Workshop at the GHI, June 5, 2000. Conveners and moderators: Christof Mauch (GHI), Christine von Oertzen (GHI & Technical University of Berlin). Participants: Susanne zur Nieden (Technical University of Berlin); Brewster Chamberlin (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum); Frank Stern (Georgetown University and Ben Gurion University of the Negev); and Freya von Moltke (Norwich, Vermont). Co-sponsored by the Friends of the GHI.
Scholarly investigations using diaries, journals, and letters as well as testimonials of contemporaries have produced what Jay Winter calls the "memory boom at the end of the twentieth century" (see his essay in this issue of the Bulletin). The translation into English in the 1990s of two important works by eyewitnesses on the resistance to and persecution by the Nazis - Viktor Klemperer's diaries and a collection of letters between Freya von Moltke and her husband, Helmut James Graf von Moltke - prompted the GHI to bring together scholars and a prominent contemporary eyewitness for an extended conversation. (Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1st American ed. New York: Random House, 1988; Count Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya, 1939-1945. 1st American ed. New York: Knopf, 1990.) The aim of this one-day workshop was to spend an afternoon reflecting on the place of "memory" and "witnessing" in our understanding of the Third Reich. Although National Socialism and the Holocaust have been extensively studied, participants in the workshop hoped to gain new insights by examining memory and eyewitness reports.
When the first part of Klemperer's diary was published in Germany in 1995, even those who had read the literature, followed the debates, and watched the movies were gripped by what was more than a personal journal. In Klemperer's words, this was "a record of the everyday life of tyranny." It was immediately hailed as the most comprehensive account of the Jewish experience during the Third Reich. When reading Klemperer's diaries we hear, it seems, "an authentic voice." It is a voice that "speaks out in fear of persecution, repression, and terror." Born in 1881, the son of a well-known Reform rabbi, Klemperer converted to Protestantism and grew up to become a professor of Romance languages in Dresden. Recording his thoughts and feelings in his diary during the 1930s and 1940s gave him strength and sanity: "I shall go on writing," he wrote in May 1942, "that is my heroism."
The historian and literary scholar Susanne zur Nieden began the first session of the workshop by reviewing the literary and historical context of Klemperer's diaries. Zur Nieden reminded us that Klemperer lived in an era when educated people kept a record of daily life. Although the diaries were not initially addressed to an audience, Klemperer - in the course of his exclusion from German society and later persecution - became a chronicler of the daily terrors of Nazi Germany. Through his attempts to connect the personal and the social Klemperer discovered the power of language as a means of constructing social reality and of self-definition: In his writings Klemperer maintained his identity, defining himself as a "true German." Zur Nieden characterized Klemperer's hesitation about publishing his diaries in the immediate postwar period as a true stroke of luck. Accordingly, the diaries appeared, first in German then in other languages, shorn of the burdens and revisions of postwar memory. This is in no small measure part of the explanation for their widespread appeal today.
Brewster Chamberlin presented an overview of the American reception to the diaries and wondered whether the American publisher will be able to recoup the costs of the translation rights. Chamberlin did indicate that the work has gained significant attention in the United States. Unlike Germans, however, American reviewers of the diaries have registered a clear sense of ambivalence. Although reviewers have acknowledged the importance of the more than 2,000-page record in detailing life under National Socialism, Americans are less willing to embrace Klemperer as a Jewish spokesperson. Chamberlin found little sympathy for Klemperer's virulent anti-Zionism, in particular the author's equation of Zionism, communism, and National Socialism. In the same vein, he has observed a disconcertedness with Klemperer's insistence on his identity as a German, his decision not to emigrate, and his refusal to see himself as belonging to a minority community of Jews. Klemperer's American critics also have noted the diarist's narrow-mindedness, hypochondria, thoughtless willingness to endanger friends and neighbors, as well as repeated pejorative remarks about his wife. In stark contrast to their reception in Germany, the diaries appear to suggest to an American audience that there were more "Good Germans" than hitherto assumed. Different assumptions exist among readers on either side of the Atlantic concerning German society's role in the persecution of German Jews: Typically, German readers are more shocked at the extent of open discrimination and violence that Klemperer witnessed.
Frank Stern's presentation focused on the reception of the thirteen-part television series based on Victor Klemperer, which was first aired on German television in November 1999. Stern indicated that the film's director and producers - notwithstanding their claims to the contrary - took noteworthy liberties with the history as Klemperer recorded it in his diary. Stern showed how key elements of Klemperer's story became either sentimental kitsch or cheap attempts to recreate the long-lost German-Jewish symbiosis. Two examples illustrate Stern's point: In the series, Klemperer's last student - a young woman - takes her leave with a kiss. His postwar rehabilitation is at least equally melodramatic: The professor of Romantic languages returns to the university to receive a hearty round of applause from his students. Neither event, Stern makes clear, has any basis in historical fact.
The workshop's second session was devoted to Freya von Moltke and her "memories of Kreisau," as well as her reasons for making her reminiscences publicly available (Freya von Moltke, Erinnerungen an Kreisau 1930-1945. Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1997). The name "von Moltke" has two immediate associations for historians: Before the 1940s it evokes the name of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, a military hero of nineteenth-century Prussia. The second association is with that of Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Freya's husband, who later represented the resistance of "Good Germans" to Hitler. The von Moltkes lived in Kreisau in the eastern Prussian province of Silesia, now part of Poland, in a castle from which they oversaw a thousand acres of land and forest. During the war the Kreisau estate became the meeting place of a group of anti-Nazi resisters, hence the name Kreisauer Circle. When the Nazis discovered the group, many were arrested; the Nazi state killed Helmuth James von Moltke in January 1945. His letters to Freya survived the war; she had hidden them in a beehive.
For von Moltke, writing - in this case letters, not diary entries - also was an act of heroism. Her belief and that of her husband that Hitler would bring about the defeat of Germany was seen by the Nazis as a treasonous act. In her conversation with Christof Mauch, von Moltke recalled memories of her youth in the Rheinland, her holidays in Austria, and her studies at Bonn University. Most of the conversation, however, focused on her life in Kreisau and on the resistance against Hitler. Moltke implored her listeners not to overvalue the importance of the Kreisauer Circle but rather to see it as it actually was: a series of important, if sporadic, discussions among a group of regime opponents from different political camps. At its core, "the Kreis" consisted of young, idealistic friends. Moltke's quick-wittedness, humor, and disarming self-confidence kept her audience in rapt attention. Toward the end of the evening, the audience began to ask their own questions; and after two hours of intense discussion in the GHI Lecture Hall, which was filled beyond capacity, the grande dame of the German resistance left the room to a standing ovation.
Christof Mauch
Christine von Oertzen