Source : D. J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany (Yale, 1987), pp.236-242.
Many Germans who supported the Nazi regime, or at least accepted it, believed the ΓÇ£FuehrerΓÇ¥ when he promised that he would deliver them from the abnormal' conditions, which had been brought about by the upheavals of modernisation and the hardships of the depression. Their vision was hardly the perpetuum mobile of a utopian Volksgemeinschaft bent on struggle - the stuff of the leading National Socialists' vague dreams. They were looking for a return to normality 1 , to regular work, to secure planning of their lives and certainty about their own place within the social scheme. Much of this seemed, in the second half of the 1930s, to have come about or to be well on the way to coming about. In face of this long-lost sense of private well-being, various other warning signs were thrust to one side, virtually excluded from everyday awareness: the fact that employment was serving the cause of war-readiness, that terror against community aliens' was continuing, and that the regime's goals and measures were being increasingly radicalised, not scaled down. People ΓÇ£didn't talk aboutΓÇ¥ these things. But they dreamed about them at night. Their dreams betrayed the oppressive presence of anxieties, which were all too willingly denied in the light of day 2 .
An employer, a committed Social Democrat who ran his firm on highly patriarchal lines, dreamed only three days after Hitler's seizure of power about his own future powerlessness, the compulsion to conform and the destruction of personal relationships:
Goebbels comes into my factory. He has the staff line up in two rows, on the left and the right. I have to stand between them and raise my arm in the Hitler salute. It takes me half an hour to bring my arm up, a millimeter at a time. Goebbels watches my exertions like a spectator at a play, without signaling either applause or displeasure. But when I have eventually got my arm up, he says five words: I don't want your salute.' He turns and goes to the door. So I am left standing in my own factory, between my own people, in the pillory, my arm raised. The only way I am physically able to do it is by keeping my eyes riveted on his club-foot as he limps out. I keep on standing like this until I wake up.'
A 45-year-old doctor dreamed in 1934 about the bureaucratised abolition of private life:
After my surgery, getting on for nine in the evening, I want to stretch out peacefully on the sofa with a book about Matthias Gruenwald. But the walls of my room, of my whole flat, suddenly vanish. I look round in horror: all the flats, as far as the eye can see, have lost their walls. I hear the roar of a loudspeaker: 'As per decree abolishing all walls, 17th instant.'
There was not only the sense of the private sphere being exposed to Nazi penetration; the individual's own psychological make-up and personal identity were affected. People who did not wish to be ΓÇ£coordinatedΓÇ¥ and who wanted at least to continue to think and feel, if not to act, against the current, could sense how they had to harden their inner selves: almost to hide from themselves. This too was articulated in dreams:
I'm going to turn into lead. Tongue already leaden, sealed with lead. Fear will go away if I'm solid lead. Lie motionless, shot into lead. If they come, I'll say, Lead people can't stand up.' Oh, no: they want to throw him into the water because I've turned to lead. . .'
An SA man is standing in front of the big old-fashioned blue tiled stove in the corner of our living-room, where we always sit and talk in the evenings. He opens the stove door, and the stove begins to speak in a snarling, penetrating voice [note once more the allusion to the shrill loudspeakers of daytime]: it repeats every sentence we have spoken against the government, every joke we have made. O God, I think: now what's going to happen? What about all my little comments on Goebbels? But at the same time I see clearly that one sentence more or less is immaterial, because absolutely everything we have ever said within these four walls is already known. Yet I also realise that I have always pooh-poohed the idea of built-in microphones, and I still don't in fact believe it. Even as the SA man ties a strap round my wrist to take me away - he uses our dog's lead - I think he's doing it in fun. I even say out loud: 'This isn't serious, surely; it can't be.'
I dream that I am speaking Russian, as a precaution. (I can't in fact speak Russian, and I never talk in my sleep.) I am doing it so that I can't understand myself and so that no one can understand me, in case I say anything about the state - because that, of course, is forbidden and has to be reported.'
When the national organisational director of the National Socialists, Robert Ley, declared:
The only people who still have a private life in Germany are those who are asleep. One young man in 1933 already knew in his dreams that this was not true that an unviolated private life was no longer possible and that the nonpolitical idyll, which the majority of Germans tried to live out in the thirties could not bury the knowledge of horror.
I am dreaming that all I am dreaming about is rectangles, triangles and octagons, which somehow all look like Christmas biscuits, because dreaming is of course forbidden.'
The anxiety-dreams of Germans living under the Third Reich show that the retreat from National Socialist pressures into private life and familiar social circles had its price. Tensions and fears could not simply be left outside the front door. Certainly, an undisrupted family life, or the sort of well-established social solidarity that continued to exist in many workers' housing estates, in Catholic circles and quite often in the countryside, did offer a refuge from the demands of National Socialism. These communities could even give rise to the formation of a kind of ΓÇ£alternative public lifeΓÇ¥ that subsisted below the threshold of Gestapo intervention. But only a minority of Germans lived in such socio-ecological networks, and these networks themselves were not as unaffected as may appear to have been the case.
Retreat into the private sphere and refusal to yield up anything more than the minimum necessary participation in the public stage-management of Volksgemeinschaft still entailed, at the least, passive acceptance of the prevailing order. In addition, these social milieux could escape the arm of the Gestapo only if explicit political activity was utterly discontinued. They were in any case no longer the same milieux they had been before 193 3, even if the people who composed them were the same and their non-political everyday modes of communication had not altered. A clear indicator of this change is the quantity of denunciations of political misdemeanors that came in to the Gestapo from the general public 3 . An analysis of surviving documents of the Duesseldorf Gestapo dealing with people prosecuted for political reasons (in the widest sense) 4 shows that at least one in every four cases handled by the Gestapo was initiated by denunciatory reports from the general public. The Gestapo and the Special Courts had to deal with a flood of reports directed against neighbours, drinking companions, chance acquaintances met on train journeys, and relatives. The thinly-veiled purpose of many of these denunciations was to invoke the aid of the Gestapo in settling a private grudge. Among the Duesseldorf Gestapo case-files mentioned, 24 per cent of the denunciations can be regarded as having been motivated by loyalty to the system; 37 per cent as serving to resolve private disputes. Of the latter group, three-quarters were concerned with domestic disputes, family rows, quarrels in the workplace, business competition and other economic matters.
Many of the situations in which ΓÇ£maliciousΓÇ¥ utterances were made
were notable for their very familiarity, openness and ordinariness. The
regime's demands for loyalty, thpower of its agencies of surveillance
and the co-operation of its informers were ever-present facts: on the
fringes of the surviving social milieux and the private family circle, and
even within them.
Control over everyday social behaviour resulted not only from the
potential presence of informers in the individual's immediate
surroundings, but also from the loyalty reporting operated by the Party
organisations, the so-called ΓÇ£Political AssessmentsΓÇ¥ recorded in the
course of day-to-day matters such as the granting of loans, decisions on
promotion and contacts with public officials 5 . A person's style of
greeting, the size of his donations to the incessant collections (and the
degree of willingness that accompanied them), a style of life in
conformity with the petty-bourgeois norms and morals of the Party's
functionaries, and the behaviour of one's children - all served as indices
of political reliability and were observed by a whole army of lower-grade
Party dignitaries, from the Blockwart (block warden) to the air-raid
warden and NSV collector. It goes without saying that this activity
generated little genuine loyalty but, rather, a style of behaviour in
public and semi-public places in which the acceptability or otherwise of
spoken opinions was constantly kept in mind. Such behaviour was
inevitably marked by loss of spontaneity, calculation and conformity,
and loss of intimacy with, and concern for, others.
The need for self-control, for caution vis-a-vis one's surroundings
and for a calculated weighting of simulated loyalty and sincere aversion
remained so strong that even in the ultimate refuges of private life a
truly autonomous realm, in which one could still be oneself, was not
achievable. ΓÇ£I didn't trust my own backside any more,ΓÇ¥ was how a
Bremen worker summed it up. Could you still be yourself, if you could
so little trust yourself? If you conformed and joined in the parade, you
became merely one interchangeable figure in the mass decor of the
Reich Party rallies; if you held back, all basic everyday relationships still
lost their intimate, accustomed character and had to become matters of
calculation if they were to survive at all. Either way, the end result was
still an individual stripped of social relationships, fighting for himself
alone, ΓÇ£scraping byΓÇ¥.
The ΓÇ£fellow-travellerΓÇ¥ and the non-participant, then, were equally
threatened by the atomisation of everyday life, the dissolution of social
bonds, the isolation of modes of perception, the shrinking of prospects
and hence the loss of the capacity for social action. The draining
experience of wartime life, with its daily descents into the air-raid shelter, aggravated these tendencies even further. By the end of the war the German population, apathetic, exhausted by the arduous performances of daily routine, bereft of all ability to act, could look ahead only to one thing: for it all ΓÇ£somehowΓÇ¥ to be over.
It may seem paradoxical that the atomisation created by the National Socialist brand of mass mobilisation and the attempt to sustain resistance within everyday life should both have had the same effect of withdrawal into privacy. This is not, however, mere theorising after the event: the process was early noted by alert observers at the time. An extract from the SOPADE ΓÇ£Reports on GermanyΓÇ¥ for November 1935 is a case in point:
The purpose of all the National Socialist organisations is the same. Whether we are talking of the Labour Front or Strength through Joy, the Hitler Youth or Labour Service, in each case the organisation's purpose is the same: to ΓÇ£includeΓÇ¥ or ΓÇ£look afterΓÇ¥ the ΓÇ£national comradesΓÇ¥, to make sure that they are not left to their own devices and, as far as possible, to see that they do not come to their senses at all. Just as empty restless activity prevents a person from doing any serious work, so the National Socialists are forever providing excesses of excitement with the express aim of preventing any real communal interests or any form of voluntary association from arising. Ley recently said as much quite openly: national comrades were not to have a private life, and they should certainly give up their private skittles club. The aim of this organisational monopoly is to rob the ordinary man of all independence, to suffocate whatever initiatives he might take to create even the most primitive forms of voluntary association, to keep him at a distance from anyone who is like-minded or merely sympathetic, to isolate him and at the same time to bind him to the state organisation. The effects are inevitable. Occasionally one can hear working men or women express their appreciation of Strength through Joy, and comment: ΓÇ£Nobody ever bothered about us before.ΓÇ¥ Sure enough, the state did not previously regard it as its' job to send rotas of working men and women off to the theatre in their ΓÇ£free timeΓÇ¥. Previously, it was a point of pride for the workers to ΓÇ£botherΓÇ¥ about such things for themselves. But many people will prefer the state-run forms of pleasure and ΓÇ£relaxationΓÇ¥ because they are less trouble. If that is the way things are, then clearly it cannot be just a side-issue for us to show the workers that one or another particular achievement has come about because they stood firm, ΓÇ£shoulder to shoulderΓÇ¥: this task becomes a central feature of illegal active work.'6
The essence of fascist control of the masses is compulsory organisation on the one hand and atomisation on the other.
During the war, in November 1942, the Communist resistance newspaper, Der Friedenskaempfer (The Peace Fighter), distributed in Berlin and in the Ruhr district, likewise traced the absence of a German resistance to the fragmentation of social relations, modes of perception and forms of behaviour:
Why have the people not yet been able to give stronger voice to their hatred of the war and against the war-guilt of the Hitler gang? Why can Hitler, who is now faced by the condemnation and animosity of a majority of the people, nevertheless continue to take the people's name in vain, and commit in its name the vilest crimes? The simple answer is that it has not yet found itself as a people again and has not yet united against the enemy within.'7
Hitler turned the people into a collection of individuals who denounced one another and feared one another. Everyone had a special uniform and everyone ran around with different badges of rank. But it was not only a question of externals. National comrades were undermined intellectually by refined, demagogic propaganda and through force and terror. The people were split up into innumerable castes and tribes, and the Hitler regime was always able to play off one national comrade against another and one social stratum against another.
The Nazis had set out to impose a new order on the disquieting complexities and social upheavals that the modernisation of the twenties had brought with it: as they promised, to bring harmony. The visionary force of their ideas, however, was never sufficient to generate more than some half-baked attempts at reorganisation, attempts which soon came to a standstill or fell foul of jurisdictional wrangles between competing internal power blocks, while the regime's hectic dynamism swept forward, in compensation, to new campaigns. But the Nazis, with their terror apparatus, did succeed in breaking up the complex jigsaw of society into its smallest component parts, and changing much of its traditional coherence almost beyond recognition. By the end of the Third Reich, and of the world war the Reich had staged, the vision of a ΓÇ£national communityΓÇ¥ had dissolved.
Instead, there lay a society in ruins. Ruined not only in a material sense (though the post-war period was to show how astonishingly well it had actually held up) but psychologically, morally and in respect of its social bonds. If the Third Reich could boast any achievement, it was the destruction of public contexts and responsibilities and the dislocation of social forms of life, even in traditional environments which provided some measure of refuge and scope for resistance. Private spheres of bwere impoverished and isolated, relapsing into a self-serving individualism devoid of all potentially dangerous social connections and meanings. The Volksge-meinschaft that had been so noisily trumpeted and so harshly enforced became, in the end, an atomised society.
In the immediate post-war period there was an attempt on the part of the political culture to fill this vacuum by joining the short-lived but powerful international trend towards an anti-fascist left-wing hegemony 8 . After the onset of the Cold War, however, the traditional patterns of political culture in Germany reasserted themselves. Yet, spurious though the brief anti-fascist hegemony in Germany may have been, the ΓÇ£restorationΓÇ¥ political culture of the 1950s was equally artificial, even if its effects were more pervasive. With an anxiety touching on the grotesque, post-war German society clutched at the values and standards of behaviour of the ΓÇ£good old daysΓÇ¥ before 1933 - or, better still, before 1914 - and behaved as though nothing had happened in the interim.
Yet if ΓÇ£restorationΓÇ¥ was a veneer - promising security, normality and continuity, while beneath the surface people's lives remained marked by the uncertainties that had prevailed since the 1910's - the genuinely integrative, and highly modern, dynamism of post-war society was making itself felt none the less, in the shape of economic expansion 9 . The mood of Wirtschaftswunder and take-off now profited from the very destruction of tradition and recasting of standards of behaviour brought about by the Third Reich 10 . Part and parcel of the change were the new type of worker, achievement-orientated, individualistic and prepared to trade high productivity for high wages; the modern nuclear family, isolated in its private life, satisfying its social needs in the market place; and the growth of modern mass consumption, leisure and mass media.
The break-up of socio-cultural environments, which began under the Third Reich, with the smashing of political and religious clubs and associations and the intrusion of political control into everyday life, and the corresponding destruction of communal social experience, together maintained their dynamic advance even after enforced political loyalty and surveillance had gone. The National Socialists' pervasive intervention in society had meant that it was impossible in 1945 simply to resurrect the conditions of 1932. The disappearance of contexts and traditional forms of life that is characteristic of modern societies in general continued to apply to Germany too. The atomisation of society, however, took on a new connotation as the dynamic, achievement-orientated, high-consumption industrialism of the fifties emerged. For most people, the opportunities for integration which in the thirties had been promised but not always delivered, were now realised. Volkswagen, Volkseigenheim, Volksempfaenger - a car, a home and a radio (and later television) set of one's own - these symbols shed the ideological overtones of the Nazi era. After many detours, the normality they stood for had been attained.
References:
1. Ulrich Herbert has pointed out to me, in the context of the Essen project Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930ΓÇô1960', that interviews show how powerfully people's memories are structured according to alternations between normal' and non-normal times. In these interviews the years between the midΓÇô1930s and the irruption of war into everyday life ΓÇô the latter date varying from individual to individual (1939ΓÇôc. 1941) ΓÇô are seen as normal times'. See Ulrich Herbert, Good Times, Bad Times', in History Today , vol. xxxvi, February 1986, pp. 42ΓÇô8.
2. A contemporary collection of dreams of Germans from the 1930s, with retrospective commentary, is: Charlotte Beradt, Das Dritte Reich des Traums , Frankfurt, 1981: subsequent quotations, ibid., pp. 7, 19, 25, 37, 41, 5, 42. For a penetrating interpretation of the material, see the after word by Reinhard Kosellek, ibid., pp. 117ΓÇô32. Cf. also: Mario Erdheim, Die tyrannische Instanz im Innern. Wie totalitaere Herrschaft die Psyche beschaedigt', Journal fuer Geschichte , vol. 4 (1982), no. 2, pp. 16ΓÇô21.
3. See Peter Huettenberger, Heimtueckefaelle vor dem Sondergericht Muenchen 1933ΓÇô1939', in Bayern in der NS-Zeit , op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 435ΓÇô525; Martin Broszat, Politische Denunziationen in der NS-Zeit', Archivarische Zeitschrift , 1977, pp. 221ff.
4. Reinhard Mann, Politische Penetration und gesellschaftliche Reaktion ΓÇô Anzeigen zur Gestapo im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland', in: Soziologische Analysen beim 19. Deutschen Soziologentag , ed. Rainer Mackensen and Felizitas Sagebiel, Technische Universitaet, Berlin, 1979, pp. 965ΓÇô85.
5. Dieter Rebentisch, Die ΓÇ£politische BeurteilungΓÇ¥ als Herrschaftsinstrument der NSDAP' in Peukert and Reulecke, op. cit., pp. 107ΓÇô25.
6. Deutschland-Berichte der SOPADE, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 1375f.
7. Quoted in Peukert, Die KPD im Widerstand , op. cit., . 435.
8. Lutz Niethammer, Rekonstruktion und Desintegration: Zum Verstaendnis der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung zwischen Krieg und Kaltem Krieg', in: Politische Weichenstellungen im Nachkriegsdeutschland 1945ΓÇô1953 , ed. Heinrich August Winkler, Geschichte und Gesellschaft , Sonderheft 5, Goettingen, 1979, pp. 26ΓÇô43.
9. Hans-Peter Schwarz, Die Aera Adenauer 1949ΓÇô1957. Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland , vol. 2, Stuttgart/Wiesbaden, 1981, especially pp. 375ΓÇô452.
10.Helmut Schelsky, Die skeptische Generation. Eine Soziologie der deutschen Jugend , Duesseldorf/Cologne, 1957; id., Wandlungen der deutschen Familie der Gegenwart , Stuttgart, 1955; Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany , op. cit.
