Hatred after War: Emotion and the Postwar History of East Germany

Abstract

Hatred after War:Emotion and the Postwar History of East Germany Richard Bessel (bio) The massive eruption of deadly violence around the world during the 1940s left as many as 100 million people dead and many more wounded and scarred for life. This was probably the greatest eruption of violence the world has yet seen, and left in its wake a difficult and far-reaching legacy—of loss, of mourning, of disorientation, of bitterness and of hatred. In recent years historians looking at the aftermath of the two world wars in Europe have devoted considerable attention to questions of memory and mourning, questions that have to do with the loss of cherished human beings, in essence with love.1 Historians have seemed somewhat more reluctant to focus on hatred. Yet bitterness and hatred were widespread in the wake of World War II. They motivated the actions of many people who had had terrible experiences in their recent past; they put an indelible stamp on the public and the political life of the postwar period; and overcoming them was one of the greatest challenges facing Europeans after the horrors of the 1940s. Therefore, an appreciation of the importance of hatred seems crucial to understanding the postwar transition, which, as we now can appreciate, was a transition from the violent and bloody first half of Europe's twentieth century to the relatively peaceful second half.2 There are few places where this transition can have been more difficult than in East Germany—in the Soviet Occupation Zone and then the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—after World War II. The political, social and cultural history of postwar East Germany was [End Page 195] framed by profoundly disturbing developments: the occupation by Soviet armed forces, the need somehow to absorb a huge number of uprooted refugees from east of the Oder-Neiße (comprising roughly one quarter of the GDR's population in 1950), the division of Germany, the imposition of a socialist-Stalinist political and economic system against the will of a large proportion of the population, the suppression of free expression and with it of many possibilities for dealing with the personal trauma arising from what had happened in the recent past. Nazism, war, destruction, defeat, suffering, loss of "Heimat," military occupation, mass rape, and political repression created a huge potential reservoir of hatred in postwar East Germany. It seems more than just coincidence, therefore, that the political leadership in the GDR so frequently drew upon hatred as a basis of allegiance. This essay is a brief, admittedly speculative, attempt to suggest that examining hatred after war, and viewing public and political behavior as an expression of that hatred, may offer insights into what occurred in both the public and the private spheres in post-1945 East Germany. The suggestion is that hatred, arising from the violence and brutality of war and Nazism, was a major factor motivating both the leaders and the led in East Germany after World War II. Not just their rational calculations of how to deal with the challenges they faced and the political commitment that framed their actions, but also their emotional responses to what had occurred determined how Germans behaved in the physical and psychological rubble left behind by war and Nazism. This essay, therefore, is a tentative attempt to approach the history of Germany after World War II as a history of sentiments and emotions. When viewed from this angle, it is striking how often hatred seems to have motivated people and how often it surfaced in their utterances in postwar East Germany. By way of introduction, one example of how this figured in the new "antifascist-democratic" postwar order was the continuing practice of denunciation to the police—a practice that, as we know, had become something of a tradition in German dictatorships.3 The new authorities, like their predecessors, received letters of denunciation from members of the public, this time often aimed against people who a few years previously may have been seen in SS uniform or who during the "Third Reich" had taken advantage of positions as local Nazi bosses to bully and terrorize their neighbors.4 The authors of the denunciations...