Postwar Angst

Abstract

This chapter examines German fears of retribution in the early postwar period, roughly from 1945 to 1948. It focuses on three main groups on which Germans trained this fear: Jewish Holocaust survivors, former slave laborers from Eastern Europe who had become displaced persons after 1945, and American occupation officials. By analyzing German fears of retribution, the chapter highlights massive uncertainty and fear as formative popular experiences of the early postwar period. Fear and insecurity emanated as much from Germans’ imagination of the consequences of their defeat as from the threat or reality of actual acts of retribution. By analyzing both dimensions—actual experiences of retribution as well as popular fantasies of revenge—this chapter highlights the extent to which a specific postwar fear shaped German subjectivities and anticipations of the future. Fears of retribution were based on Germans’ widespread knowledge of National Socialist crimes. Germans’ increasingly frequent self-perception as “victims” derived from their expectations that what they had done to the victims of Nazism would now be inflicted on them. Fears of retribution therefore also displaced emotions such as guilt and shame, and hence enabled postwar Germans to avoid a more comprehensive confrontation with the Nazi past.