Widerstand – 20. Juli 1944

Today marks the 67th anniversary of the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944, a day in which Germany remembers those who resisted the Nazi vision of the world. Popularized by Tom Cruise’s portrayal of Graf von Stauffenberg here in U.S. in the film Valkyrie, one finds that there’s actually a lot more to the story than him.

On July 20, 1944, a handful of German officers attempted to put an end to the Third Reich’s war of world domination by assassinating Hitler. Led by the Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the group of 20 planted a bomb in a briefcase near Hitler during a meeting in the Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s military headquarters located near the East Prussian town of Rastenburg, now known as Kętrzyn, Poland. The plot, however, failed as Hitler was partially shielded from the bomb’s explosion by the legs of the heavy oak table under which the briefcase had been placed. Hitler survived with minor injuries, and although the conspirators and Stauffenberg briefly escaped and attempted to put “Operation Valkyrie,” the seizure of control of the German government, into action, they were finally captured and summarily executed that same evening. The war went on as Hitler interpreted his survival as “divine providence.” Stauffenberg is seen now as a symbol of the German resistance.

An interesting article in Der Spiegel recounts the difficult time that the daughter of one of the organizers of the assassination plot had even after the war. Though seen as a hero in some eyes, Hansen and the rest of the conspirators were also seen by some as traitors, even after the war. Even now, the family hopes for positive recognition.

The memory of Stauffenberg is not without controversy. Immediately after his execution, the Nazi regime painted the attempted coup d’etat as the result of Stauffenberg’s own ambitions, while others have questioned how an officer who gladly participated in the war and in Nazi ideology up to 1943 could suddenly change sides if not as an opportunistic attempt to save his own skin. Most of these questions  have been put to rest and he’s now seen in a positive light.

Thus, Graf von Stauffenberg is regarded today as a man who followed his conscience and attempted to put an end to the German war against the world, not just because Germany was beginning to lose that war, but also because he saw how the oppression of foreign populations was wrong and that Germany could be freed if it somehow managed to escape from its madness. Had the assassination attempt been successful,  countless lives could have been saved and though it is difficult to say exactly how Germany would’ve weathered the end of the war, it is hard to imagine that the outcome wouldn’t have been somehow much better.

Some vocabulary for students of German:

der Sprengstoff – explosives

das Attentat – assassination; assassination attempt

“jedes Problem in der Welt ist lösbar durch den sorgsamen Einsatz von Sprengstoff” (from the movie trailer) – every problem in the world is solvable through the careful use of explosives. I just think students would get a kick out of that, although it could probably be misconstrued if taken too far out of context.

der Verräter – traitor

Wolfsschanze – Wolf’s Lair

Der Staatsstreich – coup d’etat

 

A Most Dangerous Book

Yesterday’s Washington Post book reviews section introduces an interesting new book on the origins of 19th and 20th century German culture and history as seen through the lens of the Romans: A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs.

Drawing from the Roman senator and historian Tacitus’ writings on Germania, the author traces a line of proto-nationalism that he claims existed in a moral homogeneity among the German tribes dating all the way back to Roman times, but seen also in the spirit of 1848, the Grimms, presumably in German Romanticism all the way through Kaiser Wilhelm and the justification of the Third Reich, as tribe becomes “Volk”:

“From the turn of the nineteenth century,” as Krebs writes, “the Roman historian was twisted to testify to the purity not only of the mores and the language but also and increasingly of the racial constitution of the Germanic ancestors as members of the Caucasian, then Aryan, and finally Nordic race. Racially pure the Germans had been; racially pure they should be again.”

 In those romantic years, the “Volkish” program embraced Teutonic folklore as chronicled by Jacob Grimm, the Northern myths as transformed by Richard Wagner into “The Ring of the Nibelung,” and various theories about racial degeneration and ethnic purity. Throughout this period, Tacitus was read as providing the template for what a true German should be, though his text sometimes needed to be slightly bowdlerized — those human sacrifices were emended as scribal errors. In 1871, the German “Volk” — long divided into separate states such as Prussia and Saxony — were finally united under the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm I.

Already a key text in German history textbooks, “Germania” took on a darker identity in the 20th century as “a Bible for National Socialists.” The “golden booklet” obsessed Heinrich Himmler, so much so that the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany ordered special forces to steal the oldest surviving manuscript from an Italian villa. (They failed.) As Reichsfuehrer of the SS, Himmler deliberately modeled his dreaded elite troops after Tacitus’s descriptions of the tightknit bands of young warriors. As he ominously proclaimed in his diary, “Thus shall we be again.” Himmler duly insisted on SS initiates physically conforming to the blond muscleman ideal, even though, as Krebs notes, Himmler himself was “dark-haired, near-sighted, and flat chested.” One Nazi wit actually dared to remark, “If I looked like Himmler, I wouldn’t even mention the word race.”

Seen from the perspective of finding historical justification for German nationalism in all of its forms, it’s a very interesting hypothesis and one that’s been visited before. Obviously, tracing the origins of historical movements is likely more complex than can be attributed to any single source, but Kreb’s book looks like a good read and the early reviews have been very favorable. It’s now on my “to-read” list.

Wandrers Nachtlied

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch;

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde

Ruhest du auch.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe