The Perils of Privacy and Passivity: Antidemocratic, Racist, and Antisemitic Sentiments in Postwar West Germany

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This article analyzes the affective economy of West Germany's postwar society. After delineating the intellectual history of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research's “Gruppenexperiment,” which consisted of 137 group interviews with different segments of West German society, my article focuses on one transcript of a 1950 group discussion of young fashion-designer apprentices. Based on a close reading, I study how the younger generation in West Germany constructed a passive and privatist self-image in which they could both articulate their emotional dissociation from National Socialism while clinging to antidemocratic, racist, and antisemitic feelings in metamorphosed form. The micrological focus of the analysis of the group's emotions is balanced by a rereading of both Helmut Schelsky's study about the “skeptical generation” and texts by researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research who came to markedly different conclusions about the West German youth.

“Agreed: post-war Germany is a miracle,” the Franco-American literary critic George Steiner noted in 1959, analyzing the economic success of the young Federal Republic, but “it is a very queer miracle.” Beneath the buzzing economic life hid “a profound deadness of spirit, such an inescapable sense of triviality and dissimulation.”Footnote 1 Steiner was hardly alone in noticing this eerie atmosphere. Whereas he attributed it to Nazism's destruction of the German language, the American sociologist Morris Janowitz considered the material destruction resulting from Allied air warfare as the crucial reason for German “apathy toward all phenomena outside the immediate personal sphere.”Footnote 2 Also emphasizing the poor material conditions, the Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman reported in 1946 the prevalence of “apathy and cynicism” and he noted the indifference with which the population responded to high-stakes political events like the death sentences of the Nuremberg trials and the first democratic elections in Berlin in 1946. He described the latter in morbid tone: “In a deathly silent Berlin, 20 October, the first day of the free elections looked like all the other dead Sundays. There was not the slightest trace of enthusiasm or joy in the crowds of deathly silent voters.”Footnote 3 Hannah Arendt agreed: when she visited in 1950, she saw “indifference” and “apathy” everywhere. But in Arendt's account, the West German atmosphere was marked by its disregard for the material destruction of German cities: “Nowhere,” she wrote, “is this nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less talked about than in Germany.” In her Report from Germany, the moods attest to something else: “a deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.” Footnote 4 Several years later, in their widely received book The Inability to Mourn, psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich took the “general apathy that prevails concerning issues involving basic political rights” as a starting point for their attempt to understand the psychic condition of the West German population.Footnote 5 Echoing Arendt, they considered the West German “emotional rigidity” or “quasi-stoical attitude” in response to the downfall of National Socialism to be a central mechanism in the effort to derealize the past and keep feelings of guilt, shame, mourning, and melancholia at bay. This derealization, they argued, constituted an immense expenditure of psychic energy, reinforcing the West German tendency to “show a minimum of interest in the new ordering of their society.”Footnote 6

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