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connection to the Nazi movement. As a result, members of the New Left generation felt uninformed or even lied to about events of the past that defined their parents’ generation and, ultimately, the identity of all Germans.
The recollections of Margrit Schiller, who grew up in the new capital of Bonn and later joined the RAF, powerfully convey the reign of silence that many among her generation endured. Schiller’s education about German history ended with World War I.28 Her father, though not a member of the Nazi Party, had fought in World War II. When she asked her parents about the Nazi period, the constant refrain was, “We could not possibly have supported what Hitler did.” About the worst of Germany’s crimes, they “knew nothing.”29 Yet when Margrit was fourteen, her father confessed in a moment of drunken candor that he had tortured a captured Russian soldier to death.30 An additional trauma came when she discovered that songs she was learning on the piano had been written or adapted by the Nazis to promote their cause.31 Thereafter, she disdained all German songs.
For young West Germans, the Nazi past was not only a source of confusion and anger but an impetus to activism. Determined not to repeat their elders’ failings, they reacted strongly to contemporary forms of injustice. In the late 1950s, left-wing journals such as Das Argument developed an understanding of fascism as an extreme response of capitalism to economic crises. The transition in the postwar years to democratic
“Agents of Necessity”
33
capitalism, by extension, did not in itself represent a decisive break with fascism. More than that, young intellectuals saw fascism—following the lead of the Frankfurt School and the iconoclastic psychologist Wilhelm Reich—as a cognitive structure and a cultural condition, manifest in subjects who were at once extraordinarily pliant and dictatorial, submissive and aggressive. In keeping with this view, West German New Leftists condemned the attitudes and behavior of the adult generation—from the defense of order to disdain for nonconformity—as signs of the persistence of the “authoritarian personality” integral to fascism.
More tangibly, students and youth pointed to the considerable linkages in personnel between the Nazi regime and the new German state as evidence of “fascist continuity.” As of 1965, fully 60 percent of West German military officers had fought for the Nazis, and at least two-thirds of judges had served the Third Reich.32 Students clamored to know the pasts of their professors and conducted research revealing that many of them had been affiliated with the Nazis. Initially, their findings were presented in more or less civil ways, often with the cooperation of the institutions whose faculty they investigated. By 1967, however, students began angrily confronting their professors during lectures. In addition, some high-ranking officials in the Federal Republic had been Nazis. Most notorious was the CDU’s Kurt Kiesinger, who years before becoming federal chancellor in 1966 had held an important position in the Nazi propaganda ministry. At a public gathering in 1968, the twenty-nine-year-old Beate Klarsfeld slapped Kiesinger; Klarsfeld, who then made it her life’s work to hunt down Nazi war criminals, described her audacious act as
“the children of the Nazi generation slapping the Nazi face.”33
The fascist past also helped to shape the opposition of young Germans to the Vietnam War. As for American New Leftists, the war was the primary issue around which West German students mobilized. German activists, relative to their American counterparts, were generally well versed in Marxist principles; the SDS and the “Republican Clubs” found in major German cities generated a dizzying array of “working groups”
that meticulously applied Marxism in analyzing contemporary political phenomena. Far from being a conceptual revelation, then, the view of capitalism as
The recollections of Margrit Schiller, who grew up in the new capital of Bonn and later joined the RAF, powerfully convey the reign of silence that many among her generation endured. Schiller’s education about German history ended with World War I.28 Her father, though not a member of the Nazi Party, had fought in World War II. When she asked her parents about the Nazi period, the constant refrain was, “We could not possibly have supported what Hitler did.” About the worst of Germany’s crimes, they “knew nothing.”29 Yet when Margrit was fourteen, her father confessed in a moment of drunken candor that he had tortured a captured Russian soldier to death.30 An additional trauma came when she discovered that songs she was learning on the piano had been written or adapted by the Nazis to promote their cause.31 Thereafter, she disdained all German songs.
For young West Germans, the Nazi past was not only a source of confusion and anger but an impetus to activism. Determined not to repeat their elders’ failings, they reacted strongly to contemporary forms of injustice. In the late 1950s, left-wing journals such as Das Argument developed an understanding of fascism as an extreme response of capitalism to economic crises. The transition in the postwar years to democratic
“Agents of Necessity”
33
capitalism, by extension, did not in itself represent a decisive break with fascism. More than that, young intellectuals saw fascism—following the lead of the Frankfurt School and the iconoclastic psychologist Wilhelm Reich—as a cognitive structure and a cultural condition, manifest in subjects who were at once extraordinarily pliant and dictatorial, submissive and aggressive. In keeping with this view, West German New Leftists condemned the attitudes and behavior of the adult generation—from the defense of order to disdain for nonconformity—as signs of the persistence of the “authoritarian personality” integral to fascism.
More tangibly, students and youth pointed to the considerable linkages in personnel between the Nazi regime and the new German state as evidence of “fascist continuity.” As of 1965, fully 60 percent of West German military officers had fought for the Nazis, and at least two-thirds of judges had served the Third Reich.32 Students clamored to know the pasts of their professors and conducted research revealing that many of them had been affiliated with the Nazis. Initially, their findings were presented in more or less civil ways, often with the cooperation of the institutions whose faculty they investigated. By 1967, however, students began angrily confronting their professors during lectures. In addition, some high-ranking officials in the Federal Republic had been Nazis. Most notorious was the CDU’s Kurt Kiesinger, who years before becoming federal chancellor in 1966 had held an important position in the Nazi propaganda ministry. At a public gathering in 1968, the twenty-nine-year-old Beate Klarsfeld slapped Kiesinger; Klarsfeld, who then made it her life’s work to hunt down Nazi war criminals, described her audacious act as
“the children of the Nazi generation slapping the Nazi face.”33
The fascist past also helped to shape the opposition of young Germans to the Vietnam War. As for American New Leftists, the war was the primary issue around which West German students mobilized. German activists, relative to their American counterparts, were generally well versed in Marxist principles; the SDS and the “Republican Clubs” found in major German cities generated a dizzying array of “working groups”
that meticulously applied Marxism in analyzing contemporary political phenomena. Far from being a conceptual revelation, then, the view of capitalism as
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