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580 Robert G. Moeller war know that, they remember it. In no time at all, those who win forget.’ This is the lesson that ersatz fathers are able to tell on the eastern front in March 1945, and a decade later it is the cautionary tale that losers in KMG offer the winners of the Second World War as Soviets and Americans faced each other on the front line of the Cold War. Post-war German youth—and postwar superpowers—had much to learn from chastened fathers who returned home from the war sadder but wiser. 34 Veterans of the eastern front, however, also understood that war and militarized vigilance were not the same thing. In the final debate over German rearmament—which took place in late February 1955 as KMG opened in West German cinemas—Heinrich von Brentano, the leader of Adenauer’s party, the Christian Democrat Union, who would become Foreign Minister in June, stressed that Soviets had not ended the war, rather, they had continued it with other means by blockading Berlin and expanding into Korea and Indo-China. Public opinion polls indicated that a majority of West Germans closely followed these parliamentary debates, and the public was remarkably well-informed about the foreign affairs that shaped West Germany’s future. 35 Those who best understood the perils of war—and its potentially perilous legacies—had a particular obligation to keep the peace, and as soon as the ‘western world appeared tired or lacked determination,’ Brentano predicted, the Soviets would ‘make the move from the Cold War to a hot war.’ 36 The enemy in 1945—in the backyards and gardens of the abandoned village Captain Dornberg attempts to defend—was the enemy West Germans confronted in 1955 in the backyard of the Cold War Federal Republic. KMG affirmed other popular memories of the war’s end, which provided variations on the theme of what distinguished soldiers from Nazis. According to the vernacular memory of the war, 37 those most vocal in affirming 34 Heide Fehrenbach, ‘Rehabilitating Fatherland: Race and German Remasculinization’, Signs,24 (1998), pp. 107 27; Robert G. Moeller, ‘‘‘The Last Soldiers of the Great War’’ and Tales of Family Reunions in the Federal Republic of Germany’, ibid., pp. 129 45; Moeller, ‘Heimkehr ins Vaterland: Die Remaskulinisierung Westdeutschlands in den fünfziger Jahren’, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, 60 (2001), pp. 403 36; Frank Biess, ‘Survivors of Totalitarianism: Returning POWs and the Reconstruction of Masculine Citizenship in West Germany, 1945 1955’, in Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: a Cultural History of West Germany (Princeton, 2001), pp. 57 82. 35 Michael Geyer, ‘Cold War Angst: The Case of West-German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons’, in Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years, pp. 380 1; Georg Meyer, ‘Innenpolitische Voraussetzungen der westdeutschen Wiederbewaffnung’, in Alexander Fischer (ed.), Wiederbewaffnung in Deutschland nach 1945 (Berlin, 1986), pp. 31 44; Hans Ehlert, ‘Innenpolitische Auseinandersetzungen um die Pariser Verträge und die Wehrverfassung 1954 bis 1956’, in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Anfänge westdeutscher Sicherheitspolitik, 1945 1956, Vol. 3, Die NATO-Option (Munich, 1993), pp. 235 560. 36 Verhandlungen des Bundestags (Bonn, 1955, hereafter VDB), 2. Wahlperiode, 72. Sitzung, 27 Feb. 1955, p. 3881. 37 I borrow the formulation from Peter Fritzsche, ‘Volkstümliche Erinnerung und deutsche Identität nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Konrad Jarausch and Martin Sabrow (eds), Verletzte Gedächtnis: Erinnerungskultur und Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt (Frankfurt=Main, 2002), pp. 75 98.
What Did You Do in the War, Mutti ? 581 Goebbels’ call for a fight to the finish in the eastern provinces of the Reich had left long before the Soviets advanced, abandoning ordinary Germans to hold off the enemy for as long as possible. In these memories of the end of the war on the eastern front, it was opportunistic party bosses, the ‘gold peacocks,’ 38 identified by their highly decorated uniforms, who postponed evacuation, mouthing pronouncements of German victory while failing to add that the Red Army was at the gates, then fleeing to save themselves, leaving their subordinates behind. Leading Nazis who had condemned as traitors those who questioned the Führer’s will emerged as the biggest traitors of all. They are an absent presence in KMG. Reinecker and Benedek do not have to name them for viewers to know that real Nazis were once there but have long since vanished, leaving it to real Germans in Wehrmacht uniforms to hold off the Red Army. When the mothers first confront the general, they find him poring over maps, studying the Heimat he seeks to defend. He knows the war is lost, but he also knows that in the ‘horrifying weeks’ to come, his ability to delay the enemy’s advance will determine how many Germans escape Soviet terror. In other war films of the 1950s, at least some generals are true believers, but in KMG, even the commanding officer cannot bring himself to mouth empty propagandistic platitudes. On the walls of his office are a barometer that registers the stormy weather blowing westward and sombre oil paintings, not portraits of the Führer. The general, Captain Dornberg, and virtually everyone else in uniform better fits the description of the historian Hans Rothfels, who, commenting on 9 May 1945, ‘ten years after’ reminded West Germans of the courage of soldiers who had experienced ‘the eastern side of the defeat, namely, the expulsion [of Germans from east central Europe] and the [territorial] losses, the loss of a thousand year history and the loss of German unity.’ In an article written for the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, the most important new postwar historical journal in the Federal Republic, Rothfels developed a speech first delivered to students at the University of Tübingen, who had asked this representative of their grandparents’ generation to offer his reflections on the meanings of 1945. Rothfels invoked the memory of those whose ‘struggle, rich with sacrifice, in the defence of the territory of the Heimat ... was carried out to the end with a sense of the military duty to fulfil obligations.’ Their efforts only intensified as illusions evaporated, ‘with no hope of wonder weapons or armies that no longer existed.’ 39 And in early 1955, millions of West Germans knew that some ten thousand of them still languished in Soviet 38 ‘Erlebnisbericht der Frau Wilhelmine von Hoffmann aus Reichenberg, Original, Winter 1956=57, 48 Seiten, mschr.,’ in Bundesministerium für Vertriebene (ed.), Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, vol. 4: Die Vertreibung der deutschen Bevölkerung aus der Tschechoslowakei (1957, reprinted Augsburg, 1994), Pt 2, p. 680. 39 Hans Rothfels, ‘Zehn Jahre danach’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 3 (1955), p. 228.
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