A GERMAN LIFE BEGINS with an extended series of close-ups of the ancient visage of Brunhilde Pomsel, the “German life” examined in the documentary by directors Christian Krönes, Olaf S. Müller, Roland Schrotthofer, and Florian Weigensamer. Eye-level profile shots of Pomsel's wizened cheeks and eyes (she was 103 at the time of filming) are set against extreme low angle shots of her chin and neck, at once sinewy and slumped with age. These images are intercut with a few shots of explanatory text that give us the basic outline of Pomsel's involvement with the infamous Joseph Goebbels, for whom Pomsel worked as a secretary until the very end of the Nazi era. The sequence is soundless except for the faint slight rasp of Pomsel's breath and the occasional licking of lips, acoustic reminders that we are being drawn into an almost painful degree of intimacy vis-à-vis the film's subject. A kind of hovering sensation results from the shot combination, as the viewer, guided by the intrusive camera and editing, circles around Pomsel at an improbably close range and waits for her to begin to speak. The result is an opening sequence with startling specular intensity that thrusts us into a position of alert and uncomfortable viewing.

The exaggerated proximity of the shots in this opening sequence not only fuels a feeling of standing much too close to a stranger, but also compels us to contemplate the markers of Pomsel's extreme age. This is augmented by the film's black-and-white scale, chiaroscuro lighting, and the minimalist staging, which places a simply-clad Pomsel against a solid black background that disappears, leaving her illuminated face as the only object for our contemplation. At least for the viewer with film-historical training, there is an inevitable association with the work of theorist Béla Balázs such as Der sichtbare Mensch (1924), in which he idealistically opined that the close-up had the particular capacity to reveal the essence of a person. Here, the close-ups seem to enlist us as detectives, encouraging us to read her face for the signs of who she was and who she is now.

IN MARCH 2013 the television miniseries Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (Generation War) premiered on German television's ZDF station. With a hefty run time of 4.5 hours, the series (directed by Philipp Kadelbach and released by TeamWorx studios, the heavyweight of German historical television today) promised to introduce today's audiences to the generation that came of age during the Second World War. The release was accompanied by extensive media fanfare, including an interview with producer Nico Hofmann and journalist Frank Schirrmacher, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) under the boldly declarative title “Es ist nie vorbei” (It's never over). The phrase stemmed from Schirrmacher, a co-publisher of the FAZ and a vocal supporter of the film, who just three days earlier had urged viewers of all ages to gather before their televisions and seize the chance to create dialogue between postwar generations and the ever-dwindling number of Germans who experienced the war firsthand. In the FAZ interview, he insisted on the continued relevance of “es,” that is, the “it” that is “never over”:

I.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS VOLUME is to assess the manifold ways in which German studies today engages with the Holocaust and its legacy. Although from the vantage of today, the validity of the Holocaust as a subject in German studies may seem obvious, it has by no means always been a given that North American Germanists should pay deliberate attention to representations of the Nazi genocide, in either their scholarship or their teaching. In fact, the development of this disciplinary focus has a long and complex history that continues to unfold today. While it is not possible to locate the origins of this engagement in a single catalyzing moment or figure, one important starting point is the publication in the Autumn 1978 volume of Unterrichtspraxis of an article entitled “The Germanist and the Holocaust.” Written by University of Massachusetts in Boston scholar Alfred Hoelzel (1934–96), the article urges university-level instructors of German to offer general education courses about the Holocaust taught in English using chiefly literary texts. “We Germanists,” Hoelzel writes, “have a special expertise—and, therefore, a special responsibility—for teaching the Holocaust.” With this statement, Hoelzel, an Austrian-born Jew who fled Nazi persecution in 1939, argues for a deliberate and targeted introduction of Holocaust studies to the general university curriculum in the United States and elsewhere; moreover, he makes the case that Germanists, in their role as interpreters of German history and culture, are precisely the people to accomplish such a task. He maintains that scholars of German are especially poised to offer a critical introduction and evaluation of the events and experience of the Holocaust by virtue of their expertise with imaginative literature, which, according to Hoelzel, “cuts through the data, logic, and empirical evidence of the historian and the social scientist to mediate a more direct, intuitive understanding of truth and reality—particularly the inner reality of the psyche, of emotion, and of human interactions.” In addition to possessing unique facility with this material, Germanists bear a particular duty in the classroom to address the cultural products and legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust, something Hoelzel notes that his colleagues are hesitant to do or often even resist outright, preferring to focus instead on the crowning achievements of German culture.

WHEN FLORIAN HENCKEL VON DONNERSMARCK’S Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, FRG 2006) first appeared in commercial and festival theaters, audiences and critics both in Germany and internationally embraced its dramatic treatment of life under the oppressive regime of the former German Democratic Republic. Set in 1984, the film is a thriller about the intertwined fates of an East German author, his lover, and the State Security (or “Stasi”) agent hired to track their movements. Ultimately, it becomes a tale of redemption for the two central male characters: author Georg Dreymann (played by Sebastian Koch) successfully smuggles out a groundbreaking article on GDR suicide rates, in large part thanks to covert assistance provided by his watcher, Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), who transforms from a Party hack to a rebel after becoming convinced both of the corruptness of his agency and the moral rectitude of Dreymann’s political and aesthetic project. Although von Donnersmarck admitted that the figure of Wiesler had no historical antecedent, he insisted on the larger truth of his film, and with its muted color palette, studious replication of mundane detail, and tragic sweep, the film bears all the formal hallmarks of the sort of contemporary German historical cinema that more commonly has turned its attention to conjuring the era of National Socialism. The film garnered strong audiences worldwide and dozens of film prizes, including numerous Film Awards in Gold at the 2006 German Film Awards, the 2006 Friedenspreis des deutschen Films (or Peace Prize in German Cinema, also known as the Bernhard Wicki Film Award) for its director, and in 2007, the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

In the laudatio for the Friedenspreis, former German Vice Chancellor Hans Dietrich Genscher hailed the film as an important and felicitous intervention: “Dieser Film kommt zur richtigen Zeit, … in einer Zeit, in der DDR-Nostalgie wie eine Art geschichtlicher Weichspüler zu wirken beginnt” (This film comes at the right time, a time in which GDR nostalgia has begun to act like a softener on the fabric of history).

Recuperating the German Soldier

ON 11 AUGUST 1950 a carefully selected commission composed of former German Wehrmacht officers convened at the behest of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. They were charged with drafting a position paper on the possibilities for German rearmament — a subject that had been discussed in political circles since the earliest days of the Federal Republic but had gained new international support through the events of the Korean War. What emerged from the meeting was the so-called “Himmeroder Memorandum,” a top-secret document that outlined in roughly forty pages a series of political and psychological rationales for the restoration of the German military. The memo served as a foundational text for the German army, not only for its detailed discussions of military structure and planning, but also for its articulation of a new concept of soldiering. At the forefront of this latter effort was the young Wolf Graf von Baudissin, who would become a leading figure in the West German effort to rethink the German soldier’s function. During the Himmeroder discussions, Baudissin took the occasion to push for two concepts that would eventually define the ideal Bundeswehr participant: the principles of “innere Führung” (inner guidance) and “der Staatsbürger in Uniform” (the citizen in uniform). Both notions were meant to aid in the construction of a new form of German military, no longer reliant upon a Prussian code of absolute obedience and instead promoting a more democratic institution compatible with the preservation of civilian liberties.

The memorandum pursued a patently missionary project. In order to influence Germans’ negative perceptions regarding national defense, the study advised that the Federal Republic and its Western allies should take as its first priority a comprehensive project for the “rehabilitation of the German soldier.” Many of the suggestions offered by the commission appear to the present-day observer as part of an obvious effort to retouch the past and foster the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht,” notably the release of Germans convicted of crimes against humanity, as long as they had acted under orders and not violated laws preexisting the National Socialist state, and the cessation of all official disparagement of Wehrmacht soldiers including those drafted into the Waffen-SS.