Even a bad novelist would not have come up with this improbable plot: a poor traveling salesman arrives in a small German town, marries the wealthy innkeeper's daughter, buys a cigarette rolling-paper company, joins the Nazi Party, becomes president of the regional Chamber of Industry and Commerce, expropriates Jewish businesses, buys his way into Heinrich Himmler's official Circle of Friends, and enjoys the status of the town's “first citizen” during the Nazi era. After 1945, he is arrested and interned, denazified as a mere “Lesser Offender,” and given a state-backed loan of DM 3 million that he squanders on his son-in-law's bad business propositions. He then claws his way back into polite society and, at his death, is honored as a venerable patrician. The town was Trossingen, in Württemberg. The man was Fritz Kiehn (1885–1980), founder of Efka, a well-known brand of cigarette rolling paper (the company name was derived from his initials, the German pronunciation of the letters F and K).
Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh originally published Fritz K. Ein deutsches Leben im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert in 2000. Ably translated by Casey Butterfield, this English-language version includes a new chapter on the book's reception after its release. It also draws on more recently published sources, notably on the expropriation of Jews, and adds new information about Kiehn's financial improprieties and legal difficulties. As in the original volume, Berghoff and Rauh expertly weave Kiehn's life into the historiography of twentieth-century Germany. They also tell the story of the German Mittelstand (owners of small to medium-sized companies) in the last century.
The first three chapters of the book, on Kiehn's rise to prominence in Trossingen, provide a textbook case of how social outsiders, often social climbers, found their way into the NSDAP during the Depression and then enjoyed twelve years of (mis)rule in their provincial fiefdoms. Berghoff and Rauh then focus on how Kiehn benefited from Aryanization and other forms of corruption during the Nazi years. They also show the difficulties that the NSDAP had in controlling local elites: although Kiehn was subject to several disciplinary investigations, the party ultimately dropped all charges against him. The fact that Kiehn and others were able to evade responsibility caused, in Ian Kershaw's words, “a lingering crisis of confidence in the Party and its representatives, particularly at [the] local and regional level” (98). As the authors intimate, Kiehn's example helps to explain not only the Nazis' rise to power, but also the party's loss of legitimacy and ultimate downfall.
In their analysis of Kiehn's postwar trajectory, Berghoff and Rauh draw on the burgeoning scholarship on West Germany. As they show, most West Germans, even leftists imprisoned during the Third Reich, were reluctant to bring Nazi criminals such as Kiehn to account. After the first postwar years, Kiehn benefited from Konrad Adenauer's decision to integrate former Nazis into the new West Germany. Although morally questionable, Adenauer's strategy paid off in the long run. Indeed, as the West German economic miracle unfolded, Kiehn became a “republican by reason” (Vernunftsrepublikaner, 295). In addition, his generous paternalism helped smooth over class and social antagonisms in Trossingen. At the same time, Kiehn engaged in “communicative shutdown” (296), the denial of one's past so characteristic of Nazi perpetrators. Kiehn came to believe that he was the victim of postwar shenanigans; in his view, for example, the Jewish-owned Fleischer paper factory was returned to its initial owners in far better condition than when he had bought—or rather, stole—the company in the 1930s.
Using the example of Kiehn, Berghoff and Rauh uncover the social history of former Nazi functionaries in postwar Germany. An avid hunter, Kiehn pursued his passion with old Nazi buddies and members of the new democratic elite. He not only entertained widows of Nazi functionaries executed for their crimes, but also Fritz Walter, captain of the West German soccer team that won the 1954 World Cup. No less a person than Baldur von Schirach, the former Nazi Youth leader and Vienna Gauleiter, lived at Deibhalde, the Kiehn estate, for some years after his release from Spandau Prison. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Kiehn's daughter had an affair with von Schirach; in addition, von Schirach's grandson was briefly married to Kiehn's granddaughter. As his web of social contacts indicates, Kiehn deployed a certain finesse in maneuvering through postwar German society.
Berghoff and Rauh are more successful in placing Kiehn within a historical-sociological framework than in analyzing his person. Admittedly, the latter is no easy matter: Kiehn was not given to self-reflection; his letters betray little sense of doubts or anxieties, let alone remorse, that might have plagued a man with his biography. Still, the authors argue that Kiehn's personality traits—his eagerness to hobnob with the high and mighty, his willingness to hire men based on familial or Nazi connections, his intense desire to run a major company (Efka never had more than a few hundred employees)—brought about his business failings. Despite his initial luck with Efka, none of Kiehn's attempted efforts at diversification or expansion produced profits. In fact, it is remarkable that Efka pulled the Kiehn family through the twentieth century, even though mismanagement finally forced Kiehn to give up company control in 1972. Berghoff and Rauh might have explained more fully just how Efka spun off enough profit to allow Kiehn to maintain a luxurious lifestyle while indulging his penchant for largesse—from the building of a community sports facility to the buying of an honorary position as senator at the University of Innsbruck.
As the authors write, their book initially received a frosty reception in Trossingen. Yet, in the fifteen years since the book first appeared, the town, and Germany more generally, have become more willing to examine the past—though through compromise; while the central Kiehn Square in Trossingen has been renamed, the sports facility and a street in a neighboring town still bear Kiehn's name. In the end, it would seem that bad novel plots make for good history. Kiehn's biography offers an illuminating lens through which to view Germany's twentieth century.
