8/9 May 1945 and the Long Shadows of War

Abstract

On the basis of personal memoirs and family histories, the author reproduces the situation in Germany at the end of the Second World War. He concentrates his attention on the material position and spiritual state of normal Germans, for whom the total defeat of their country meant famine, expulsion, destruction, and moral depression. Reflecting on the fact that the majority of Germans (in distinction from the other peoples of Europe) did not consider the collapse of the Nazi regime as liberation, the author discusses differences in perception of VE Day in the German Democratic Republic and the German Federal Republic. He places especial significance on the speech of Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker for the formulation of a new approach to evaluating the results of the Second World War for Germany. His 1985 address on the subject of the years after the conclusion of the war, an explicit censorship of the West German interpretation of the 1945 capitulation, was the first to attribute a positive meaning to these events for all Germans and called for the establishment of friendly contacts with the Soviet Union. The concluding remarks relate to the problem of national historical memory, its connection with forms of commemoration (such as the celebration of Victory Day), and the need to take a scholarly approach when studying the Second World War.