After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe
272
After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe
272eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
"After the Nazi Racial State offers a comprehensive, persuasive, and ambitious argument in favor of making 'race' a more central analytical category for the writing of post-1945 history. This is an extremely important project, and the volume indeed has the potential to reshape the field of post-1945 German history."
---Frank Biess, University of California, San Diego
What happened to "race," race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of "race" since 1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks---arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany---the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with "race" in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity.
After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration---and about just how much "difference" a democracy can accommodate---are implicated in a longer history of "race." This book explores why the concept of "race" became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from "race" for Germany and Europe as a whole.
Rita Chin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
Heide Fehrenbach is Presidential Research Professor at Northern Illinois University.
Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan.
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at Cooper Union.
Cover illustration: Human eye, © Stockexpert.com.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472025787 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 02/22/2010 |
| Series: | Social History, Popular Culture, And Politics In Germany |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 366 KB |
About the Author
Rita Chin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
Heide Fehrenbach is Presidential Research Professor at Northern Illinois University.
Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan.
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at Cooper Union.
Read an Excerpt
After the Nazi Racial State
Difference and Democracy in Germany and EuropeBy Rita Chin Heide Fehrenbach Geoff Eley Atina Grossmann
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2009 the University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11686-7
Chapter One
Black Occupation Children and the Devolution of the Nazi Racial StateHeide Fehrenbach
Prior to 1945, children were a primary target in the Nazi regime's murderous quest to build a new order based upon fantastical notions of racial purity. In a determined drive to craft an Aryan superstate and realize a racialized empire in Europe, the Nazi regime enacted social policies ranging from sterilization to "euthanasia" and, ultimately, mechanized mass murder targeted at those deemed eugenically or racially undesirable. Children were not incidental victims of this fight for posterity. In demographic terms, they numbered among the Third Reich's earliest and most consistent casualties. Beginning in the 1930s, hundreds of Afro-German adolescents were sterilized, and thousands of disabled institutionalized children, regardless of ethnicity, were quietly starved to death or killed by lethal injection. Abortion and adoption law in Germany was recast along racial lines, resulting in the forcible termination of fetuses and families judged inimical to "the public interest" due to the presence of "alien blood." By the war years, Polish and Soviet youth were pressed into slave labor, while phenotypically pleasing Polish, Czech, and Yugoslavian children were kidnapped and Aryanized into German families. Once transports to the Nazi death camps began, children were seized from kindergartens without their parents' knowledge and shipped away on their own. Painfully few of the mostly Jewish children survived the initial hours following arrival at the camps. Due to their dependent and unproductive status, on the one hand, and fears about their future reproductive potential, on the other, children-some unescorted, others accompanied by mothers, siblings, or grandmothers-were inevitably "selected" for immediate death.
After 1945 and the demise of the Third Reich, children remained a focus of racialized social policy in Germany, particularly in the decade and a half following the war. Although no longer subject to physical violence or death by state dictate, certain children continued to serve as objects of scientific study by anthropologists, psychologists, social workers, and school and state officials intent on documenting signs of racial difference. Children, that is, remained a central social category for the postwar production of national-racial ideology. The historical literature on state-sponsored racism and mass murder under the Third Reich is vast, and although scholars have recently published excellent work on the Nazi regulation of sex and reproduction, there has been little focus on children as a category of social analysis. This essay aims to address this gap and argues that the study of social policy toward children has a lot to tell us not only about Nazi conceptions of race and nation but, more significant for the purposes of this volume, about the evolution of racial ideology during the transition from National Socialism to liberal democracy in postwar West Germany.
Here I explore some key features of how attention to children-in particular, black occupation children fathered by Allied troops of color and born to white German mothers-figured in what I have called the devolution of the Nazi racial state. Informing this analysis is an insistence that we begin to consider two key postwar developments-namely, democratization and racial reconstruction-in tandem as mutually informing processes. The transition away from Nazi racial practice and understanding was hardly abrupt. Rather, this was a protracted social process lasting at least into the 1960s. It was through the articulation of social policy regarding abortion, adoption, schooling, and integration of these youth into the workforce that questions of German racial redefinition after 1945 were worked out.
Postwar responses to black occupation children represent a formative moment in the racial reconstruction of postfascist Germany. Military occupation between 1945 and 1949 produced some 94,000 occupation children. However, official and public attention fixed on a small subset, the so-called "farbige Mischlinge" or "colored mixed-bloods," distinguished from the others by their black paternity. Although they constituted a small minority of postwar German births-numbering only about 3,000 in 1950 and nearly double that by 1955-West German federal and state officials, youth welfare workers, and the press invested the children with considerable symbolic significance.
The years after 1945 were constituent for contemporary German racial understanding, and postwar debates regarding "miscegenation" and "Mischlingskinder" were central to the ideological transition from National Socialist to democratic approaches to race. The term "Mischling," in fact, survived the Third Reich and persisted well into the 1960s in official, scholarly, media, and public usage in West Germany. But its content had changed. Rather than refer to the progeny of so-called mixed unions between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans as it had during the Third Reich, immediately after the war it came to connote the offspring of white German women and foreign men of color. Thus "Mischling" remained a racialized category of social analysis and social policy after 1945, as before. But the definition of which races had mixed, as well as the social significance of such mixing, had fundamentally altered.
Contact Zones: The Social Meaning of Military Occupation
I begin with a few brief observations about the radically altered conditions that confronted Germans in 1945 since these helped shape the terms of social and ideological revaluation following National Socialism's demise. First, it is important to note that the postwar reformulation of notions of race in Germany was not a purely national enterprise but an international and transnational one as well. Defeat in the spring of 1945 brought military occupation and the victorious Allies' mandate for Germans to denazify and democratize themselves, their society, and their polity. The first decades after the war were dominated by debates regarding self-definition as contemporaries were forced to grapple with the question of what it would it mean to be German after Hitler and the Holocaust.
Second, debates about national self-definition necessarily involved confronting issues of race since Germany was occupied by the multiethnic armies of enemy nations. Former racial subordinates-whether Jews, Slavs, North Africans, or African Americans-now occupied a position of political superiority due to their membership in the Allied forces. The occupation challenged Germans to function within a context that was radically postfascist in terms of social composition and political authority, if not yet in terms of ideological disposition or social policy.
Third, the most explicit discussions of "race" after the war occurred in response to interracial sex and reproduction between German women and Allied soldiers of color. This was accompanied by an emerging unwillingness among German officials to speak openly about Jews in racialized terms-although antisemitic utterances and actions certainly persisted in informal private interactions, through the circulation of jokes and stereotypes, and even in anonymous exchanges on public transportation or desecrations of Jewish cemeteries.
American practices of racial segregation and antiblack racism in the American occupation forces also helped shape racial ideology after 1945. This does not mean that postwar Germans learned antiblack racism from American occupiers. After all, Germans had a long tradition of such bigotry that predated and was intensified by Germany's short stint as colonial power prior to 1918 and shorter stint as National Socialist power between 1933 and 1945. Rather, informal contacts between occupier and occupied-along with the discriminatory policies of the U.S. military toward its minorities and the tense relations among occupation soldiers of differing ethnicities-affected the ways Germans perceived and received American political and social values after 1945. Although the American Military Government in Germany put a good deal of emphasis on official efforts to denazify and reeducate the German public, "race" barely figured in formal reeducation programs (beyond the legal language against discrimination that ultimately entered West Germany's Grundgesetz in 1949). As a result, racial reconstruction in early postwar Germany resulted primarily not from official Allied pronouncements or programs, but more spontaneously through Germans' interaction with, and observation of, the social and racial dynamics of occupation on the ground in Germany.
The United States defeated and occupied Germany with a Jim Crow army in 1945, and the hierarchical values of racial segregation affected social dynamics and perceptions of the American occupation, both among American soldiers and between American occupiers and Germans. In particular, interracial fraternization between African American GIs and white German women elicited a zealous rage-and frequent incidents of verbal and physical abuse-by white GIs. In a series of intelligence debriefings of U.S. troops returning from overseas in 1945, for example, numerous white officers and soldiers denounced interracial dating by black GIs abroad as the primary cause of racial violence in the military. On the ground in Germany, it was treated as an unbearable provocation. White GIs harassed German women in the company of black GIs and physically assaulted the men. American military police forcibly excluded black GIs from bars, in effect imposing racial segregation on German establishments, as Maria Höhn has shown. Where segregation broke down, violent brawls, serious injury, and even murder could result. White American hostility toward interracial sexual relations between African American troops and German women in Germany persisted for decades, but was especially vehement and violent during the late 1940s and 1950s-the years during which desegregation of the U.S. military, if not American society at large, was accomplished. What is more, it was assiduously reported in the German press and no doubt served to condone acts of violence directed at black GIs by German men, which were less frequent but not unheard of. During the occupation, white men of American and German nationality employed a common epithet, Negerliebchen or "nigger lover," newly popularized in the German language, to slander women who associated with black troops. Although white Americans and Germans drew on distinct national-historical idioms of race, both agreed upon the necessity to "defend" white manhood and police white women.
In the public behavior of U.S. troops on the German street, troubled American race relations were on display for all to see. Germans absorbed the postwar lesson, inadvertently taught by their new American masters, that democratic forms and values were consistent with racialist, even racist, ideology and social organization. German understandings of the content of "democratization" were conditioned by the racialized context within which this was delivered. As a result, military occupation initially reinforced white supremacy as a shared value of mainstream American and German cultures.
Abortion and the Persistence of Antinatalism
The Nazi regime had been pronatalist regarding Aryan reproduction and antinatalist regarding non-Aryan. During the Third Reich, new laws were promulgated that restricted the social and sexual choices of "Aryan" women -those deemed racially and eugenically valuable as reproducers of the Volk-to "Aryan" male partners. Relations between such women and "racially foreign" men, whether Jewish, Polish, Soviet, or Black, were strictly prohibited and severely sanctioned. The same did not hold true for Aryan men, who retained the license to engage in interracial sex and wartime rape provided it was nonreproductive. Indeed, archival evidence suggests that at least one Black German girl, who was sterilized in 1937 as a "Rhineland bastard," narrowly escaped being shipped to Eastern Europe to be pressed into prostitution for the Wehrmacht. During its twelve-year rule, National Socialism forged a culture based upon a "racialization of sex" in which the bodies of Aryan women were stringently policed, while the bodies of non-Aryan women were violently or murderously exploited. In both cases, female sexuality was instrumentalized for national purposes by a regime intent on forging a powerful racial state and European empire.
German defeat and the influx of occupation forces ended a decade of prescribed Aryan exclusivity in white German women's heterosexual relations. What came home to the Germans after 1945 was not just their former state enemies, but their declared racial enemies as well: Blacks, Jews, Slavs, and other so-called "Asiatics" who served in Allied armies or were liberated as slave laborers, POWs, or concentration and death camp inmates. The result for German women was that the restrictive, state-mandated Aryanized sex of the Third Reich gave way to a broader range of choice in social relations and sexual partners.
In 1945, German state officials attempted to nullify the reproductive consequences of conquest by temporarily relaxing Paragraph 218, which outlawed abortion. Under National Socialism, a state-sponsored policy of "coercive pronatalism" emerged in which access to abortion was severely restricted for Aryan women, who were prohibited from terminating pregnancies under penalty of death, unless there were severe medical problems or unless pregnancy resulted from sexual relations with "racial aliens." In liberalizing abortion policy, German officials specifically targeted "miscegenist" rape by enemy soldiers. In early March 1945, just months before defeat, the Reich Interior Ministry issued a decree to doctors, health offices, and hospitals to expedite abortions of "Slav and Mongol fetuses." Sometime during the spring the Bavarian state government followed suit, issuing a secret memo authorizing abortions in rape cases involving "colored" troops. In the months following defeat, state and municipal officials continued to refer to those orders. So while compulsory abortions and sterilizations ceased in May 1945 due to the nullification of Nazi laws, the elective abortion of fetuses continued apace from the first months of 1945 and over the course of the year "became a mass phenomenon."
The majority of abortions between early 1945 and early 1946 occurred in response to rape by perceived racial aliens-Allied troops of color and Soviet soldiers-indicating that a commitment to racial eugenics and antinatalism persisted in abortion policy and practice after the Nazi state's demise. This was possible because German authorities at the local and state level were left to deal with women's health and medical issues without firm instructions from the Allied occupation powers. A German medical board of three doctors (preferably gynecologists) ruled on applications for abortion. Applications by women alleging rape by white Allied soldiers were often denied, since medical boards "doubted that physical or emotional problems would ensue" for women carrying such pregnancies to term.
While notions of Rassenschande (racial pollution) continued to inform the language and social policy of abortion in the early years of the occupation, the rationale for such decisions changed. The diagnostic focus was transferred from the racialized body of the offspring to the emotional state of its mother. For example, one thirty-six-year-old woman who alleged she had been raped by a Moroccan soldier and was applying for permission to abort wrote that it "affects me mentally to think that I shall bring a Moroccan child into this world." In assessing the case, the district magistrate noted that "one has to be careful because the incident occurred in a forest without witnesses" and expressed concern that she hadn't told her husband about the attack, though she might have contracted a sexually transmitted disease. Still, this magistrate concluded that "if she really was raped by a Moroccan, which can't be disproved, then emotional injuries must also exist," and he approved the abortion. This reasoning signaled a shift in racialist thinking after 1945 and anticipated a crucial development in the rhetoric and rationale of postwar social policy: namely, the transition from an emphasis on the biology of race to the psychology of racial difference.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from After the Nazi Racial State by Rita Chin Heide Fehrenbach Geoff Eley Atina Grossmann Copyright © 2009 by the University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.