German schoolchildren’s thoughts about the war

MIRAH LANGER

This was just in a school essay that she wrote, one of thousands that young German schoolchildren wrote about their understanding of what they had experienced during World War II.

Dr Beate Müller, of Newcastle University in the UK, has transformed these sources into precious historical artefacts. She scrutinised essays written by German schoolchildren in the aftermath of World War II  to reveal societal perspectives of the time.

Müller presented a talk at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre in Forest Town last week about insights drawn from her research.

Müller has compared reflections made in the immediate aftershocks of war with those from a cohort who grew up with more historical distance. To do this, she worked with two different archives of German high school texts: one from 1946 and the other from 1956.

She found that while students in 1946, unless directly prompted, did not mention the persecution of the Jews in essays, many of those in 1956 chose to do so unsolicited.

“What drives that big difference?” posed Müller.

She explained that the 1946 texts were from 3 000 Nuremberg schoolchildren between the ages of 16 to 17. Of the 7 000 texts recorded, some are essays, but others are answers to questionnaires as well as drawings, according to Müller.

The children answered the following question: What was wrong, unjust and erroneous with the National Socialists?

In their answers, they made clear references to “concentration camps, the annihilation of the Jews and crimes against humanity”.

However, in the personal essays, where students had a choice of topics, the experience of the Jews was not explored at all.

What did emerge in these essays, said Müller, was the emotional struggle for many students to reconcile the wrongdoings of the Nazis with the utter faith with which they had invested the figure of Adolf Hitler. “If all of a sudden you learn that the ideology you grew up in, is shown to be despicable, …then how do you, as an adolescent… integrate that into your biography?”

Müller then identified a number of “coping strategies” by the students.Besides choosing to repress issues like Jewish persecution, students also chose to deflect responsibility and guilt by conceiving of German victimhoods. For example some focused on the effects of the wartime air raids on the German populace.

Hence,  the students could then also position themselves as victims. An example of this mindset was seen in an essay about the air raids: “You hear everything about the concentration camps, but what the German population went through in the phosphorous rain, the atrocities that happened there, nobody talks about that any more today.”

Other students constructed the German people as “innocent victims” of the Nazi regime and thus not responsible for actions taken.

“The situation was already hopeless for the Nazis, but they didn’t give in, they had rather that the whole German people would be destroyed alongside them,” read an extract from one of the 1946 essays which exemplified this kind of belief.

When it came to the 1956 archive, Müller scrutinised approximately 6 800 essays about the war from schoolchildren across what was then West Germany. The cohort was the same age group as those writing in 1946.

Müller noted that a key shift from 1946 is that in 1956, even when given an open choice in topics, many elected to address the persecution of the Jews directly. Another key difference between the two sets of essays, said Müller, was that a decade later, “Hitler is very strongly rejected… from the safe distance of students who had not experienced that strong ideological connection.”

Rather, the 1956 students struggled to conceive of how Hitler could have ever managed to gain such enormous control over the populace.

Müller noted that a pattern emerged whereby “the students who try to explain what the allure of National Socialism was, actually portray the adults as having lacked judgment, rationalism, insight – all the attributes associated with children – unlike the students from 1946… who often described their own innocence as children as a way to remove culpability.

Müller noted that her research indicated the need to probe the politics of school curricula.