In late 1959, with the Cold War in full swing and Eisenhower winding down his presidency, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s iconic The Sound of Music debuted on Broadway to widespread acclaim. Audiences thronged into the Lunt-Fontanne theater, nodding and applauding to songs now enshrined in the canon of popular entertainment: “My Favorite Things,” “Do-Re-Mi,” and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” The film version, starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, premiered in 1965 and endures as a classic to this day, evoking the courtship of the Austrian widower Captain von Trapp and the governess Maria, the sinister Nazis they elude in the aftermath of the Anschluss. It’s a sanitized, popcorn-friendly escapism that gestured, if faintly, to the menace of the Third Reich. That same year Hogan’s Heroes, a sitcom set in a German POW camp, with American inmates outwitting their bumbling captors, premiered on CBS; it would run for six seasons. Journalist William Shirer’s bestselling The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich took a far more serious, investigative approach, winning the National Book Award in 1960.
Hitler and the Holocaust, then, were common subjects of cinema and literature in the United States, watered-down to match American sensibilities. But in postwar Germany they’d been erased. After the Nazis, historian Michael H. Kater’s meticulous, invaluable cultural history, plots an arc through the decades, from the end of World War II to the reunification of capitalist West Germany (or FRG, for Federal Republic of Germany) and communist East Germany (the GDR, or German Democratic Republic). He targets the persistent plague of antisemitism and the FRG’s misguided sense of victimization. His title is ironic: Nazis pop up everywhere throughout this book, as many leading figures had joined the party and actively supported the Reich and were keen to hide their affiliations. There’s no “After” in After the Nazis but rather an excruciating push-pull between generations of musicians, writers, painters, and cineastes, wrangling over a genocide that a nation chose to forget.
As in the landmark work of Hannah Arendt and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Kater explores the banality of evil, how ordinary citizens fell in line behind the Führer and Goebbels. A professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, Kater sprinkles bits of memoir into his narrative. After the Nazis opens on May 1, 1945, with seven-year old Kater drying Hitler stamps on the windowsill of his grandfather’s house near Bremen, where he’d fled with his mother and brother while his father fought with the Wehrmacht. The radio was broadcasting music until a newscaster interrupted with the breaking report of Hitler’s suicide in a Berlin bunker. This anecdote sets the stage for the book, an emotional current; the personal was, and is, political. (Kater’s family later immigrated to Canada when he was a teenager.) In the years just after the war, the Allies divvied up Germany into four occupied zones, sparking the Cold War, as the U.S., Soviet Union, France, and Britain all had specific, varying ideas about the colossal challenges of denazification.
Denazification, Kater argues, was not a matter of atonement. After Stalin erected the Iron Curtain, the Allies gave the FRG a wide berth in reconstructing itself, boosted by the Marshall Plan. Konrad Adenauer, the conservative Catholic who served as chancellor from 1949-1963, presided over rapid growth and historical amnesia, which Kater links to residual Nazi-style nationalism. A kind of German Eisenhower, Adenauer advocated for proper middle-class virtues even as his government exonerated former party officials, including concentration camp guards. He refused to confront the Reich’s dark legacy because he understood West Germans felt little connection to the atrocities carried out in the name of the Fatherland. Hitler may have brought ruin on his people, but the larger cause — a powerful, revitalized Germany, flexing its muscle after the humiliations of the interwar years — somehow remained worthy.
[left: Konrad Adenauer at the microphone, with Willy Brandt]
The Volk rolled up their sleeves. As the late Tony Judt notes in his magisterial Postwar, “To contemporary observers, however, it was Germany’s capacity to recover which seemed the most remarkable of all. This was a tribute to the efforts of the local population who worked with a striking singularity of purpose to rebuild their shattered country. The day Hitler died, 10 percent of German railways were operational and the country was at a literal standstill. A year later, in June 1946, 93 percent of all German rail tracks had been re-opened and 800 bridges had been rebuilt … In April 1945 it seemed to Saul K. Padover, an observer with the advancing U.S. Army in western Germany, that it would surely take the flattened city of Aachen 20 years to rebuild. But within a few weeks he was already recording the re-opening of the city’s tire and textile factories and the beginnings of economic life.”
Kater dubs the FRG’s reboot the Economic Miracle. Its focus blinkered intellectuals and the public; politicians and cultural machers discouraged influences from the outside, particularly rock ‘n’ roll and jazz, with its roots in Black America, entrenched prejudices that Kater encountered as a graduate student in Bavaria, where he played vibraphone under the nom de guerre of “Mike Carter.” After the Nazis leans heavily on developments in music, piling on names and festivals, prizes and rivalries. (Kater seems less invested in, say, literature.) These sections require rapt concentration and patience. A couple of themes bind the period’s artists, though: the suffering of regular Joes (or Josefs) and the blurring of any reference to the Holocaust.
But this erasure couldn’t last. Youthquakes broke out on both sides of the Atlantic. “The 1950s were characterized by, politically, unshakeable stability and, economically, the return of prosperity, predicated on the division between West and East Germany as sanctioned by the Cold War,” Kater writes. “The early trials of the worst of Nazi war criminals were accompanied, culturally, by retrospectives in literature authored by — at the time — youthful participants in war and, related, experimental musicians in the Darmstadt music courses. Experimentation became a hallmark of the emerging arts, as it showed in jazz, radio Hörspiele, or the Informel painting school, sometimes with nods of indebtedness to the United States or France. In the interest of a vibrant democracy, those artists’ critiques extended, in part, to the new materialism that was an outgrowth of the Economic Miracle … As the 1950s saw recurrent anti-Semitism, in the decade following the Germans were in for a fundamental reckoning concerning mass murder and Auschwitz. Culture mavens had to deal with this as well as define their own status, vis-à-vis their mentors and an emergent, restless generation, bent on faulting their parents.”
The Auschwitz trials and the Israeli prosecution of Adolf Eichmann nudged West Germans toward deeper reflection. The truth came out in fits and starts, spurred by a generation frustrated with conventionality. One Auschwitz defendant, the music lover Pery Broad, had contributed his accordion talents while on duty at the camp. “Does music temper human cruelty? Does music temper fascism?” Kater asks rhetorically. His answer is swift and brutal: “In reality, Broad had a perverted sense of aesthetics. In Auschwitz, he had a reputation for killing the most beautiful girls first.” Broad was sentenced to four years in prison.
As Abstract Expressionism gained traction in New York, a similar rebellion stirred in the FRG. As Kater notes, “Abstraction continued to be regarded as an antidote to once-established Nazi art, a path from which one must not stray.” Such prescription was consonant with the inertia of the Adenauer era. That inertia gave way to dynamism. Once the horrors of the Reich were exposed, artists defined themselves “in antithesis to the Nazi past.” A spirit of international cooperation and dialogue blossomed. Gender roles, too, were upended by feminists such as journalist Alice Shwarzer and filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta. Queer art also inched into the avant-garde, embodied by Rosa von Praunheim’s movies and the “slash paintings of the Berlin ‘Wild Youths’ in the 1980s.”
[left: Helmut Kohl with Ronald Reagan]
After the Nazis showcases artists that cut against the grain, as Communism teetered, lighting the way to the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of FRG and GDR. Kater leaves no stone unturned. Luminaries sprang up: Günter Grass, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Fluxus. The vibe was edgy and defiant during the long tenure (1982-1998) of the center-right chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was committed to buttressing relationships with Germany’s allies. (As a teenager Kohl had enlisted in the Hitler Youth.)
After the Nazis is a dense read, befitting the oeuvre of an eminent scholar who’s devoted his career to illuminating a savage ideology. The road toward reunification — an inevitability once the Soviet Union collapsed — was pitted with fierce debates, and Kater goes into the weeds here, brilliantly unearthing egotists and conspiracy theories. He girds his arguments with rich detail, seeking moral purpose in the Germany of today while telling a compelling story. “Was there nothing positive in the nation’s past?” he asks, again rhetorically. “It would take reunification of the two Germanys in 1990 to create fresh political constellations and charge men and women from the culture scene with new tasks.”
[Published by Yale University Press on September 26, 2023, 416 pages, $35.00 US hardcover. Includes 32 color illustrations]