961
S. G. Fritz, “We
are trying… to change the face of the world”. Ideology and motivation
in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front: The view from below, «The Journal of Military History», 60, 4 (1996)
C. Gerlach, Verbrechen deutscher Fronttruppen in Weißrussland 1941-1944. Eine Annäherung, in Wehrmacht und Vernichtungspolitik. Militär im nationalsozialistischen System, ed. by K. H. Pohl, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999
H. Geyer, Das IX. Armeekorps im Ostfeldzug 1941, Neckargemünd, Vowinckel, 1969
A. Golovchansky and others, eds., “Ich will raus aus diesem Wahnsinn”. Deutsche Briefe von der Ostfront, 1941-1945, aus sowjetischen Archiven, Reinbeck, Rowholt, 1993
H. Guderian, Erinnerungen eines Soldaten, Heidelberg, Vowinkel, 1950
F. Hartlaub, Von unten gesehen, Stuttgart, Koehler, 1950
R. Headland, Messages of Murder. A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941-1943, Rutherford, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992
K. Jarausch, and K. J. Arnold, eds., “Das stille Sterben…”. Feldpostbriefe von Konrad Jarausch aus Polen und Russland. 1939-1942, Paderborn, Schöningh, 2008
J. Keppler, Überwindungen. Tagebuch und Aufzeichnungen aus dem Kriege, Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958
E. Kern, Der große Rausch. Russlandfeldzug 1941-1945, Weiblingen, Leberecht, 1950
K. Letzel, Deutsche Soldaten – nationalsozialisticher Krieg? Kriegserlebnis – Kriegserfahrung, 1939-1945, Paderborn, Schöningh, 19982
W. Lubbek and D. Hurt, At Leningrad’s gates. The story of a soldier with Army Group North, Barnsley, Pen & Sword Military, 2007
J. Lucas, War on the Eastern Front 1941-1945. The German Soldier in Russia, London, Jane’s Publishing, 1979
W. Manoscheck, The Holocaust as recounted in Wehrmacht soldiers’ letters from the front, in The discursive construction of history. Remembering the Wehrmacht’s war of annihilation, ed. by H. Heer and others, Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, pp. 27-49
E. von Manstein, Verlorene Siege, Bonn, Athenäum, 1955
K. Matthies, Ich hörte die Lerchen singen. Ein Tagebuch aus dem Osten, 1941/45, München, Kösel, 1956
H. Metelmann, Through hell for Hitler. A dramatic first-hand account of fighting on the eastern front with the Wehrmacht, Staplehurst, Spellmount, 2003 (1990)
H. Pabst, Der Ruf der äußersten Grenze. Tagebuch eines Frontsoldaten, Tübingen, Schlichtenmayer, 1953
Pater-Mater, Heinz. Ein Menschleben im Krieg geboren – im Krieg verloren, 1915-1942, Heidelberg, Schneider, 1947
K.-T. Schleicher and H. Walle, eds., Aus Feldpostbriefen junger Christen 1939-1945. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der katholischen Jugend im Felde, Stuttgart, Steiner, 2005
H. Steets, Gebirgsjäger in der Nogaischen Steppe. Vom Dnjepr zum Asowschen Meer. August-Oktober 1941, Heidelberg, Vowinckel, 1956
W. Wette, “Rassenfeind”: die rassistischen Elemente in der deutschen Propaganda gegen die Sowjetunion, in Deutsch-russische Zeitenwende. Krieg und Frieden 1941-1995, ed. by H.-A. Jakobsen and others, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1995, pp. 175-201
B. Zieser, In their shallow graves, London, Elek Books, 1956
The
letters sent from the front during WWII constitute a broad universe
which we are just partially familiar with (tens of thousands of letters
out of billions). Only a very small portion of the immense corpus of
letters from and to the fronts has been published, which means that such
a form of testimony constitutes an important but also distorted means
of encounter with war. Do
therefore letters constitute a good means for encountering war? Do
people at home really come across war, when they read the letters
received from their loved ones at the front? The testimony
provided by a letter from the front is complex and ambiguous insofar as
it differs both from autobiographical texts written after the events in
the form of a narrative and from diaries, which are basically private
writings with an open and discontinuous narrative structure. Letters
from the front imply the presence of a defined reader, normally the
family, relatives, friends etc. of the combatants who write. Letters are
first of all life-signals that combatants exchange with their families
back home. Therefore, they also imply a sort of dialogue dislocated in
space and delayed in time, which affects communication and the flow of
information. Moreover, letters from the front are subject to censorship,
which limits the freedom of the writers to express their minds openly.
Finally, combatants tend to present themselves in their letters as
individuals who struggle to balance their experience of violence and
suffering with the ideas, expectations and sets of values of their
relatives at home. Combatants cannot and dare not report the reality of
their daily life in war directly to their relatives without applying
some language-filter. Letters from the front line must first of all keep the dialogue
between combatants and their society as it existed before the war alive
(Letzel 1998: 30). Such a dialogue is irregular and ambiguous, though,
because, on the one hand, censorship prevents it from being spontaneous
and, on the other hand, self-censorship represents the psychological device by which the system of values shared with family and friends is protected from the potential harm resulting from direct representation of the war. Insofar as censorship
prevents the combatants from expressing freely their own thoughts and
from revealing classified or secret aspects of the war, the
relationship between combatants and censorship has two faces: on the one
hand the soldiers try to escape control by avoiding prohibited topics;
sometimes, conversely, they use the keywords of propaganda in order to
“smuggle” opinion and information which should not be put into writing.
This is the reason why one often comes across letters which appear oddly
propagandistic, discordant with
private communication. Most of the times, such an attitude is a subtle
way of “cheating” censorship, which urges the recipient to read between
the lines.
In
the German letters sent home from Russia in 1941, the invasion at first
appears as a just war waged in self-defence against communism and the
“Judaic-Bolshevik” plot. For many German soldiers, the war and the
annihilation of the Red Army would impede the “red beasts” to reach
Germany, thus they represented that total annihilation-war as a cause
worth fighting and death. The soldiers of the Wehrmacht often considered
themselves as liberators and restorers of Catholicism in Russia, which
they depicted as a backward country populated by uncivilised
inhabitants. Nonetheless, perplexity and fear do emerge from the letters
of these combatants as long as they advanced deeper into enemy
territory and witnessed a cruel war conducted relentlessly against
civilians, POWs and Jews.
No writer openly refers to these misdeeds, which was prohibited by
censorship: they just write that the war is demanding more than mere
physical effort and courage in battle: obedience, faith, endurance and
determination therefore assume a secret meaning, insofar as the
combatants try to tell (ambiguously and indirectly) that they are
experiencing unexpected war crimes from which they cannot call
themselves off. Shootings, hangings, deportation, forced labour, mass
mortality from starvation and disease among the Russian POWs hardly made
their way into the letters, because any admission that the conflict in
the East was a criminal extermination war, would undermine the moral
link between the combatants and their families, from which the former
received the signal of a normal life, so they made every effort to send
back a representation of their daily life as much normal, by removing
all reference to violence and horror.
But the brutality of the war in Russia took its toll on the soldiers.
Beside the restrain of censorship, self-censorship represented a
constant attitude of the combatants to face a moral crisis, as soon as
they began to recognise in their comrades a glimpse of the bandit and
raider, or to understand that the series of victories was turning into
defeat. The language of letters bears the scars of such internal conflict.
The combatants, by writing that their condition was “beyond
description” and by promising that one day they would tell everything in
person at home, put a distance between themselves and the events, thus
concealing their moral struggle. Silence was therefore all but mute: if
blackened lines in censored letters show that the State could control
and transform dissent into coerced consent, silence imposed by
self-censorship was rather a blank to fill with interpretation.
Silence as refusal
to speak about the war means that the encounter with war was so
shocking that it had to be framed within a discourse of apparent
normality. Which also means that the language of letters would deny
people at home the possibility to actually encounter war and to
understand what was going on at the front. In situations of extreme
danger like in Stalingrad or in other great battles in 1943-1944,
combatants found it very difficult to conceal reality. In the letters
written under life-threatening conditions of extreme suffering and fear,
the combination of censorship and self-censorship became highly
problematic, because the attempt to escape through writing stood in open
contradiction with experience, and this created violent swings in
language. One can find, in fact, strong oppositions between expressions
of hope and despair, or between appeals to calm, often dictated with a
strained enthusiasm, and crude descriptions of a hopeless condition.
Silence
therefore became a form of complicity. It occurred first of all as
ellipsis (denial), but it could also occur as understatement and irony.
There were two different types of self-censorship: the first was a
rational precautionary
reaction to the presence of the military censorship and to its
restrictions. Silence or the displacement of information was not aimed
at interrupting the communication totally; the writers wanted to be
understood by their recipients but not by censors. This was the reason
for the promises to speak in person at home, for cryptic symbols (e.g. a
circle with a point inside, to mean the encirclement of the German 6th Army in Stalingrad) and other allusions.
The
second case was that of total and impenetrable silence, when the
combatants passed over entire parts of their daily life and experience
in silence simply by writing about other things, until their letters
conveyed an image of the war tampered with as though those aspects of
violence and horror had never existed at all. Adjectives like
“inconceivable”, “indescribable” and “unimaginable” represent the limit
beyond which silence became total. It was no longer a matter of “I
cannot say this because it is forbidden”; the war had to be radically transformed
into a bearable experience that the reader at home could handle,
comprehend and eventually justify in order to believe that their loved
ones would eventually come back home as they once were.
The
readers of letters encountered war through a thick filter of linguistic
and ideological manipulation: they encountered the “soft” version of
the war depicted and tampered with by the combatants themselves, who
quite usually arranged their representations as a compact pack of
standardised communication, in which life-signal appeared as the most
important and urgent content to communicate. “I am still alive and in
good shape and spirit” was likely to be in the end the most useful and
consolatory thing to write and read.
But
war, despite its distorted images, changes and affects the combatants
for the rest of their lives and urges them to constantly arrange the
story in order to make sense of it and to make it bearable and
acceptable. Self-censorship in the letters is first of all a symptom of
the pursue not much for a true and authentic account but rather for
consent and self-acknowledgement aimed at permitting, after the war, the
return of the veterans into the circle of their community as civilians.
Therefore, one can see the letters from the front as a first stage of
the attempt to stretch a bridge over the gap between war and those
civilians who, away from it at home, can only imagine it through the
official representations of propaganda and those unorthodox of letters
and first-hand oral accounts made by veterans when they come home on
leave. Many Germans became aware of the actual situation in the East by
listening to the accounts that the veterans made in secret: crimes,
extermination of the Jews, the defeat in Stalingrad, the general retreat
in 1944 were taboos that the Nazi propaganda tried to keep secret.
Through the letters from the front many German families encountered a
war that they had never imagined, although a war still tampered with.
Perhaps, only after 1945 silence in the letters began to make sense,
when defeat opened the eyes of the majority, as one veteran wrote:
“In
retrospect, I realized that I – and countless others like me – had
helped Hitler start and fight a world war of conquest that had left tens
millions of people dead and destroyed our own country. I wondered now
whether I would ever question these things if we had won the war. I had
to conclude that it was unlikely. This was a lesson taught by defeat,
not by victory” (Knappe 1993: 298).
Further reading
Buchbender, Ortwin and Reinhold Sterz, eds., Das andere Gesicht des Krieges. Deutsche Feldpostbriefe 1939-1945, München, Beck, 1982
Ebert, Jens, Feldpostbriefe aus Stalingrad. November 1942 bis Januar 1943, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2003
Golovchansky, Anatoly and others, eds., “Ich will raus aus diesem Wahnsinn”. Deutsche briefe von der Ostfront, 1941-1945, aus sowjetischen Archiven, Reinbeck, Rowholt, 1993
Knappe, Siegfrid and Ted Brusaw, Soldat. Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949, Shrewbury, Airlife, 1993
Schleicher, Karl-Theodor and Heinrich Walle, eds., Aus Feldpostbriefen junger Christen, 1939-1945. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der katholischen Jugend im Felde, Stuttgart, Steiner, 2005
The
twentieth-century opened under the sign of great trust in progress and
technology. Machines, which had since ever been considered as a
dangerous adversary and as a source of primordial fear, quickly began to
lose their disquieting aspect and to become an ally of human beings as a
ductile tool to overcome physical strain. Airplanes and cars created
new opportunities for transport at unprecedented speed besides
steam-locomotives, which had replaced horse-powered coaches as the main
connection between cities.
The
military also benefited of such evolution: weapons became lighter,
automatic, transportable and lethal, as the new tanks or submarines.
Both war and strategy had already been changing: from Napoleonic war to
Franco-Prussian war in 1870 artillery had reversed the impact of the
forces on the field, but only with the new century, and in particular
with the Great War, an extraordinary change occurred: war started to be
conceived positively, in people’s minds even before than in the
combatants’ view. General rehearsal took place in the Italian-Turkish
war in 1911-1912, better known as the Libyan war, when airplanes (nine
Italian aircrafts), cars, motorcycles and unfortunately toxic gas were
for first employed.
The
old conception of war as physical fighting carried out hand-to-hand
with the enemy, with great masses of soldiers rallying enemy positions
to conquer, was replaced with the idea (or illusion) of a mechanised war
in which modern technology took the place of human force.
Combat
was no longer based on direct fighting or on the possibility to
overcome the enemy with one’s own strength, but rather by means of
conduction/mastery of machines, for which knowledge, communication,
expertise and promptness are really key.
This
new idea of an indirect combat, mediated by technology, which let the
weapons do the dirty job, was perhaps one of the main arguments that
convinced people in the early years of the twentieth-century that war
was after all not an evil to escape but rather an opportunity to catch,
insofar as weapons rather than men would fight it and because its
duration – unlike past wars, which went on for decades – would be short.
A lightning-war, a Blitzkrieg as a modern war should be, in
which velocity, rapidity of decision-making, courage – juvenile
qualities – are determining factors.
The idea of a war which was not fearful but beautiful,
if not even a source of wealth as a powerful stimulus for economic
growth and change against the stagnation of the past, spread all over
the early twentieth-century and persuaded also those who, as pacifists
and internationalists, were afraid of being accused of weakness,
cowardice, defeatism, pessimism or even worse with being reactionaries.
Nonetheless,
the nineteenth-century, despite its social problems, barricades,
communes, revolution and the growing pressure of masses, had been
enlightened by internationalism, also derived by the experience of
Socialism and Marxism, whose Manifesto of 1848 – although not rejecting
violence – invited to a trans-national brotherhood which stretched
beyond the interests of single countries, convinced that the problem of
working-class people were the same everywhere.
Conversely,
the reinforcement of the State, of national culture, traditions and
interests was the aim of conservatories, who based their own principles
on the defence of such ideals as the Fatherland and the State. Not by
chance all right-wing movements since the nineteenth-century have
recalled key-concepts such as Nation, people, and Fatherland by
attributing to them some sacred value and by highlighting the emotional
feeling of participation in a closed enclave, coherent and made
recognisable by the share of values and symbols. Terms like people and
popular, nation and national or even social often recur in the acronyms
of right-wing parties and movements, which attempt to obtain consensus
by moving the lever of emotions. The feeling of belonging to the nation,
patriotism, so glorified during the Italian “Risorgimento”, had its
part of responsibility in the growth of aggressive feelings toward other
countries. Nationalism revealed itself as a fertile ground for war.
The
most surprising thing is that intellectuals, and among those
sociologists, who had inherited that branch of positivistic philosophy
aimed at studying society with scientific method, i.e. with a super partes and objective approach, supported the interventionist position in the face of war.
Karl
Emil Maximilian Weber, or Max, born in Erfurt in 1864 and dead in
Munich in 1920 stood out among these sociologists. Weber was on the one
hand the father of modern sociology, as he claimed the need for sound
objectivity and non-evaluation in sociological research (Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, published in 1904 and 1917 and collected in 1922), of studies on religion up to his fundamental Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft,
published posthumous in 1922; on the other hand he was the intransigent
nationalist, the firm assertor of the superiority of his country and
its historical mission to preserve and develop civilisation against
barbarisation.
By
assuming a contradictory and sometimes even counterproductive attitude,
Weber showed his faith in war as a catalyser of change and as a
shocking event capable of waking the consciences from lethargy and
pushing civilisation forth.
Aldo
Toscano, who devoted an important study to the sociologists of the
Great War, wrote that since the very beginning Weber knew that sooner or
later something terrible would happen and that Germany should then play
its role in the world by facing the hostility of other countries.
Nonetheless, Weber always remained faithful to the German cultural
patriotism with sense of honour and devotion.
Therefore,
the outbreak of the war found him prepared and enthusiastic. The words
of his wife Marianne in his monumental biography of 1926 do not leave
doubts behind: the scene is set in Weber’s house, where he is surrounded
by friends and disciples on the 26 July 1914, the last Sunday before
the war which would be declared two days later, on Tuesday 28. Marianne
recounts that the guests asked for his opinion and waited with anxiety
for his answer: he said that a war would allow young people to find the
real connection with their own community by means of sacrifice.
Weber
could not enlist, which made him bitter. His faith in Germany remained
firm also in the face of serious familiar losses. In 1915 he wrote to
his sister Lili, concerning his brother-in-law Hermann Schäfer, fallen
at Tannenberg during one of the first combats, that this new war would
be, despite its outcome – great and wonderful and above all
expectations.
During the conflict Weber strongly defended German policy. The letter of January 1916 to Gertrud Bäumer, editor of the magazine Die Frau
testifies to that, where he wrote that a people that is numerically
superior, organised as a powerful State should lead the destinies of
other small countries. In the same year, though, the first doubts rise.
In 1916 Weber wrote that after the sinking of Lusitania on 7 May 1915
time was against Germany and that war would become a satanic event that
would eventually crush the German people. Later on he started to believe
that peace should be the necessary outcome of a brief war, in order to
avoid irreparable economic damages. Finally, on 4 November 1918, in the
face of the disastrous conditions of Germany, in a public speech in
Munich Weber proposed to accept peace at all costs. But the effect was
not as hoped for. He was contested and even accused of being a traitor.
As others had done before, Weber too decided to write his opinion about
the German responsibilities for war, in a work published in the Frankfurter Zeitung of January 1919.
The
end of the war and the foundation of the Republic of Weimar saw the
decline of an intellectual who always has a “secret passion” for
politics and was ready to do whatever possible for his nation and to
lead the young people, but who had no followers in such a quest.
Italian version:
Il
secolo XX si apre all’insegna di una grande fiducia nel progresso e
nella tecnologia. La macchina, da sempre considerata una temibile
antagonista e fonte di una paura primordiale, sta perdendo rapidamente
la sua connotazione perturbante per divenire alleata dell’uomo e farsi
duttile strumento di sostituzione alla fatica fisica. L’aereo e
l’automobile aprono nuove opportunità di trasporto a velocità finora
impensabili e vanno ad aggiungersi al treno a vapore, sostituendo le
carrozze a cavalli nel collegamento tra le città principali.
Di
questa evoluzione tecnologica beneficiano ovviamente anche le
attrezzature militari, le armi si fanno più leggere, automatiche,
semoventi, micidiali – come il carro armato o il sottomarino. Già da
tempo la guerra, assieme alla strategia di condurre le battaglie, ha
cambiato volto: dalle guerre napoleoniche alla guerra franco-prussiana
del 1870, l’artiglieria ha sovvertito le sorti delle forze in campo, ma è
col nuovo secolo, e in specie con la “grande guerra”, che si compie la
straordinaria rivoluzione nel concepire la guerra in maniera positiva,
prima nelle menti delle persone che sui campi di battaglia. Le prove
generali hanno luogo in occasione della guerra italo-turca del 1911-12,
conosciuta anche come “guerra di Libia”, nella quale furono impiegati
per la prima volta gli aerei (nove quelli italiani), ma anche auto, moto
e, purtroppo, anche gas tossici.
La
vecchia concezione della guerra come combattimento “fisico”, che si
compie nello scontro a corpo a corpo col nemico, dove i soldati
assaltano in gran numero le postazioni avversarie per conquistarle, si è
andata sostituendo con l’idea (o l’illusione) di una guerra
“meccanizzata”, dove la tecnologia più avanzata prende il posto delle
forze umane.
Il
combattimento non è più basato sullo scontro diretto, né sulla
possibilità di sopraffare l’avversario con la forza, ma attraverso la
conduzione/gestione di una macchina, dove ha più importanza il sapere,
il comunicare, la conoscenza del mezzo e la rapidità d’intervento.
Questa
idea innovativa di combattere in forma indiretta, mediata dalla
tecnologia, lasciando che siano le armi a fare il lavoro sporco, è forse
una delle motivazioni principali che convincono gli uomini del primo
Novecento che la guerra non sia poi un male da evitare, ma
un’opportunità da cogliere, dal momento che a combatterla saranno più le
armi che gli uomini e che – contrariamente al passato, la cui durata si
misurava in decenni – si sarebbe risolta in breve tempo. Una guerra
lampo, una blitzkrieg, come si conviene a un tempo moderno, in
cui la velocità, la rapidità delle decisioni, il coraggio – tutte
qualità giovaniliste – sono determinanti.
L’idea di una guerra non temibile, ma bella,
persino produttiva di benessere, perché in grado di stimolare lo
sviluppo economico, spingere al cambiamento, a fronte della condizione
d’inerzia del passato, permea tutto il primo Novecento e finisce per
convincere anche chi, pacifista e internazionalista, teme di essere
accusato di debolezza, codardia, disfattismo, pessimismo o, peggio
ancora, passatismo.
Eppure
il secolo precedente, con tutti i problemi sociali, le barricate, le
comuni, le rivoluzioni e la crescente pressione delle masse, era pervaso
di uno spirito internazionalista, frutto anche dell’influenza dei
movimenti socialisti e in particolare del marxismo, il cui Manifesto del
1848, pur non rifuggendo dalla violenza, invitava però a una
fratellanza transnazionale che andava ben oltre gli interessi dei
singoli paesi, nella convinzione che i problemi del proletariato fossero
ovunque gli stessi.
Al
contrario, il rafforzamento dello Stato, della cultura, delle tradizioni
e degli interessi nazionali è fatto proprio dal pensiero conservatore
che, sulla difesa degli ideali di patria, nazione e Stato, fonda i suoi
principi.
Non è
un caso che tutti i movimenti di destra, a partire dall’Ottocento e per
buona parte del secolo successivo, si siano richiamati a concetti
“chiave” come nazione, popolo, patria, assegnando loro un valore sacrale
indiscutibile e facendo leva sull’emotività diffusa che l’appartenenza a
un gruppo circoscritto, coeso e riconoscibile attraverso la comunanza
di valori e simboli, poteva suscitare.
I
termini popolo e popolare, nazione e nazionale, e persino sociale, si
ripetono spesso nelle sigle dei movimenti e dei partiti di destra, che
cercano di coagulare il consenso facendo leva sulle spinte emozionali.
Il senso di appartenenza alla nazione, l’amor di patria, così tanto
esaltato nel Risorgimento, ha la sua parte di responsabilità nella
crescita del sentimento di rivalsa e di aggressività nei confronti degli
altri paesi. Il nazionalismo si dimostra così terreno fertile per la
guerra.
La cosa
più sorprendente è che siano proprio gli intellettuali e, tra essi, i
sociologi, eredi di quella branca della filosofia positivista che si era
posta l’obiettivo di studiare la società con metodi scientifici,
mantenendo un atteggiamento obiettivo e super partes, a sostenere un’opinione interventista in occasione della prima guerra mondiale.
Tra
questi brilla tale Karl Emil Maximilian Weber, detto Max, nato a Erfurt
nel 1864 e morto a Monaco nel 1920. Veniamo così a conoscere due Max
Weber: da una parte il padre della sociologia moderna, autore dei saldi
propositi dell’oggettività e dell’avalutatività nella ricerca
sociologica (in Il metodo delle scienze storico-sociali apparsi nel 1904 e 1917 e raccolti nel 1922), degli studi sulla religione, fino al fondamentale Economia e società,
pubblicato postumo nel 1922. Dall’altra l’intransigente nazionalista,
convinto assertore della superiorità del suo paese, come della missione
storica di cui esso è investito, al fine di conservare e far progredire i
capisaldi della civiltà, contro l’imbarbarimento.
Con un
atteggiamento contraddittorio e, a tratti, persino controproducente,
Weber manifesta il suo credo nella guerra come acceleratrice del
mutamento, evento scioccante che è in grado di smuovere le coscienze dal
letargo e far avanzare la civiltà.
Fin
dall’inizio, scrive Aldo M. Toscano, che ai sociologi della prima guerra
mondiale ha dedicato uno scritto illuminante, Weber “sapeva che da un
momento all’altro qualcosa di tremendo si sarebbe compiuto, e lo
lasciava intendere in non pochi passaggi dei suoi scritti. Sapeva che la
Germania avrebbe dovuto affrontare il nodo del suo ruolo mondiale, che
nessuno avrebbe riconosciuto pacificamente.” E tuttavia “la vocazione
tedesca, con tanto di patriottismo culturale, passione storica, senso
dell’onore, devozione al destino e anche Lebensraum, accompagnerà Weber per tutta l’esistenza.”
Pertanto
lo scoppio della guerra lo trova preparato ed entusiasta. Le parole
della moglie, Marianne, nella monumentale biografia pubblicata nel 1926,
non lasciano dubbi: la scena si svolge in casa Weber, attorniato da
amici e discepoli, il 26 di luglio, l’ultima domenica prima della
guerra, che sarebbe stata dichiarata due giorni dopo, il martedì 28.
“Quel
pomeriggio tutte queste persone preoccupate si accalcano attorno a
Weber, lo portano in giro per il mondo con le loro domande e pendono ora
per ora dalle sue labbra. L’esperienza più importante della sua
infanzia, lo scoppio della guerra del 1870, Weber l’aveva vissuta
proprio nella stessa stanza e nello stesso periodo dell’anno. Nella
memoria gli sembra che lo stato d’animo allora fosse diverso: più
austero e solenne. Ma adesso la decisione non è ancora presa, si può
ancora giocare con il destino. Eppure, una cosa emerge già oggi: quei
giovani che hanno cercato sinora la forma e il contenuto del proprio
essere discosti dalla comunità, sono pronti a sacrificarsi servendo la
comunità.” E subito dopo: “L’ora è giunta ed è di inimmaginata
grandezza” .
Lo
amareggia non potersi arruolare. La sua fiducia nella Germania non
crolla neppure di fronte ai lutti in famiglia. Nel 1915 scrive alla
sorella Lili, a proposito del cognato Hermann Schäfer, caduto a
Tannenberg, in uno degli scontri iniziali, concludendo con le parole
“perché questa guerra è – qualunque sia l’esito – veramente grande e
meravigliosa al di sopra di ogni attesa.”
Durante
il conflitto mantiene i suoi propositi e si conferma strenuo difensore
della politica tedesca. La sua opinione è ben espressa in una lettera
del gennaio 1916 e inviata a Gertrud Bäumer, curatrice del mensile “Die
Frau”, che la pubblicherà nel febbraio:
“Un
popolo superiore dal punto di vista numerico, organizzato come Stato di
potenza, proprio per il semplice fatto di essere tale, si trova di
fronte a compiti del tutto diversi rispetto a quelli che toccano agli
svizzeri, ai danesi, agli olandesi o ai norvegesi.”
Ma è in
quello stesso anno che cominciano a manifestarsi i primi dubbi. Infatti
nel corso del 1916 Weber annota che, dopo l’affondamento del Lusitania
avvenuto il 7 maggio 1915, “il tempo lavora non per la Germania, ma
contro di essa; e la guerra, da straordinaria manifestazione di eroismo e
di abnegazione, si trasformerà in un evento satanico che spegnerà la
resistenza fisica e morale del popolo.”
Più
tardi finirà per convincersi che la pace, alla fine, sia il coronamento
necessario di un breve periodo di guerra, onde evitare un danno
economico irreparabile. Il 4 novembre del 1918, di fronte alle evidenti
difficoltà della Germania, in un discorso pubblico a Monaco, propone di
stipulare la pace ad ogni costo, ma l’effetto non è quello sperato.
Weber viene contestato e persino accusato di tradimento.
Così
anch’egli, come avevano fatto altri prima di lui, si decide a scrivere
sulle responsabilità della guerra, in uno scritto dal sapore amaro che
viene pubblicato sulla “Frankfurter Zeitung” del gennaio 1919.
La fine
della guerra e la nascita della Repubblica di Weimar segnano il declino
di un intellettuale dalla “passione segreta” della politica, “pronto a
fare qualsiasi cosa per la nazione e ad assumere la guida delle giovani
leve. Ma non c’era nessuno che lo seguisse.”
For further reading
Toscano, A. M., Trittico sulla guerra. Durkheim, Weber, Pareto, Bari-Rome, Laterza, 1995
Weber, M., Max Weber. Ein Lebensbild, Tübingen, Mohr, 1926
Weber, M., Economy and society. An outline of interpretive sociology, Berkeley, University of California press, 1978
In
all ages of human history, torture has represented a fear and a reality
for prisoners of war. Soldiers captured in war can be the victims of
the victor’s retaliation immediately after battle as well as far behind
the front line, through interrogations for intelligence, forced-labour,
brain-washing. In fact, torture is not only physical. George Orwell
describes the perversion of psychological torture in his novel 1984 (1948)
by means of the symbol of Room 101. Primo Levi, the well-known
Auschwitz-witness, once wrote that “useless violence” in Nazi Lagers
consisted in inflicting apparently aimless physical and psychological
suffering in order to demolish the human dignity and resilience of
captives.
A
mass-scale case of ideological torture was the political re-education
of German POWs in Soviet concentration camps during WWII. In 1941 Walter
Ulbricht (1893-1973, he was President of the Democratic Republic of
Germany from 1960 up to his death), in exile in Moscow, thought that
German POWs could represent a useful instrument of propaganda, if they
could be won to the cause of Communism. Ulbricht believed that the Red
Army would eventually win the war, and he therefore saw the necessity to
create a group of German Soviet agents who would trigger a socialist
revolution in Germany after the end of the war. Ulbricht submitted his
project to the Soviets, who recognized the potential of the proposal and
decided to install the first School of Antifascism in the concentration
camp of Jelabuga, where the German Captain Ernst Hadermann began to
cooperate with Ulbricht and the Soviets to win the German POWs to the
cause of antifascism. The breakthrough came in winter 1943, after the
German debacle in Stalingrad, where the entire 6th Army was
destroyed. Although only 90.000 Germans were taken prisoners, among them
Feldmarschall Freidrich Paulus and his staff were also captured. For
the first time hundreds of thousands of POWs were in the hands of the
Red Army (over 100.000 Germans, about 74.000 Italians, and many
thousands of Rumanians and Hungarians).
On 13th
July 1943 in the Lager of Krasnogorsk the National Committee “Free
Germany” was founded with the purpose to create the first group of
military resistance against Hitler’s regime. Soon after, in September
1943, a number of officers who had refused to join “Free Germany”
because it seemed too compromised with Communism, founded the Union of
German Officers, which was apparently independent but actually under the
thumb of Communist political activists. By the end of 1944 some tens of
officers and a few hundreds of Wehrmacht soldiers had joined the
antifascist movement, small figures in comparison with the 3.500.000
German POWs in Soviet hands at the end of the war.
In
November 1945 “Free Germany” and the Union of German Officers were
disbanded. The former members were sent back to the Soviet Zone of
Occupation in Germany between 1946 and 1948 in order to build the new
socialist German fatherland. Nonetheless, although political
re-education of POWs was no longer in agenda, POWs remained exposed to
arbitrary Soviet policies concerning intelligence and forced-labour. In
1949 a wave of political trials stormed over the thousands of
concentration camps in the USSR: thousands of German POWs were accused
with war crimes and sentenced to death, life imprisonment or 25 years of
forced-labour. POWs were to be used to rebuild the Russian cities and
infrastructures destroyed by war as well as hostages to put pressure on
West Germany, which in 1950 was to be re-armed within the NATO.
Political trials against POWs took place in an atmosphere of terror and
menace, which can be acknowledged from the literary memoirs of
witnesses.
One
must distinguish between memoirs written in the Democratic Republic of
Germany and those published in West Germany because they reflect
different political perspectives: in fact, all Eastern authors (e.g.
Paulus, Adam, Müller, Steidle and Rühle) occupied relevant roles in
politics, culture and education and their memoirs depict the political
re-education in Soviet concentration camps as a rejuvenating experience
of self-affirmation. Political re-education, or Antifascism, certainly
was not for them torture or suffering. They consider themselves as
patriots who embraced the cause of a free and democratic Germany shaped
on the Marxist view of history and society. They interpret Germany’s
catastrophe as the necessary outcome of imperialism and militarism, to
which they oppose socialism and its vocation to internationalism and
peace.
On
the other side of the Iron Curtain, things were different. A small
group of witnesses came from the ranks of former antifascists, such as
Heinrich Einsiedel (vice-president of the National Committee “Free
Germany”), novelist Heinrich Gerlach, and theologian Helmut Gollwitzer.
These authors had first joined Communist antifascism because they had
believed in the historical necessity to take a stand against Hitler and
his war. They had later gown critical toward Communism and they had been
persecuted and punished for that, in concentration camps before and
once they had come back to Germany after 1948. They represent the
political re-education as a two-fold experience: on the one hand it was a
noble and heroic assumption of responsibility that they faced as
officers and human beings; on the other that experience was also a
dangerous compromise with power and corruption insofar as being
antifascists in Soviet concentration camps meant claiming privilege and
prominence over other fellow POWs. These authors remember in their
memoirs how they had to act as spies for the Communist authorities, how
they had to lie and deceive in order to keep their privileges, and how
they had to go through a never-ending psychological war against other
prisoners in order to conquer power. These authors recall the motto of
Soviet antifascism: “whoever is not with us is against us”, or “whoever
does not work does not eat”, which did not sound much different than
under the Nazi yoke.
The
political re-education in the memoirs of lower officers and ranks, who
depict it as sheer torture, appears even worse, as a school of
double-thought and as a struggle for surviving, because the periodical
interrogations carried out by Communist activists made the difference
between being admitted to the school of antifascism (which meant more
food, warm bedrooms and no hard-labour) and being sent out to Siberia
for hard-labour in the woods, in mines or on cotton fields.
Interrogations were subtle and dangerous, aimed at forcing prisoners
into self-contradiction. When this happened, the prisoner had to choose
between becoming a spy and collaborating, and ending up in punishment
camps. These witnesses recall the wave of political trials of 1949 as
the most fearful experience after starvation and typhus epidemics of
1943-1944: threatened to be held for years in hard-labour camps, many a
prisoner chose to denounce even close friends as war-criminals, in order
to be sent back to Germany, and many even mutilated themselves in order
to be spared from work and sent home.
In
West Germany some authors, such as former pilot and POW Assi Hahn,
caught the occasion to raise a vehement polemic against Communism, which
in many cases turned out to be a shameful apology of the old Nazi
regime, militarism and imperialism. What is striking is that the Soviet
project of conquering a huge mass of POWs, marked as a “bunch of
fascists”, to the political cause of Communism eventually ended up into a
large-scale failure. In fact, the strategy of attracting POWs to
antifascism in exchange of privilege and power over fellow comrades in
concentration camps did not produce the model of a virtuous democratic
society, but rather a “grey zone” where compromise, deceit and egoism
prevailed over social virtues such as solidarity, friendship and
justice.
In
this sense, Soviet concentration camps of POWs also represented a sort
of laboratory for social experimentation. The separateness of POWs from
their homeland permitted to create the condition for an artificial
acceptance of the new political and social doctrine in abstract, not as a
real means to manage the life of a community. Better said, there was a
community, but a fragile and weak one, of starving and frightened POWs
under the thumb of a powerful and intricate structure capable of
inflicting suffering and death or to grant favour and privilege. Such
political re-education can be seen as torture, especially if one
considers that many German POWs remained in Soviet camps up to 1956.
Torture
is an evil and useless instrument. Its secrecy and separateness testify
to its unlawfulness as well as to the bad will of those who use it. In
the past, criminals were tormented and executed in public, as Foucault
pointed out, in the course of violent ceremonies aimed at restoring the
authority of the State challenged by serious offences. But torture is
different. It is a closed-door activity, because it is brutal and
illegal, because it is aimed at overwhelming the victim’s will, in order
to force out a confession beyond evidence of crime and guilt. Torture
can make up evidence as magic: in order to stop suffering and fear the
victim is ready to confess what the torturer wants to hear. The case of
political re-education shows that torture can also be a means to force
ideologies into the mind of people. Nonetheless, experience teaches that
such achievements almost always remain unattained, or that they are
reached at the cost of moral degradation, illegality and inhumanity.
For further reading
Bungert, Heike, Das Nationalkomitee und der Westen. Die Reaktion der Westalliierten auf das NKFD und die Freien Deutschen Bewegungen 1943-1948, Stuttgart, Steiner, 1997
Scheurig, Bodo, Freies Deutschland. Das Nationalkomitee und der Bund Deutscher Offiziere in der Sowjetunion 1943-1945, München, Nymphenburger, 1960
Schoenhals, Kai, The Free Germany Movement. A Case of Patriotism or Treason?, New York, Greenwood Press, 1989
Smith, Arthur, The War for the German Mind. Re-Educating Hitler’s Soldiers, Oxford, Berghan, 1996
