This poem, published in an early postwar edition of the German-language pacifist journal Der Friedensbote, encapsulates a vision of modern war that circulated among German peace activists during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is an image of war as arson on a massive scale, of strategic bombing campaigns that burned cities and civilians to ashes. Of course, the less than subtle allusion here is to the aerial assaults carried out on select German cities by British and American forces during World War II, which inflicted tremendous damage, population displacement, and loss of life in and around cities including Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, and throughout the Ruhr industrial basin. Some 131 locales were subject to and an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 deaths resulted from air assaults that used the tactics and weaponry of area and firebombing.Footnote 2 Read with this recent history in mind, the stanza evokes images of the wartime Allies as criminals and Germans as their civilian victims.
An unsympathetic reading of the stanza might see in it an attempt to exonerate German civilians from responsibility for National Socialism, World War II, and even the crimes against humanity committed by Germans in the name of the Volk. There is a well-developed literature that explores the politicization and functionalization of the trope of the German as victim in the construction of new collective identities after World War II.Footnote 3 Scholars explain how “rhetorics of victimization” equated German suffering with the suffering of Germany's victims and facilitated German resistance to accusations of collective responsibility for National Socialism, the Third Reich, and World War II.Footnote 4 Of course, not all expressions of victimization from the immediate postwar era follow this form. This article attends to one such example, underscoring the multiple sources and valences of “memory” production. In so doing, it asks whether “memory regimes” can be linked together; specifically, whether postwar German discourses on vicitimization and colonialism were connected in a process of mutual reconfiguration.
Scholarship on the rhetoric of victimization relies on a variety of sources, ranging from official reports, commemorations, and propaganda to personal testimonies and character studies in literature and film. According to Wulf Kansteiner, these are the artifacts of “memory makers [. . .] who selectively adopt and manipulate” intellectual work product and cultural traditions into items for mass consumption.Footnote 5 Authors and artists, politicians and official spokespersons are the usual suspects; social-movement actors are not. Scholars rarely attend to social movements as sites of memory production. There are several prominent exceptions to this rule, notably, refugee associations of the 1950s and student activists of the New Left during the 1960s. Even in these cases, however, activism is treated as a transparent vehicle for the expression of concrete interests (e.g., irredentism, generational conflict). The fact that particular interests are framed and articulated through activism is deemed irrelevant to its contributions to the public discourse on German identity.Footnote 6
There are a number of reasons that social and protest movements are largely ignored as historical arenas of memory production. Primary among them is that scholars of social/collective memory concern themselves with the construction of national identities. Accordingly, they look to the most obvious and prominent discursive and visual contributions to the collage of elements that contribute to national memory. Minor articulations are generally looked upon as failed contributions, of little or no value for scholarly analysis. Leaving aside the slippage here between notions of a majority and a national identity, it is, indeed, the rare social movement that registers on a national scale.
Then there is the role of suffering in postwar recollections of World War II and its centrality to postwar patterns of identity construction. Scholars such as Gilad Margalit describe an apologetic trope animated by reluctance on the part of the German populace to engage critically with the crimes against humanity committed by Germans and their proxies during World War II. Suggested is a lingering German attachment to or culpability in the Third Reich, at the very least a refusal to accept collective responsibility for crimes perpetrated in the name of the German nation.Footnote 7
Against this background, it may seem counterintuitive to think of social-movement actors such as pacifists perpetuating an image of the German as victim after the war. They can hardly be seen as apologists for National Socialism or the cult of a Schicksalhafte Volksgemeinschaft that it fostered. While individual pacifists may have survived the Third Reich by making common cause with the regime, on the whole, pacifists were persecuted politically. Those who did not emigrate ran the risk of incarceration. Inaction was by far the most common response of persons who had organized for and promoted peace during the interwar years. Owing to the age structure of this community of activists, a number of prominent activists died from natural causes during the Third Reich. As a result, a leadership vacuum accompanied the postwar organizational deficit in the wake of National Socialism.Footnote 8
Of course, there were pacifists—prominent representatives of the so-called “Other Germany”—who emerged to lead peace organizations after 1945. As this article explains, among them there were persons who portrayed Germans collectively as victims of National Socialism, war, and the Allies after 1945. Given that the current historical literature on the self-perception of Germans as victims cannot account for pacifist evocations of this historical trope, it is worth asking what their example contributes to scholarship that focuses on more prominent makers of the most well-established and widely shared collective memories.
This article elaborates on the origins and contours of a specific pacifist representation of the German as victim that was articulated by Theodor Michaltscheff. Michaltscheff was “one of the greats” of postwar pacifism. For ten years he served as chairman of the Internationale der Kriegsdienstgegner (IdK), the main West German branch of the War Resisters' International (WRI), and for twenty years as the organization's chief publicist. Like its parent organization, the IdK was an association of individuals who refused to take up arms and who believed that personal refusal to take part in war was ultimately the only way to prevent its outbreak.Footnote 9 Independent and reclusive by nature, Michaltscheff proved to be a controversial chairman of this highly decentralized organization. His relationships with successive cohorts of local leaders were strained at best. At the same time, he was a remarkably prolific propagandist. Michaltscheff had committed his life to war resistance, and, after 1945, this primarily meant publishing. He was editorially responsible for the IdK's main monthly publication, Der Friedensbote, later renamed Die Friedensrundschau, from 1947 to 1966. His editorial work extended further to include an extraordinary number of pamphlets aimed at educating a younger generation about the methods and possibilities of nonviolent struggle.Footnote 10 Several of these pamphlets were printed in runs of 60,000 to 500,000.Footnote 11 On this basis alone, one has to acknowledge that Michaltscheff played a key role in how the IdK presented itself to its members, the wider community of peace activists, and, later, the West German public. In addition to the length and nature of his organizational service, one must also consider that as a Bulgarian, Michaltscheff occupied an unusual location in the nascent public culture of occupied Germany. He was able to raise his voice in criticism of Allied occupation policies and practices at a moment when the German populace was treated as a subjugated people, to be seen but not heard.Footnote 12
Michaltscheff's pacifism echoed Mohandas Gandhi's teachings on and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience. Drawing on Hindu cosmology and Jain teachings on compassion and nonviolence, Gandhi promoted ahimsa, a state of nonviolent existence, as well as individual self-awareness and responsibility for making truth manifest in the world. Satyagraha is the term that Gandhi coined for cleaving to the truth in one's thoughts and actions. The movements that he championed against discrimination in South Africa and British imperialism in India demonstrated how formidable a psychological tactic Satyagraha could be when used as nonviolent resistance on a mass scale.Footnote 13 Michaltscheff was a committed follower of Gandhi's teachings. He saw himself as an interpreter of those teachings for postwar Germans and a western audience in general.
In his voluminous postwar writings, Michaltscheff measured a variety of issues against a Gandhian yardstick. It is striking how he drew upon Gandhi's teachings, first, to criticize perceived Allied malevolence toward and misdeeds against Germans, and, second, to promote the principles of nonviolence as the basis for German political reconstruction and renewal after 1945. Regarding Allied malice, in many of Michaltscheff's writings, criticism of occupation policies devolved into expressions of outrage over the area bombing of German cities during the war. Indeed, one finds consistent reference to the air wars in Michaltscheff's writings. In this regard, it is important to note that Michaltscheff was a resident of Hamburg and lived through the area bombing of the city in summer 1943, which laid waste to the built environment and killed some 40,000 of its inhabitants. His criticisms of Allied actions were grounded as much in personal experience as in ideological principle. Gandhian teachings became a means for Michaltscheff to shape his personal experience and trauma into a rhetoric of collective victimization more appropriate to the causes of peace and political renewal.
Michaltscheff's example entreats us to revisit the trope of the German victim in several ways. It raises questions about who contributes to collective identity construction, the arenas of its construction and, specifically, the role played by social movements and social-movement ideologies therein. His example also raises questions about possible relationships among multiple memory regimes. Consider the idealized characterization of Gandhi that takes shape in Michaltscheff's writings against the backdrop of seemingly unjust British actions, driven by supposedly base motives. Michaltscheff's characterization of Gandhi must be examined for the tell-tale signs of what Susanne Zantop called “postcolonial amnesia,” or the repression and rewriting of colonial narratives after World War II.Footnote 14 Given the way that Michaltscheff justified his portrayal of Germans as victims via reference to a postcolonial memory under construction, his example leads me to ask, first, whether (and, if so, how) one can speak of a relationship between memory regimes and, to be more specific, whether the search for a usable past after 1945 implied a reconfiguring of perceived relationships of Germans to former colonized peoples. In a manner akin to Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory, I approach Michaltscheff's writings as a nodal point of overlap at which pacifist ideology facilitated a reciprocal exchange between representations of the postwar moment and postcolonial memory.Footnote 15
Michaltscheff's Satyagraha
By his own account, Michaltscheff's experience of World War II played a crucial role in his turn to active war resistance, conceived as individual commitments to nonviolent action that collectively represent a challenge to militarism. From what little evidence there is of Michaltscheff's life and politics prior to 1945, he had not been particularly active politically. Born Theodor Michaltscheff Baklaroff on April 20, 1899, in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, the son of peasants, we know that he was once a revolutionary anarchist and had embraced principled nonviolence by late 1923. Having spent more than a year in prison for refusing conscription into the Bulgarian armed forces, he fled his homeland after the military putsch of June 1923, eking out a meager living first in France and later in England. In 1930 Michaltscheff moved to Germany, where he dropped his Bulgarian surname and enrolled at the University of Hamburg. Five years later he defended a doctoral dissertation on William Godwin, the English social reformer, forerunner of British anarchism, and husband of Mary Wollstonecraft.Footnote 16
Germany in the 1930s was hardly a hospitable environment for a foreigner with his political leanings and background. Out of necessity, though also for reasons of principle and temperament, Michaltscheff largely avoided political activity during the Third Reich. That said, he did not withdraw entirely from public action. Indeed, his advocacy on behalf of foreign forced laborers in Hamburg during World War II would later win him praise as their “real consul.”Footnote 17 Though Michaltscheff's charitable work could have put him in considerable danger, he remained safe thanks to the efforts of his dissertation advisor and the Bulgarian General Consul, to whom Michaltscheff had been of assistance. Whatever the reasons, Michaltscheff had to endure searches of his apartment by the Gestapo during the Third Reich, but no more harassment than that.Footnote 18
The Bulgarian consulate's protection brought a degree of normalcy to Michaltscheff's life in extraordinary times. On this basis he was later able to claim to have experienced National Socialism and the war as neither a Bulgarian nor a foreigner in Germany. Rather, he claimed to have “shared his fate with the people of [Hamburg],” particularly “when in the burning nights of bomb attacks entire quarters sank into debris and ashes.”Footnote 19 Here and elsewhere, Michaltscheff asserted that the civilian experience in cities such as Hamburg was typical for the German experience of the air wars in general. As will be discussed below, the civilian was an important category for Michaltscheff. It represented both the typical German and the typical victim of modern war. In it, he collapsed the differences between victims and types of suffering. Through the rhetoric of the civilian, Michaltscheff asserted personal experiences of the air wars as typical for Germans under attack on the home front.
Of course, Michaltscheff's war resistance represents more than a response to the experience of wartime suffering. According to Guido Grünewald, his war resistance built upon two foundations: a rejection of warfare in all its forms, and an embrace of the Christian commandment to love one's neighbor. These commitments established the basis for a politics of social reform that precluded militarism and warfare from the outset. Like so many of his contemporaries, Michaltscheff believed that wars were produced by specific sociocultural circumstances and that lasting peace would require social transformation. The “true” pacifist sought to change social circumstances and was thus a reformer as well.Footnote 20 While ideologically grounded, Michaltscheff's views were not radically out of step with the public mood in occupied Germany and the early Federal Republic. As evidenced by the multiple Länder constitutions that initially legitimized war resistance, the antimilitarist spirit of the postwar moment was pervasive and strong.Footnote 21
Michaltscheff's sectarianism became clearer as the Cold War set in and forced the western occupiers to rethink their plans for Germany. While German militarism continued to haunt Germany's erstwhile enemies, in general, the German Question of the late 1940s and 1950s thematized German rehabilitation through integration into mutually beneficial economic, political, and, eventually, military alliances.Footnote 22 In these relationships, the Federal Republic's first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, saw a path toward greater state sovereignty and national security.Footnote 23 These were goals that the average citizen could understand, appreciate, and support.Footnote 24 Against the grain, Michaltscheff continued to preach the principles of war resistance, criticizing geopolitical developments and domestic concerns (e.g., rearmament, conscription) from a Gandhian perspective.
Even before the Cold War set in, and despite the enormity of the proposition, Michaltscheff had devoted himself to the task of translating the principles of war resistance into an idiom that might speak to German disappointments, disillusionments, and needs. This meant both literally translating English-language articles from Peace News and War Resister into German, and explaining the principles underlying war resistance and the WRI-Declaration.Footnote 25 The war resister considers war to be a criminal act, because “it misuses man as a means for political and economic ends.” War is a crime against all involved and against humanity in general, “against all that is dear to man and holy before God.” In light of the pervasive, permissive, and profound impacts of warfare, the war resister must marshal his inner strength to stand alone against the tides of militarism and all forms of war, be they aggressive, defensive, revolutionary, antifascist, in the name of democracy, and/or sanctioned by a higher authority.Footnote 26 The WRI's pledge states, “War is a crime against humanity. I am therefore determined not to support any kind of war, and to strive for the removal of all causes of war.” It represents a decisive commitment to human dignity and life, driven by an “unconditional solidarity” with humanity.Footnote 27
Clearly, Michaltscheff understood war resistance as something more than conscientious objection. In addition to the personal refusal to fight, war resisters should refuse to work in industries that produce goods for war or in any way that their labor frees up resources in the service of war. He described a “positive, life-affirming stance” made manifest in the “voluntary renunciation of the destruction of human life, homes, and cultural goods,” and he wrote of social harmony—of a society freed from class conflict, racial hatred, “misunderstood patriotism,” militarism, and “not least of all [. . .] egoism.” In short, “The war resister strives for a social order of freedom, equality, and justice that allows every man the material and spiritual possibilities for the full and perfect unfolding of his being.”Footnote 28 He placed considerable emphasis on these life-affirming aspects of war resistance, in part to counterbalance the name of his organization, which suggested a narrow mandate and attention to conscientious objection over the positive and (vaguely) productive aspects of resistance. “Peace activism,” he believed, “must be above all constructive.”Footnote 29
To convey the possibilities of a life lived according to the principles of war resistance, Michaltscheff dedicated considerable space in Der Friedensbote to introducing a pantheon of pacifist role models for postwar Germans. These portraits illustrated what it meant and looked like to lead a life in accordance with the principles of nonviolence. Included in this series were biographical sketches of persons past and present, such as Rabbi Leo Baeck; WRI General Secretary Grace Beaton; U.S.-American abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe; WRI Chairman H. Runham Brown; Norwegian polar explorer and Nobel Peace Laureate Frithjof Nansen; the German humanitarian and missionary Dr. Albert Schweitzer; Dick Shepard, the founder of the British Peace Pledge Union; Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy; Austrian author and Nobel Peace Laureate Bertha von Suttner; and, of course, Mohandas Gandhi.Footnote 30
Special attention was paid to Gandhi. Described as one of “the greatest men of our age,” with “a power greater than the atom bomb,” Gandhi's commitments to nonviolence in theory and practice made him an icon of war resisters around the globe.Footnote 31 Michaltscheff published numerous articles and pamphlets on the British-trained lawyer whose teachings on and practice of civil disobedience guided campaigns for Indian civil rights and national liberation from British colonial rule.Footnote 32 Noted for his “unending patience and love [. . .] even for his enemies,” Gandhi was described in heroic and reverent terms as someone who rejected war and political injustice, “makes no compromises,” and “never conceals his mistakes.”Footnote 33
These articles highlight Gandhi's personal journey of discovery and attempt to maintain fidelity to truth in all aspects of his life. Gandhi promoted individual self-awareness and responsibility for making truth manifest in the world. Again, Satyagraha is the term Gandhi coined for cleaving to the truth in one's thoughts and actions. When deployed on a mass scale in the forms of noncooperation and nonviolent resistance, it pushed British officials in 1930s India to take aggressive measures against nonviolent protesters, publicly exposing the structural violence of colonial rule and forcing the British to question the legitimacy of the imperial project. As Michaltscheff well understood, however, Satyagraha was more than a tactic. The Satyagrahi “obliges himself to refuse obedience to bad laws, to follow loyally the path of truth, but [also] to refrain from violent attacks on life, person, and property, and to rescue the enemy by risking his own life.”Footnote 34
Michaltscheff was by no means the first person in Germany to contemplate Gandhi's teachings and their meaning for Europeans. A spectrum of interwar intellectuals had written on Gandhi, from Martin Buber and Franz Kobler to Romain Rolland.Footnote 35 In 1928, Kobler included a translation of Gandhi's “The Theory and Practice of Passive Resistance” in an edited volume, entitled Gewalt und Gewaltlosigkeit. Handbuch des aktiven Pazifismus.Footnote 36 In his own contribution, entitled “Gandhis Verhältnis zur abendländlischen Friedensbewegung,” Kobler dismissed the prospects of Satyagraha's successful application in Europe. Characterizing deep-seated and unbridgeable differences between occidental and oriental perspectives, he argued that the west and the east had distinct and incompatible visions of and approaches to peace. Whereas European peace activism built upon Enlightenment commitments to universal Reason and attended to the relationships among states and the creation of a static international legal order, Satyagraha concerned itself with “the unmediated relation of man to life.” According to Kobler, Gandhi envisioned the daily efforts of the individual to embody truth. Gandhi's teachings thus represented “not a message of eternal peace, but of a struggle of the sub specie aeternitatis.”Footnote 37 Underlying these divergent approaches to peace work were distinct life ways. Kobler explained via reference to “India's spirit”:
Gandhi's received belief in the caste system, in every man's own Dharma, excludes an abstract, inflexible moral imperative. From this belief [in Dharma] flows a depth of tolerance hardly comprehensible to western man, [a tolerance] revealed in Gandhi's every expression.Footnote 38
Conversely, Europe appeared to be anything but fertile ground for Satyagraha. Gandhi's teachings and actions may have demonstrated the possibilities of “a nonviolent life orientation” beyond the constraints of a “rational disposition toward peace,” but they did not provide a model for Europeans to emulate.Footnote 39
Michaltscheff rejected Kobler's view of nonviolent resistance as an expression of an oriental mentality that had nothing to offer occidental man. He believed that this argument relied on stereotypes of passive easterners and active westerners that could not be sustained. First of all, Michaltscheff argued that the masses everywhere were equally inert and passive. There was also the fact that under Gandhi's leadership the Indian people had proved itself “as disciplined and ambitious in their movement” as organized German labor.Footnote 40 Elsewhere, Michaltscheff highlighted the structured, mass political character of Gandhi's movement in India, which Gandhi apparently adapted from protest techniques initially developed by European and American labor movements.Footnote 41 Extending the discussion of western influences on Gandhi, Michaltscheff cited Tolstoy, the U.S.-American naturalist Henry David Thoreau, and the English social critic John Ruskin, in addition to Christian teachings that complemented Gandhi's Hindu and Jainist beliefs. Indeed, Michaltscheff stressed the Christian overtones of Gandhi's teachings, pointing out that “Gandhi himself said that the New Testament, especially the Sermon on the Mount, went straight to his heart, and that he owes to the New Testament every bit as much as to the Bhagavad Gita.”Footnote 42
Michaltscheff thus challenged interwar assumptions about unbridgeable differences between realms of eastern spiritualism and western rationalism. Instead, he and his colleagues sought to identify common ground between them. Consider the following description of Gandhi as “[e]xample and guide—showing the Christian Occident the decisiveness and uncompromising Christian behavior of this non-Christian, in whose wake [one] sees the salvation of the occident from its perils, tangled in a web of purely material thought.”Footnote 43 Emphasized here was Europe's spiritual deficit. Rationalism was not referred to as Europe's nature, but rather as a condition of imbalance that Gandhi and the orient could help Europe overcome. Against Europe's “purely material way of thinking,” Satyagraha offered an internally consistent way of life grounded in commitments to human life and respect for one's fellow man, even one's oppressor. It fostered a person who, despite his instincts and prejudices, heard and obeyed his “inner voice.”Footnote 44
Michaltscheff believed that the “inner voice” of conscience was universal to the human condition, and attention to it was necessary for true freedom. Conscience was what bound us as humans and in humanity. It represented a corrective to the socially and spiritually destructive imbalance of the occidental life ways that led to militarism. This was what made Gandhi's example so powerful an object lesson for European pacifists. Manifest in “a life-form and life-posture,” Satyagraha represented the dialectical negation of “science and wisdom” in recognition of humanity and human dignity.Footnote 45
Through this line of argument, Michaltscheff sought to engage German cultural concerns of the moment and bring them into dialogue with a wider world of ideas. The antinomies of science/wisdom and Macht/Geist found expression in a civilizational divide between occident and orient. Michaltscheff appears to have recognized that Gandhian Satyagraha and European critical theory functioned via similar logics of negation. He sought to capitalize upon this in writings that presented war resistance to postwar Germans.Footnote 46 Thus eastern spiritualism was characterized as an antidote to excessive western rationalism, and Satyagraha as the dialogical negation of both in a universal human condition.
While he preached about the dignity common to all men, Michaltscheff's argument still evoked—and, indeed, relied upon—salient cultural differences between east and west. For example, in much the same way that Gandhi said that he had rediscovered Hinduism through his study of Christianity, Michaltscheff offered Gandhi's example as a way for occidental man to reinvigorate his true, Christian self.Footnote 47 There is a parallel here to the effect ascribed to European encounters with the orient in literature. In Michaltscheff's tracts, Gandhi played the part of an “epistemic foil” in a singularly European discourse on cultural identity.Footnote 48
Allied Perpetrators, German Untermenschen
Whether the topic was the Allied conduct of the war and occupation policies, or, later on, West German rearmament, military conscription, or the deployment of nuclear weapons on either side of the iron curtain, Michaltscheff measured Allied policies and the prospects for postwar political renewal against a Gandhian yardstick. One striking element of his initial postwar writings was how Gandhian teachings functioned in them as a means to shape Michaltscheff's personal experience of the wartime era into rhetoric of collective victimization more appropriate to the causes of peace and political renewal. It was also in these early texts—through his criticisms of British wartime and postwar practices—that the linkage between postwar and postcolonial memory became clear.
It was, Michaltscheff wrote, “[f]irst during the war [. . .] as the bombs thundered over Hamburg and thousands found [themselves] in an ocean of flames” that he committed himself to collective, nonviolent action as a means to create a world without war. Born out of the “lessons of suffering” and a dawning appreciation of war as “the most potent of all evils,” he developed a newfound willingness to participate in collective action.Footnote 49 As he wrote to the WRI's H. Runham Brown, the war years were formative for him.
Having experienced all the horrors and atrocities of the air-raids and the war, I'm more then [sic] ever convinced that not only is war a crime, but it is the greatest and most abominable crime against humanity in general and against the soul of man in particular. I hope however that suffering has taught people to hate war, and to believe in and strive towards universal peace and brotherhood.Footnote 50
Life in wartime Hamburg left an indelible imprint on Michaltscheff's person and propaganda. He frequently returned to these “lessons of suffering” in his postwar writings. Indeed, they became a central motif in the portrait of modern war that emerged out of two decades of Michaltscheff's postwar writings.
Cities set ablaze were but the physical manifestation of what made war criminal. Invoking Gandhian principles, Michaltscheff characterized the aerial bombardment of German cities as a violation of human dignity. It was a crime, he wrote, “against everything that is precious to man and holy before God.”Footnote 51 Writing from the standpoint of principled nonviolence, Michaltscheff thus universalized the theme of suffering during wartime. This explains his tendency to attend to the total numbers of persons killed and wives widowed, as well as to the total numbers of homes and buildings burned to the ground in cities across the continent and, indeed, the globe. Michaltscheff insisted upon the collective responsibility of all wartime belligerents for this destruction, and he downplayed the distinction between assailants and defenders; perpetrators and victims; between the multiple roles played in and the multiple experiences of lives impacted by war. In his works, German suffering was considered to be no more justified than that of any other wartime belligerent.Footnote 52
As previously discussed, “the civilian” played an important role here, as it represented the typical victim of modern war. In it, the different experiences of war and suffering disappeared. Focus on the civilian as victim allowed Michaltscheff to underscore the universality of suffering. At least this seems to have been his intent. In practice, he wrote primarily about the experiences of German civilians to correct a perceived imbalance and focus by other commentators on German acts of war and war crimes. No one should forget, he wrote, that there were “war criminals on the other side as well.”Footnote 53 Given the attention paid by Michaltscheff to the area bombing and destruction of German cities, it was but a short step from his characterization of the sufferings of wartime civilians to his later depiction of the postwar German as a listless child, “burned” ideologically by National Socialism and literally by Allied bombs.Footnote 54
The characterization of the German as victim informed Michaltscheff's criticism of British occupation policies. As mentioned previously, it was in fact in his writings on the occupation that the Allies first appeared as wartime perpetrators of crimes against Germans and humanity. Michaltscheff was an early and sharp critic of British occupation policies, which he felt were driven by a base desire for vengeance. He laid out his criticisms in a letter to the WRI's Brown in mid-October 1945. It was subsequently published as a pamphlet, entitled “Germany: Democracy in Peril,” which found distribution in both the United Kingdom and the United States.Footnote 55
Michaltscheff wanted to see those responsible for the war punished. At the same time, he dissented from British occupation policies that he considered retributive. It was wrong, he wrote, “to raise a hue and cry against a whole people which was no less a prey to Nazism than the Polish, Czech or most other peoples of Europe.”Footnote 56 Germans were portrayed here as victims twice over, of the Nazis and the Allies. Some two decades later Michaltscheff would recall how “[t]he Germans had suddenly become second- or third-class humans, [they] had become Untermenschen.”Footnote 57
Vindictive British occupation policies represented a moral failure, a lost opportunity, and a danger. Predicated upon selective memories of the war, they failed to acknowledge that war was a dirty business; that there were war criminals on all sides of the conflict; and that it was “of no use” to have one criminal accusing the other of crimes.Footnote 58 Michaltscheff dwelled on the selective memory of the Allies: “the people who ordered the wanton destruction of the German towns and the killing or burning alive (liquid phosphor!) [of] hundreds of thousands of German women and children.”Footnote 59 Drawing comparisons between Imperial Britain and Nazi Germany, Michaltscheff wondered whether Englishmen would like to be held accountable for crimes perpetrated in India by the East India Company or by the British army in South Africa. British occupiers conveyed no appreciation for the life of the average German civilian during wartime.Footnote 60
For Michaltscheff, the hypocrisy was unbearable. Not only were the Allied victors wrong to perpetuate the idea of collective German guilt for Nazi crimes, they themselves had used—and continued to use—“nazi methods.” On this basis, he concluded that “conquering democracy proves to be no better than nazism.” The consequences for the formation of a peaceful and democratic Germany were serious. The populace was bound to feel disappointment at occupation policies that refused to distinguish between Germans and Nazis, which could lead to renewed nationalist sentiment. By late 1945 Michaltscheff expressed a fear that those Germans who had looked enthusiastically upon the Allied invasion had begun to lose heart and look back favorably on the Third Reich.Footnote 61
Against this background, he elaborated on Gandhian principles of nonviolence. The British ought to have modeled just behavior that reflected a belief in the possibility of personal, ethical transformation. Again, this was a core principle of Satyagraha and reflected the distinction Gandhi drew between injustice and the unjust. As the Mahatma wrote in Non-Violence in Peace and War, “Satyagraha is never vindictive. It believes not in destruction but in conversion.”Footnote 62 In the words of Heinz Kraschutzki, one of Michaltscheff's colleagues, the nonviolent struggle does not target the person, “but rather his misdeeds.”Footnote 63 The Allies should have approached those Germans who supported National Socialism—including former members of the Nazi Party—as individuals whose eyes might be opened to the truth of human dignity, and not objectified and punished them out of what Michaltscheff felt were base motives. After all, he wrote, the vast majority of participants in the war were themselves victims, men damaged by acts that they had been required to perform.Footnote 64
Michaltscheff frequently evoked National Socialism in his criticism of occupation policies. The aforementioned reference to Germans as Untermenschen, where the comparison of postwar Germans to Jews under Nazi rule was both clear and perverse, was no isolated example. The “great tragedy” of the moment lay in the Allied decision to come as conquerors instead of as liberators.Footnote 65 By vilifying Germans collectively and treating them as enemies, the Allies lost an opportunity to lead by example. Democracy, Michaltscheff argued, could only be taught through example, through democratic means, and by people who lived up to its principles. He believed in democracy, just not in British pedagogy.Footnote 66
The problem was compounded by occupiers who enlisted Germans in what Michaltscheff considered unjust attempts at denazification. As Manfred Görtemaker explained, denazification evolved into “a complicated bureaucratic procedure that did not confine itself to cleansing public office and industry of functionaries and members of the NSDAP, but [. . .] laid claim to the liberation of German society as a whole from the spirit of Nazism.”Footnote 67 In early 1946, British authorities contacted local representatives of the Internationalen Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit (IFFF) and the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (DFG) in Hamburg and offered to release pacifist prisoners of war from custody if their respective organizations would help the British track down Nazis in hiding. Representatives of both organizations welcomed the offer, describing it as “very generous and humane.”Footnote 68 Michaltscheff, who spoke on the subject at a DFG meeting, rejected the British proposal outright. He condemned it and the entire “holy war” on fascism then in vogue among occupiers and Germans alike. Indeed, he intimated that it had become a sign of bad taste and a lack of good manners not to oppress former Nazis.
I would go even so far as to say, that we, who do not join that [hue] and cry against the Nazis, must summon almost as much moral courage for it as we did during the Nazi-system in resisting the Nazis, notwithstanding the fact that we are not exposed to the same actual dangers anymore than formerly.Footnote 69
Perhaps one could not expect more than retribution from people who “burnt alive tens of thousands of women and children by means of liquid phosphor.”Footnote 70 Pacifists, however, had no business denouncing anyone to the occupying authorities.
It is said that ninety-three percent of Germans are informers. During the Third Reich they denounced anti-Nazis, now they denounce Nazis. If this is so, we should leave the dirty work of informing to this ninety-three percent to do. We are in any case a small lot (not even 0.05 percent of the people), and they, the informers, better understand their craft.Footnote 71
Less sardonically, Michaltscheff spoke in defense of underlying principles. He rejected the idea, advocated by representatives of both the DFG and the IFFF, that pacifists should police their ranks and scrutinize the pasts of those who wished to join peace groups. “[A] past proves nothing at all, for people do change (!)[,] and as we cannot read in a man's heart [. . .] we'll have to rely on his signed declaration.”Footnote 72 He reminded his fellow activists of the possibility of ethical transformation—a core principle of Gandhian Satyagraha—in an article entitled “Verbrechen ohne Verbrecher”: “Our hope and our confidence rest on the fact that the masses of humanity are normal (i.e., without criminal predisposition), and that therefore what is good, what is noble, and what is moral can be achieved.”Footnote 73 Such a stance was incompatible with attacks on individuals. Pacifists who pursued the latter risked turning their peace organizations into “antifascist associations.”Footnote 74
Michaltscheff's dissent from the position of fellow pacifists over the nature and means of denazification was symptomatic of fundamental disagreements about the nature of pacifism. To those activists whose commitment was not to active nonviolence per se, but to the formal, systematic regulation of interstate conflict resolution, Michaltscheff sounded like an apologist.Footnote 75 Their response to him was swift and severe. At the DFG meeting where the British proposal was discussed, Michaltscheff was shouted down. “From all sides there came a howl, and [one heard] ‘Throw him out!’ and ‘disguised Nazi!’” Michaltscheff believed that were it not for the DFG's local chairman, Max Stierwaldt, he would have been physically assaulted.Footnote 76
This hostile reception may have had as much to do with the messenger as with his message. Michaltscheff's relationship with local DFG leaders had been tense, bordering on hostile, from his very first attempt to organize an independent group of war resisters in Hamburg after the war's end. DFG leaders saw their organization as a national umbrella structure, within which conscientious objectors should remain. Michaltscheff's organizational efforts were characterized as those of a wrong-headed foreigner who could not possibly understand the German predicament, and whose efforts undermined the DFG.Footnote 77 For his part, Michaltscheff turned the tables on his critics, chastising their lack of ideological commitment and willingness to participate in the wholesale persecution of former Nazi party members. Stated bluntly, “The sufferings of the Jews are not an excuse for starting a holy war” against the people who inflicted their misery. The concentration camps did not give “carte blanche” to people for the “whole persecution” of yesterday's perpetrators.Footnote 78
Several aspects of Michaltscheff's arguments are worth noting. He was by no means the only critic of Allied, and specifically British, behavior to emerge during the immediate postwar years. Within less than two years of Germany's capitulation, the mood of the populace had turned from one of “sullen acceptance” of defeat and occupation to one of “intense criticism” of the British occupation authority.Footnote 79 German frustrations and ire had multiple sources, including the denazification program and demontage, British requisitioning of housing under conditions of severe shortage, as well as the British Fraternisierungsverbot as part of an attempt to keep their distance from the occupied population. In polls taken in late 1947, half of the Germans surveyed asserted that British occupation policies were self-serving and aimed to weaken Germany as an economic competitor.Footnote 80 One cannot forget the lack of foodstuffs that plagued parts of occupied Germany before the currency reform of 1948, and how seeming British indifference to the plight of starving Germans soured the latter on the former.Footnote 81 Whereas the average British consumer received an allowance of 2,800 calories per day, the average German allowance was officially cut in late winter 1946 from 1,500 to 1,000 calories. So serious was the shortage, the British cabinet warned that without new supplies the ration would be cut further to 700 calories. Both the socialist publisher Victor Gollancz and George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, observed that this ration was less than the lowest amount meted out to concentration camp inmates during the war.Footnote 82 Still, British public opinion seemed more concerned with the cost of the occupation than with the fate of the German population.Footnote 83
As the reference to concentration camps implies, Michaltscheff was not the only observer of the occupation concerned about British recourse to “nazi methods.” British commentators such as Gollancz returned from trips to Germany to criticize “the Herrenvolk mentality” expressed among the British officers there.Footnote 84 There were sufficient travelers between the U.K. and Germany who reported back on conditions in the British zone to make an impact on British political debate. MPs not only criticized the over-administration of German affairs, but in the case of some 40,000 persons held in concentration camps without due process of law, some also wondered aloud whether “in attempting to spread and foster democratic institutions in Germany, we are slipping into the use of one of the most odious features of the Nazi rule.”Footnote 85 Other MPs expressed a more general concern that occupation policies ultimately would prove counterproductive. Far from discrediting “Nazi values,” the British were generating skeptics and ill-will toward Great Britain and the democratic values it claimed to represent.Footnote 86
As Germans in the British zone were granted greater leave to express their views publicly, one finds that Michaltscheff's views on the occupation and the war were not nearly as isolated as his sectarian politics would make them seem. Widespread strike activity during the summer of 1947 expressed popular discontent with venal occupiers and a seemingly aimless occupation.Footnote 87 Meanwhile, memorial events called on local residents of Hamburg “not to forget” the victims of the bombing war, while the Hamburger Abendblatt turned readers' attention to “nights of fire” from the “catastrophic weeks of 1943.”Footnote 88 Michaltscheff's claim that Allied area bombing constituted a war crime was consistent with the public statement of a local fire official, who claimed that the bombing's effects were extreme, exceeding those of the atomic bombing of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.Footnote 89
Similarly, Michaltscheff was not the only observer to draw an analogy between British colonial practices and policies of occupation. According to Michael Ahrens, British occupiers themselves envisioned the occupation of Germany in terms of “Indirect Rule.”Footnote 90 This is hardly surprising given that, as Barbara Marshall reminds us, a considerable number of former colonial administrators were employed in the British zone of occupation. Their “indifference” to German opinion was in part a product of their past experience, “since for many of them it had never been necessary in remote parts of the Empire to ‘sell’ British policy to the natives.”Footnote 91 British feelings of superiority were not suffered easily by sections of the German populace, who, according to Giles MacDonogh, “grumbled that they had been turned into a Kolonialvolk [. . .] like the Indians.”Footnote 92
The analogy rested on more than superficial similarities or the fact that as occupiers, the British “slipped easily into the imperial mode.”Footnote 93 Postwar Britain remained an imperial power, with material obligations toward the indigenous peoples of its dominions. These commitments were tested in the wake of World War II when London had to contemplate the division of scarce foodstuffs between occupied Germany and the British subcontinent, areas of both of which faced conditions of malnutrition and famine. To which population did Britain have a responsibility? If both, were its responsibilities like in kind? Should the needs of one people take precedence over the other? Was it acceptable for any child to starve? British MPs responded to these questions with a diverse range of answers.Footnote 94 Ultimately, what is striking is the comparison itself, which circulated within British and, eventually, German public discourse.Footnote 95 For his part, Michaltscheff drew on Britain's dual role as an imperial power and the regional occupying authority to introduce Gandhian nonviolence in terms that he felt would be meaningful to a German audience.
Michaltscheff presented pacifism in the German context as war resistance, which is to say as a struggle against war and for peace that was “not animated by hatred and fear which are also crimes against humanity, but by the desire for peace, freedom, fellowship, and if possibl[e] by love.”Footnote 96 Guido Grünewald rightly noted that pacifism and nonviolence “symbolized by individual acts of war resistance have become virtually synonymous in the Federal Republic.”Footnote 97 This was by no means the case in 1945, however. A cursory overview of the history of German pacifism reveals how broad the term's usage had been during the Wilhelmine era, and that its definition remained broad (if contested) during the interwar and postwar years.Footnote 98 By contrast, Michaltscheff asserted a narrow definition of pacifism against the grain of both German history and competing definitions formulated by his fellow activists within the postwar community of pacifists.Footnote 99 Despite his apparently sincere wish to forge greater cooperation and community among them, his insistence upon his own principles and their correctness contributed to disagreements within and helped to fracture the ranks of peace activists anew.
The imprint of Gandhian Satyagraha on Michaltscheff's war resistance is clear. Michaltscheff's ideal war resister was a devotee of Gandhi's teachings on human dignity who strove to apply those teachings to all aspects of his life. As indicated by the way he measured the actions of Allied occupiers against a Gandhian yardstick, Michaltscheff also understood the principles of Satyagraha as the basis for postwar political renewal and provided a productive alternate reading of the occidental/oriental divide. At the same time, Michaltscheff mobilized idealized images of Gandhi and eastern spiritualism—images that relied heavily upon standard European tropes of the colonial Other as spiritual, pure, and authentic.Footnote 100 Like the subjects in much orientalist literature, Michaltscheff's Gandhi promised to “reinvigorate” western man, who might slough off his “civilized” shell to reveal his true, Christian self.Footnote 101
Finally, Michaltscheff never referred to Germany's own colonial past or the victims of German colonial pursuits in the context of his pacifist anticolonialism. This is hardly surprising. The horrors of the air war on Germany and the immediacy of occupation drew his attention to the British as the poster children of (colonial) violence and oppression. Based on analogies between practices of imperial administration and Allied occupation and between colonial resistance and postwar political renewal, Michaltscheff painted pictures of unscrupulous Englishmen and German civilians who were victims of their own and foreign governments. His characterizations of Germans as subjects of occupation policy implicitly compared the position of Germans under Allied tutelage to that of colonial peoples around the globe living under British rule. In the manner that he presented Germans as the civilian victims of war and occupation, Michaltscheff contributed to the myth of German suffering that proved such a “powerful leitmotif of post-war German political life.”Footnote 102 One may also ask whether (and, if so, how) these same speech acts informed German revisions of colonial narratives after World War II.
Probing the Margins of Public Culture
By the mid-1950s, the airs wars—so formative for Michaltscheff's concept of modern warfare and civilian victimization—had been “crowded to the margins of public commemoration,” playing only a minor role in West German public culture.Footnote 103 Robert Moeller rightly notes that the expulsion of Germans from central and eastern Europe, as well as the continued incarceration of POWs in Soviet custody “took pride of place” in public memory.Footnote 104 The victims evoked were not civilians per se, but members of the nation who suffered at the hands of the Federal Republic's current, Cold-War enemy. Pacifists were not immune from shifting geopolitical priorities and preoccupations. In an impassioned speech against West German rearmament, for example, the peace activist and parliamentarian Helene Wessel (Center Party) evoked the approximately 500,000 German POWs in Soviet hands.Footnote 105
At the same time, the bombing of German cities was not exactly a taboo subject.Footnote 106 How could it be when the material legacy of bombing, such as unexploded canisters of phosphorous, continued to endanger the populace of cities such as Hamburg?Footnote 107 Pacifists continued to remind their public about past German suffering, which frequently took on universalizing (Christian) overtones.Footnote 108 Consider the cover of Die Friedensrundschau from March 1950. It presented a photograph of a pyre of burning corpses in Dresden during February 1945 under the headline “Falls Sie vergessen haben.” The image appears to be one taken by the Dresden-based photographer Walter Hahn, who defied a prohibition to document the city in the wake of Allied area bombing.Footnote 109 The accompanying article described the photograph “as a reproach for all those who appear to have forgotten the true face of war and speak blithely of remilitarization, armament, and war.” The fate of Dresden testified to “the fate of nearly all large German cities” at the hands of already outdated means of waging war. One only had to recall Hiroshima and the fact that modern technologies enabled a single bomb to destroy in minutes “more people than did the firebombs and explosives on Hamburg during all six years of war!” Before Germans embraced the Cold-War politics of fear and rearmament, Michaltscheff asked them to reflect on this image—“with the protruding women's legs and children's hanging heads, with the indifferent trampling of soldiers on piles of corpses”—and ask themselves whether they wished to be responsible for similar “heroic deeds.”Footnote 110
A comparable article, entitled “Falls Sie vergessen haben sollten,” was published in the July 1953 edition of Die Friedensrundschau to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Allied attacks on Hamburg.Footnote 111 This article, an anonymous eyewitness account of thick smoke, stultifying heat, suicides, and the charred limbs of bodies, is simultaneously more personal and general.Footnote 112 Yet like the piece published in March 1950, it evoked a specific and intimate German relationship to the horrors of war against the tide of the Cold War.
In these articles, personal memory substituted for a collective experience of the air wars. They presented a common experience that never existed and that Robert Moeller criticized for the way it obfuscated the multitude of experiences and perspectives of different victims.Footnote 113 Of course, Moeller was not referring to Michaltscheff, but rather to the trend among bona fide “memory makers” who emphasized personal memories of war and drew moral equivalencies between victims.Footnote 114 The pacifist, too, personalized and functionalized the recent past.Footnote 115 His example presents a challenge for scholars who draw a sharp divide between public and private discourses on German suffering, who fail to account for the ways in which public representations of suffering drew on and mediated lived experience and personal testimony.Footnote 116 His example also asks us to expand our notion of “memory makers” and acknowledge the broad range of arenas in which postwar Germans evoked and used memories of war and victimization.
Jeffrey K. Olick observed that, with its multiple sources, forms, and facets, “memory” is no singular object of study. It is produced by individuals and collectives, in acts of personal reflection and public commemoration, and by the influential and at the margins of public culture. As a refinement of “collective memory,” Olick proposed the concept of “collected memory,” referring to the aggregate of individual memories of any given group. This approach to memory studies both “resists the witting or unwitting adoption of certain ideological categories,” such as nationalism, and “highlights [the] many different kinds of collective memory produced in different places in society.”Footnote 117 Olick wrote of “communities of memory” that “tell and retell” the constitutive narratives that bind them together as/in community.Footnote 118 Rather than presume a single master narrative of social memory, the challenge for scholars is to understand “the ways in which [. . .] different forms and products of retrospection combine and recombine in and through particular historical conjunctures.”Footnote 119
This approach to memory offers both a theoretical justification for reading a publicly marginal figure such as Michaltscheff and a means for bringing analytical clarity to this particular aspect of Michaltscheff's writings. Under changing circumstances of social-movement activism, Michaltscheff told and retold his account of German suffering in different ways and toward new ends. Eventually, the air wars and occupation policies faded into the background of pacifist rhetoric. Michaltscheff and his colleagues continued to remind the West German public of German suffering at Allied hands; however, it was evoked increasingly to convey the exponentially greater danger of nuclear weapons. Commemorations of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became annual opportunities to explore the horrors of man-made mass death, past, present, and future.Footnote 120 Over the course of the 1950s, pacifist engagement with the nuclear threat became increasingly technical. Personal narratives of suffering and survival were replaced by detailed reports by experts on the destructive capacity of modern weaponry. For a few years, explicit references to German suffering during World War II even fell by the wayside.
They returned during the late 1950s as the nuclear issue took on increasing political significance. During the social democratic-led Kampf dem Atomtod (KdA), as many as 325,000 West Germans came out into the streets in 1958 to protest the possibility of nuclear war.Footnote 121 Where the rhetorical referent of peace activism had been the suffering experienced by Germans, it now shifted more toward the suffering caused by Germans (i.e., Auschwitz).Footnote 122 Among Germans, in general, and peace activists, in particular, one began to find moments of overt reflection on the Nazi past.Footnote 123 As for German suffering during the war years, it reemerged in a supporting role in an argument about the radical transformation and altogether inhuman character of total war in the nuclear age.Footnote 124
From a tale of personal trauma, the Allied bombing of Hamburg was reduced in Michaltscheff's writings, by the end of the 1950s, to a mnemonic trace within an argumentative frame. According to social-movement theory, frames “assign meaning to and interpret relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists.”Footnote 125 Cognitively and emotionally, they establish common interpretive frameworks.Footnote 126 In combination with ideologies, framing processes produce cognitive justifications for social action.Footnote 127 In this objectified form, the bombing of Hamburg signified an act of cowardice, atrocity in general, German vulnerability within the Cold-War conflict, and even the exponentially greater danger of nuclear weapons.Footnote 128 The recent suffering of Germans was downplayed or left to inference.
Still, as “unassimilable breach[es] in the collective narrative” of social cohesion and security, mnemonic traces make for powerful interpretive devices. It should come as no surprise to find them embedded in the communicative strategies of peace activists.Footnote 129 Within the context of this article's argument, what remains unclear is the extent to which mnemonic traces should be treated as in dialogue with their previous occurrences.Footnote 130 In Michaltscheff's case, such path-dependency may offer a means to explore the impact of his early references to the British as a colonial power and to Germans as a quasi-colonized people, which, by the mid-1950s, had all but disappeared. As this article demonstrates, in the immediate postwar years, Gandhian ideology informed Michaltscheff's particular characterization of Germans as victims of war. At the same time, his critique of British actions in times of war and postwar enabled a particular, public representation of Gandhi and the orient. Citing British aggression and malfeasance, Michaltscheff compared the experience of Germans to that of various colonized peoples around the globe. These claims not only bolstered each other, but they also encapsulated a vision of collective German victimhood. Revealed is an association between a particular colonial fantasy and postwar pacifism. At a minimum, Michaltscheff's example suggests the possibility that postwar and postcolonial memories were connected in a process of mutual reconfiguration.
