Soldiering On: Images of the German Soldier (1985--2008).

摘要

The criminal legacy of National Socialism cast a shadow of perpetration and collaboration upon the post-war image of the German soldier. These negative associations impeded Helmut Kohl’s policy to normalize the state use of the military in the mid-eighties, which prompted a politically driven public relations campaign to revise the image of the German soldier. This influx of new narratives produced a dynamic interplay between political rhetoric and literature that informed and challenged the intuitive representations of the German soldier that anchor positions of German national identity in public culture. This study traces that interplay via the positioning of those representations in relation to prototypes of villains, victims, and heroes in varying rescue narrative accounts in three genre of written culture in Germany since 1985: that is, since the overt attempts to change the function of the Bundeswehr in the context of (West) German normalization began to succeed. These genre are (1) security publications (and their political and academic legitimizations), (2) popular fantasy literature, and (3) texts in the tradition of the Vergangenheitsbewältigung. I find that the accounts presented in the government’s White Papers and by Kohl, Nolte, and Hillgruber in the mid-1980s gathered momentum over the course of three decades and dislodged the dominant association of the German soldier with the villainy of National Socialism. The new dominant account established in the genre of security policy publications and their political and academic legitimations positions the German soldier as a European Christian hero and displaces the villainy previously associated with his image onto foreign powers and their populace. An overview of the developments in the genre of popular Nibelung adaptations echoes the development of the antagonistic accounts in the White Papers of their periods, but then these adaptations conform to the generic expectations of the Nibelungen material, though the last novels I discuss break free from this. In the genre of literature in the tradition of the Vergangenheitsbewältigung, authors engage in the broader public debates concerning the German soldier and national identity and produce counter-narratives that are both antagonistic to the dominant narrative as well as other antagonistic accounts.