Beyond Usable Pasts: Rethinking the Memorialization of the Strategic Air War in Germany, 1940 to 1965

Abstract

Recent scholarly research into the cultural impact of Second World War bombing has done much to dispel simplistic notions about an alleged absence of the bombing war from the political cultures of the two successor states of the Third Reich.1 In the German Democratic Republic, the Communist elites were quick to exploit collective memories of urban destruction and mass death for the political confrontations of the Cold War. As Gilad Margalit, Matthias Neutzner, and others have shown, it was above all the bombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 that served state-sponsored propagandists as a powerful symbol of both ‘imperialist’ atrocity and German victimhood.2 Meanwhile, the air war also occupied a prominent place in public discourse west of the inner-German border, albeit on the communal rather than the state level. In cities such as Hamburg, Pforzheim, Kassel, and many others, annual commemorations were held in memory of the bombing, attracting a considerable number of residents.3 In West German cities, public memory was dominated by the local elites of City and Church, who harnessed the air war to the task of physical and spiritual reconstruction while largely avoiding thorny questions of agency and causality.