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From: H-Net Staff <revh...@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
Date: Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 8:16 AM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Nationalism]: Steege on Stargardt, 'The German
War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu
Nicholas Stargardt. The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945.
New York Basic Books, 2015. Illustrations. 760 pp. $35.00 (cloth),
ISBN 978-0-465-01899-4.
Reviewed by Paul Steege (Villanova University)
Published on H-Nationalism (July, 2017)
Commissioned by Cristian Cercel
In his 2001 book on the Federal Republic's search for a "usable past"
(_War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic
of Germany_), Robert G. Moeller explores how West Germans told "war
stories" to selectively remember the Third Reich and to distance
themselves from being implicated in its genocidal politics. Nicholas
Stargardt has written an important book that relocates our
understanding of Germans' war stories, recognizing them not just as a
retrospective phenomenon of the postwar decades but rather as vital
components of how Germans experienced and fought the Second World
War. In this expansive and engrossing book, Stargardt draws on
wide-ranging state and personal sources--especially letter
collections that present both sides of wartime correspondence--to
reconstruct individual war stories from multiple perspectives. Using
these "private prisms through which individuals viewed major events"
(p. xxiv), Stargardt traces the war's dramatic course from
mobilization and early German military victories in Poland, through a
period of crisis following the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943, to
the diverse experiences of total defeat and ambiguous liberation in
1945.
Stargardt argues that for most Germans, the war proved more
legitimate than Nazism, but that observation also frames his response
to a core question that guides his analysis: "How did it affect
Germans to gradually realise that they were fighting a genocidal war"
(p. 6)? In providing its answer, this book explores how the
rhetorical and symbolic formulations that abetted genocidal violence
extended deep into people's everyday lives as well as into personal
and familial relationships that outlasted the war. It also examines
how they surfaced in public exchanges recorded by state and party
officials at the time. Many Germans explained their own wartime
suffering, especially in air raids on German cities, by using a
rhetoric of retaliation. They described Anglo-American "terror
bombing" as a response to what Germany had done to Europe's Jews.
Such declarations made visible these Germans' awareness of that
violence even as they implied that those crimes mattered only to the
extent they helped to explain what was now happening to them.
Stargardt puts the July 1943 bombing of Hamburg at the center of his
account. His point is not to posit Germans as victims but rather to
explain how German experiences of war framed their narratives of
violence, including especially the genocidal effort to murder
Europe's Jews. Initially, Nazi leaders feared that urban Germans'
experience of aerial bombardment might turn people against the
regime. A woman riding a train out of Hamburg spotted the mayor of
Göttingen's golden party badge and held her sleeve to his face to
confront him with the smell of smoke from the fires that had
destroyed the city. Since the first day of the raids on Hamburg
coincided with the ouster of Benito Mussolini in Italy, that sort of
personal confrontation suggested to Nazi officials a potential for
political opposition. By fall 1943, however, most Germans remained
committed to the war, especially the war against the Soviet Union.
"It took the mass bombing of 1943 and the military defeats of 1944 to
make large numbers of Germans share in their Führer's apocalyptic
vision of 'victory or annihilation'" (p. 463). In other words,
popular commitment to a war going badly facilitated Germans' embrace
of the genocidal violence that accompanied it.
While Stargardt is hardly the first historian to link German claims
of wartime suffering to German practices of genocidal violence,[1]_
The German War_ effectively draws out the story lines that Germans
used over the course of the war to knit together the diverse
geography and chronology of their experiences. Even at its outset
that war encompassed relentless brutality: in the first eight weeks
of the German attack on Poland, German forces executed as many as
27,000 Poles and burned 531 villages (p. 38). Until the end of 1940,
the war's violence was hardly noticeable for most Germans, at least
by the measure of deaths caused by air raids on German cities. After
nearly a year-and-a-half of war, only 975 people had been killed (p.
123). Stargardt provides these figures, but he also gives us voices
that, haltingly at times, translated those experiences from the front
to families at home and back again.
At the outset, Stargardt introduces his readers to the twenty-four
"dramatis personae" whose stories weave in and out of the subsequent
pages (p. xxvii). They are hardly the only people we encounter in the
book, and at times it proves difficult to keep the characters
straight (the "ends" of their respective stories are scattered
throughout the text), but this strategy proves an effective reminder
that the war and its mass violence was also personal. Perhaps even
more importantly, this cast list pushes back against any easy notion
of who, in fact, comprised the Germans whose war he investigates. It
includes familiar and unfamiliar names, men and women, soldiers and
civilians, Jewish and non-Jewish characters, their identifying traits
summed up in a few sentences and inviting further exploration of
their wartime dramas set to begin a few pages later.
In a fascinating detail, Stargardt notes that wartime calendars
recorded September 3, when France and Britain had declared war on
Germany, as the day on which the war began. The German attack on
Poland two days before thus fell outside of the day-to-day record
defining the Germans' war. As much as German war stories may also
have retrospectively tried to frame the war as something that
happened to them, Stargardt underscores how all-inclusive their
wartime stories proved. Ernst and Irene Guicking, a couple whose
exchange of letters introduces German mobilization at the start of
chapter 1, reappear at the end of the epilogue ("Crossing the
Abyss"). Looking back after a postwar life that saw many of her
family's private dreams realized, Irene wanted their wartime letters
archived and published to record how their love triumphed in the
midst of war. Stargardt reminds us about their 1942 letters that
discussed "the deportation of the Jews and what happened to them in
the east" (p. 570). By emphasizing to readers the residual presence
of those particular forms of violence in even the most personal sorts
of war stories, Stargardt challenges us to investigate further the
blurred lines between complicity and resistance in the midst of
everyday life where Germans found plenty of room for war--and all
that it entailed.
Note
[1]. Nearly a decade ago, Peter Fritzsche explored how Germans
explained their support of genocidal politics in terms of an alleged
threat to their own existence: Peter Fritzsche, _Life and Death in
the Third Reich_ (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008). More recently,
Mary Fulbrook explored "overlapping stories" of victimhood and
violence in an area of Poland annexed by Germany following its 1939
invasion: Mary Fulbrook, _A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis
and the Holocaust_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). On the
ways that Germans throughout the Reich responded with violence to
experiences and stories of Allied bombardment, see Georg Hoffmann,
_Fliegerlynchjustiz: Gewalt gegen abgeschossene alliierte
Flugzeugbesatzungen 1943-1945_ (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand
Schöningh, 2015).
Citation: Paul Steege. Review of Stargardt, Nicholas, _The German
War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945_. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2017.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50046
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
--
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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart
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