All entries for May 2023

German Veterans of the Second World War: Still “Outside”? (II)

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/homecoming/

German Veterans of the Second World War: Still “Outside”?(II)

Narratives around the German veterans as an obstacle to homecoming

As outlined in the previous part of this blog by conference co-organiser Yara Staets there were a lot of difficulties regarding the process of coming home of German veterans. While the last veterans returned in 1954, they are until today, in a cultural sense, struggling to finally arrive home. This becomes evident in some of the narratives that have emerged and are still emerging around them. On the one hand, they reveal something about the actual fate of the veterans. But, on the other hand, these narratives portray them mainly as victims, not as perpetrators. Thus, the complexity of the stories of the veterans remains mostly invisible. A good example of this is the play The Man Outside[1] (Draußen vor der Tür), created by the former soldier Wolfgang Borchert in 1947. The play, which was a huge success in post-war Germany, adapted or even helped to create the most important of the collectively accepted narratives about German veterans.

In 1947 Borchert referred with his play The Man Outside to the narrative of the German veteran as an “Heimkehrer ohne Heimkehr”,[2] someone who cannot return home, even though he has arrived there. Beckmann, the protagonist of the play, has just returned from the war. He finds that he no longer has a home, as his wife is with another man; he also learns that his son is dead. He has no job, or even food. He is hungry, desperate, and angry: no one cares about him and his needs, and therefore he feels betrayed not only by the military leadership, but also by society. He feels as if his place in his own home country is “outside the door”. With his play Borchert was expressing difficulties of the homecoming veterans at a time when they had no official voice speaking for them.

While Borchert's play underlines the difficulties veterans faced in post-war Germany, it also helps build a narrative that tends to obscure their fate. Borchert describes Beckmann first and foremost as a victim and not as a perpetrator: Beckmann feels guilty for the death of the comrades he was responsible for and blames the military leadership that put him in charge. Also, he blames the society which does not care about his sufferings. The narrative of the veteran as a victim was created by former soldiers immediately after the end of the war. While this narrative seems above all a consequence of the ignorance of the society towards the specific situation of the veterans, it creates at the same time a conflict regarding them and the victims of the Wehrmacht and the NS-regime. Borchert too does not let Beckmann express any feelings of guilt towards victims of the German military. Beckmann does not even mention them. With this, parallels between Borchert's play and the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht”, another narrative created by the former German military personnel after war, can be drawn. This myth was based on the idea that the soldiers, unlike the leaders of the Nazi-regime or the SS, were not responsible for war crimes or the Holocaust, as claimed in the denazification processes. It took a long time, but since the 1980s there has been broader research in the involvement of the Wehrmacht in these incidents and today this myth has been completely refuted.[3]

On the other hand, Borchert's play supports a counter-narrative to the post-war perception that war does not have an impact on the mental health of a veteran. Protagonist Beckmann, however, shows signs of an internal struggle because of his experiences in the war and the post-war period. He is suicidal and he is constantly thinking about taking his own life as he cannot deal with his situation. This is important, as there existed no narrative after 1945 for psychological consequences of the war. The shellshock syndrome of First World War soldiers was attributed to the fact that affected soldiers were genetically inferior. In the Second World War, soldiers with mental health issues were sent to concentration camps or were murdered in other ways.[4] After 1945 it was believed that only work-shy and weak-willed people would show symptoms over a longer period of time. This also had economic reasons: psychological symptoms were not easy to prove and therefore the fear existed that veterans would claim to have them to avoid working. For these reasons, it took a long time even to acknowledge the possibility of mental health problems due to the war. In 1980, the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) diagnosis was included in the DSM-5 manual. And only after the 1990s was it applied to veterans of the 1939-1945 war.

However, today it is widespread to assume that nearly every German veteran was traumatised by war. It is not impossible that the veterans suffered because of their experiences. But it is important to emphasise that the trauma narrative portrays them again more as victims and not so much as perpetrators. It is also ahistorical to ascribe to a whole group a trauma retrospectively, a diagnosis which was created only three decades later.[5] Even the protagonist of Borchert's play is repeatedly diagnosed with PTSD.[6] In spite of the fact that it is difficult to attest in a fictive character a psychiatric diagnosis the author could have no knowledge of, Beckmann shows no concrete signs of traumatisation. He does not seem to feel overwhelmed by his memories of the war or unable to cope with them, a symptom usually associated with trauma. On the contrary, while he is obviously desperate, his dominant feelings are betrayal, anger and self-pity.

The misleading character of the trauma diagnosis also becomes obvious with the narrative tha veterans could not talk about their war experiences because they were traumatised.[7] However, as Svenja Goltermann pointed out, their silence may also be rooted in shame and the inability to incorporate the memory of their deeds as soldiers with their identity as civilians. She sees it as a result of the fact that it was difficult to create a narrative which connected their different experiences and roles in war and peace. Also, she states, German post-war society was not able to incorporate the war experiences of its former soldiers: their contribution to war crimes and the Holocaust, but also their sufferings at the front or after their homecoming. Because of this, there were not many who wanted to listen to their stories about their war experiences.[8] Borchert's play provides again an example for this: when Beckmann tries to talk about his experiences, no one wants to listen to him.

Recently the number of publications which try to tell the complex stories of German veterans is growing. These stories include the horrible deeds as well as the sufferings of the veterans.[9] Nevertheless, today there are more publications about the phenomenon of transgenerational trauma in relation to German veterans than about the soldiers themselves. These publications mainly describe the experiences of the children and grandchildren of German veterans. While it is important to acknowledge their struggles, it is notable that the fate of the veterans in these publications, if told at all, is again reincorporated into a potential victim narrative.[10]

Overall, the presented narratives mostly portray the veterans as victims. They are on the one side created by themselves, to highlight their difficulties or balance those out in which they are identified as perpetrators. But also, they are constructed by the society which cannot deal with the ambivalent role of their former soldiers.

However, as long as the whole stories of the German veterans are only seldom told, they are, in a way, not able to return home. If still not many want to listen to their difficult and ambivalent stories, the veterans of the Second World War remain, even they have returned home long time ago, “outside”.

This indicates that in Germany the process of coming to terms with its veterans and thus with the Second World War is still not completed.

Sue Rae : 24 May 2023 11:02 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

German Veterans of the Second World War: Still “Outside”? (I)

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/homecoming/

In the first part of this this blog, conference co-organiser Yara Staets illustrates the difficulties in the process of coming home for German Second World War veterans. In the second part, she explores some of the narratives that have emerged and continue to emerge in relation to veterans and how they indicate that the process of their home coming was and still is a cultural challenge.

Difficulties in the process of coming home for German veterans after the Second World War

The process of German veterans returning home after the end of the Second World War was difficult in various ways. Germany had not only started the First, but also the Second World War, had lost both, was responsible for the Holocaust, and many different war crimes. The "unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht" meant the end of this military form of organisation and the previous government in Germany, the National Socialist-regime. The government was temporarily taken over by the Allies until in 1949 two new German states were founded.

This situation had a massive impact on war veterans: the eleven million German prisoners of war (POW) did not have to be returned immediately after the end of war. They could be kept in captivity by the Allies and used as labour force as part of reparations payments. Also because of poor conditions in camps, one million died. In addition, some POWs stayed in camps for years, longest in the Soviet Union. From there the last veterans returned only in 1956.[1]

Nonetheless, after arrival in Germany, the veterans were confronted with further difficulties. Many found their houses destroyed by the air raids, their families dead or alienated, and their former jobs no longer available. In addition, every veteran had to undergo a denazification process. This constituted an investigation into how he was involved in the crimes of the Nazi-regime and the SS.

With a negative outcome, veterans could be prosecuted or lose their right to get a qualified job and other forms of help. Even after this the veterans had to compete for jobs, food, financial support, and accommodation with the rest of the population of the war-depleted country. In addition, applications for any of these resources had to be supported by legal documents. Especially veterans who had been absent fighting or in POW camps experienced difficulties in providing the documents, and so these processes often took years. Because of this, a lot of the veterans felt left alone in their process of coming home after the Second World War.

The German post-war society, to some extent, recognised the problems of its veterans.[2] But the main goal of the population after the war was to forget the past and rebuild the country. Late returning veterans especially evoked unwanted memories. Also, while some veterans expected to be celebrated or get special support, they were blamed for the lost war and the difficulties in post-war Germany. This only began to change when veterans were given a lobby, the Verband der Heimkehrer, in 1950.

Overall, only a minority of the veterans could return to their pre-war life. Instead for many the reintegration into the post-war society was not possible: homeless, jobless, hungry, and alone, some turned to criminal activities, an unknown number committed suicide, and a study on 60,000 veterans conducted in Hamburg revealed that their life expectancy was only 45 years in 1954.[3]

Sue Rae : 24 May 2023 10:54 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Why post–war homecoming (also) belongs with the humanities

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/homecoming/

The post-war as conceptual framework has, at least since 1989, belonged firmly in the social sciences. An inter-disciplinary academic cottage industry emerged as waves of democratisation and ethnic conflict engrossed globalised audiences of scholars and practitioners. Sociologists, political scientists, economists, and a smattering of anthropologists, well-funded by the United Nations and myriad global institutes, invented the field of ‘transition’ or ‘peace studies’. At its heart is the triad ‘disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration’ (DDR) which is to take place in each post-conflict situation, from Rwanda, to Cambodia, to the former Yugoslavia. This portion of ‘transition studies’ focusses on ex-combatants and their communities in particular, centring on their ‘homecoming’ after a period of violent conflict. These studies primarily seek to plan for, and analyse existing, programmes that are supposed to neuter ex-combatants and thereby stop them from being a threat to a post-war peace settlement. Hereby, unfortunately, ‘homecoming’ is viewed as a technical problem which requires satisfactory resolution.

Alongside reducing complex situations to a series of structural laws (accompanied by a bevy of diagrams), there is the unfortunate effect in DDR studies of treating ex-combatants as a-historical, a-politicised actors. As Jaremey McMullin points out, this is also a particular result of a racial bias. While Euro-American veterans are portrayed as positive social actors who represent a reminder of a nation’s duty in the ‘homes fit for heroes' mould,ex-combatants in the Global South are a security threat who need to be ‘civilianised’ and pose a threat due to their acquired habitus of violence.^[1] DDR’s focus on the latter means a unfortunate lack of dialogue between the West’s own experience of Homecoming and experiences elsewhere. Homecoming has been happening in the Global South for as long as it has elsewhere, with every community having its own rituals of return and closure. Even if we do consider the dangers of post-homecoming remilitarisation, as one would say in the Eastern Congo today, would not Germany’s Freikorps or the US South’s Ku Klux Klan provide just as fruitful a comparison? On the other side of the ledger, trans-historical comparisons could fruitfully be made between rituals of closure: from indigenous Americans ‘burying the hatchet’ to contemporary homecoming videos of US Army personnel service personnel serving overseas.

For historians the ‘post-war’ represents that era which followed the tumult of 1939-1945, so masterfully captured in the (albeit Eurocentric) work of Tony Judt.^[2] However, loaded in this term is the crucial assumption that we in Europe live in a world indelibly marked by the after-effects of war. Europeans continue to live in the world of May 1945, albeit modified by November 1989. This conceptual importance granted to the ‘post-war’, I believe forces historians and other scholars in the humanities to re-occupy the space yielded to the social scientists of the DDR school. In particular, this applies to the precise moment of ‘homecoming’, the essential crucible in which the post-war is forged. Nathalie Duclos for one has criticised the conceptual gap between historical work on returning veterans in post-World War Europe and North America, and post-1989 DDR work.^[3]

This appeal is for far more than merely history. Literary, art, film and theatre studies, classics, and philosophy all have their place. Kate McLoughlin (keynote speaker at the Homecoming conference), starting with Homer and Xenophon, and going on to discuss the British post-Napoleonic canon, has masterfully indicated the significance of the figure of the veteran for understandings of European modernity.^[4] The root of the question is what homecoming does and says about human subjectivity, which is crucially what the humanities must contribute to the academy as a whole. The anthropologist Kimberly Theidon, working on the aftermath of Peruvian Maoist insurgency, reminds us that while many social scientists employ a global hegemonic discourse of trauma or PTSD, we need to understand ‘locally salient theories of illness, health, agency, and social repair’.^[5] War, in general, is a moment of extreme discombobulation. New identities are adopted, minds and communities are shattered by loss and experiences of extreme violence. Masculinities, femininities, and the boundaries of communities are all reshaped and require sustained academic attention. Efforts to try and rebuild a sense of ‘normality’ from this psychological and physical wreckage are not easily captured by terms like ‘civilianisation’, reconstruction, or demilitarisation, which are favourites of DDR scholars. It is up to scholars in the humanities to critique and dissect such concepts which remain tied to normative frameworks associated with the post-1989 transitions.

1 Jaremey R. McMullin, Ex-Combatants and the Post-Conflict State: Challenges of Reintegration (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 2 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005). 3 Nathalie Duclos, War Veterans in Postwar Situations: Chechnya, Serbia, Turkey, Peru, and Côte D’ivoire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 4 Kate McLoughlin, Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790-2015 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 5 Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

Sue Rae : 17 May 2023 08:52 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Conversation between the Conference Organisers: On the Day

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/territorialbodies/

In this blog post, Charlotte, Lizzie Smith (a PhD student and conference participant)and Maddie reflect on running the conference Territorial Bodies: World Culture in Crisis, which took place in February 2023.

Charlotte: Territorial Bodies 2023: where to start?

Maddie: We arrived at Warwick University’s Humanities building, alongside our team of helpers, Mohammad, Owain, Tara and Giulia. From the outset, delegates engaged in dynamic conversation. There was a genuine atmosphere of warmth.

Charlotte: Lauren’s keynote was such a great way to start the day. She really opened up the questions that then informed discussions throughout the conference.

Lizzie: it was so great to hear from academics so established in their fields!

Maddie: The panels were interdisciplinary in nature, so we were quite intrigued to see how the sessions would unfold. The first two panels – “Embodied Extractivism” and “Aquatic bodies” - featured such fascinating papers.

Lizzie: As an attendee, there was a buzz surrounding which panel to choose, because they all contained elements to spark the imagination. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who wanted to be in two places at once.

Charlotte: Yes, I had the same experience. In the second session, I attended the “Gender Bodies, Space” panel and I was blown away by the level and quality of research presented, as well as the importance of that research in impacting the everyday lives of so many people.

Maddie: The conversations continued over lunch, and it was great to see people sharing ideas in a collaborative way.

Lizzie: Yes, that’s a real benefit of the in-person conference and something we’ve all missed.

Charlotte: I agree. As the day went on and we ironed out some of the initial teething issues, it was great to be able to relax into those conversations. By the third session after lunch, I was fully immersed in the exciting discussions being presented.

Maddie: I particularly enjoyed listening to discussions taking place between people at different stages in their career, especially during the third series of panels, “Bodies and Accumulation” and “Embodied Displacement”.

Charlotte: You’re absolutely right, plus in the final session, the panel I attended had speakers from such varying disciplines, but the chair did such a great job of bringing that conversation into an interesting and creative discussion.

Maddie: For me, a real standout moment was during the Q&A following Kathryn’s keynote address at the end of the day.

Charlotte: Yes! One delegate asked about the importance of breaking down traditional academic silos and recommendations for students in the early stages of their career looking to do the same. Kathryn spoke about who benefits from maintaining traditional academic silos, and who might benefit from breaking away from them.

Sue Rae : 17 May 2023 08:16 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Conversation between the Conference Organisers: The Build–Up

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/territorialbodies/

In this blog post, Charlotte and Maddie reflect on their experience organising the conference Territorial Bodies: World Culture in Crisis, which took place in February 2023.

Charlotte:Do you remember when we came up with the idea for the HRC conference?

Maddie: Yes, I remember - we struggled to pin down the specific theme for a little while. There was a lot of back and forth, until we encountered an article about gender violence in extractive zones

Charlotte:yes, that provided us with a really interesting way of synthesizing our research interests. I think that’s when the idea really came together, and we could start writing the proposal. We then started the to-and-fro of writing and editing the application

Maddie: True, it was really useful to have the support of the HRC administrator Sue Rae during this process, who offered tips on producing a successful application, discussing things like the conference budget, the importance of plugging the interdisciplinarity of the proposed conference etc…

Charlotte: It was so exciting when our application got accepted and we could kickstart the process. We had an initial meeting with Sue where she laid out the timeline for us, and shortly after that we released the Call for Papers and started emailing keynotes

Maddie: I think we hada very clear vision in terms of keynotes from the outset, so we were really thrilled when they agreed to join us. Plus, announcing the keynotes generated some sense of momentum in terms of interest in the conference. I know you’re very proactive, Charlotte, so how did you find the process of waiting for submissions to come in?

Charlotte:Yes, I really wanted to get going – but it was great seeing the abstracts come in and discovering how people interpreted the conference theme.

Maddie: We were surprised by the thematic scope of responses to the CfP

Charlotte:Once we received these responses, we had to make difficult decisions, but I really appreciated your groundedness during this process

Maddie: yes - sadly we had to be very selective because of the limitations of it being a one-day conference. The process of developing panels was interesting because we tried to prioritise conversations between disciplines. We both research in the field of comparative literature, and it was beneficial to gain an insight into cross-discipline approaches and methodologies.

Charlotte:It was great to have that sense of excitement when we were trying to work through the more complicated part of the process, like ordering food, sorting catering and event logistics.

See part 2, “On the Day”, for a continuation of this conversation…

Sue Rae : 16 May 2023 16:01 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem