* * *
And what of the people of Hamburg themselves? How do they view the ordeal they went through? Do they blame the British and Americans for the devastation that was wreaked upon their city? Are they angry? Whenever I have asked this question of anyone from Hamburg, I have invariably received the same answer, which exactly mirrors the sentiments of their enemies: ‘We started it.’ Or, even more tellingly, ‘We deserved it.’ Anger, resentment, indignation – even sadness – seem for most people to be irrelevant, because what reallymatters is that Germans are sorry.
Even during the war, many people in Hamburg realized that they were not blameless, and that, to a degree at least, they had brought the disaster upon themselves. Many saw the catastrophe as the logical consequence of the Luftwaffe’s attacks on Britain; some even believed it to be just retribution for the way Hamburg had treated its Jews. 16In any case, an unspoken sense of shame was already embedded in the German psyche long before the end of the war. As Hans Erich Nossack recorded shortly after the firestorm, it was difficult to view the Allies as anything other than the agents of some kind of divine justice:
I have not heard a single person curse the enemies or blame them for the destruction. When the newspapers published expressions like ‘pirates of the air’ and ‘arsonists’, we had no ears for that. A much deeper insight forbade us to think of an enemy who was supposed to have caused all this; for us, he too was at most an instrument of unknowable forces that wished to annihilate us. 17
After the war, the sense that Germany had deserved this retribution grew, fuelled by the news of what had happened at Belsen, and Auschwitz, and Hamburg’s own concentration camp at Neuengamme. The cold-bloodedness of the atrocities seemed to dwarf anything the Allied air forces might have done. As the Nuremberg trials came and went, Hamburg’s capacity for anger was smothered beneath a huge burden of communal guilt.
In such an atmosphere it was the Nazis, not the Allies, who were blamed for the catastrophe that had consumed the city in 1943. For example, when the famous memorial to the dead was unveiled at Ohlsdorf cemetery in 1952, the city’s first post-war mayor, Max Brauer, gave a speech in which he denounced the ‘inhuman dictatorship’ that had led the people like lambs to the slaughter. ‘This mass grave is a warning to us,’ he said. ‘We must recognize the danger [of extremism]. We must know that, in the end, as soon as mankind gives up its rights and freedoms it is stepping on to the road to self-destruction.’ 18
Those sentiments have been repeated in one form or another in every memorial since. On the fiftieth anniversary of the firestorm, Elisabeth Kiausch, the president of the city council, implored her audience never to forget the horrors of war, and the ‘sorrow that Nazism brought to innumerable people’. 19That same day, even as the student demonstrators were clamouring outside her church, the Bishop of Hamburg was praying for forgiveness for the wrongs that Germany had committed in the past – particularly against eastern Europe, against the Jews and against Gypsies. Her sermon was primarily an appeal for world peace, but also a plea that we should never forget the time of the Third Reich, when the ‘political blindness’ of the German people had led to war and atrocity. 20
However, there is a feeling in Germany that such attitudes might slowly be changing. While newspapers, politicians and community leaders maintain the official line that Germany herself was responsible for the firestorm and its aftermath, many privately hold different opinions. It is not only those who lived through the bombings – German society has always made concessions for personalanger against the former Western Allies, so long as it is not voiced too loudly – there is now much more widespread resentment. A younger generation, which is not quite so intimately acquainted with German war guilt, has begun to question the readiness with which the Allies bombed civilians. Since 1989 there has also been an influx of ideas from the former East Germany. Understandably, the East Germans have never been quite so well disposed towards the way Britain and America bombed their country – an attitude that was encouraged by the country’s Communist leaders for more than forty years.
Those feelings came to something of a head in 2002, when Jörg Friedrich published an extremely controversial history of the bombing war. 21He claimed that the British insistence on area bombing made both Harris and Churchill no better than war criminals. Even more controversially, he deliberately described the bombings in terms usually reserved for Nazism and the Holocaust: so, for example, cellars are described as Krematoria(‘crematoria’), cities as Hinrichtungsstätten(‘places of execution’) and the destruction of libraries as Bücherverbrennung(‘book burning’). Needless to say, the book’s publication created a media storm, both in Germany and abroad. It also created enormous concern because it appeared to strike such a chord with the German people: there were immediate worries that Germans were beginning to see themselves as the victims rather than the perpetrators of war crimes, and that such books might even become a clarion call for neo-Fascists.
While this last point seems unlikely, it is important to note that Germans seem to live in constant fear of a resurgence of right-wing extremism. Nowhere is this fear more prevalent than in Hamburg. In 1992 neo-Nazi violence provoked an anti-Fascist demonstration on the streets of Hamburg 400,000 strong. There were more demonstrations when the American neo-Nazi publisher Gary Lauck was tried and sentenced there in 1996. I myself experienced a hint of the city’s anxieties when I first visited Hamburg in 2001, during a book tour. A complete stranger approached me and asked me to wear a badge bearing an anti-Fascist slogan: he had heard that I would be appearing on local television, and wanted his badge to appear with me. As I was unaware of Hamburg’s political landscape at the time, I declined – but not without a measure of surprise at the strength of his feelings. It struck me then, as it has struck me many times since, how politically active Hamburgers seem to be when compared with my own countrymen. Sometimes it seems as though the city is vigilant to the point of paranoia when it comes to avoiding the political mistakes of the past.
* * *
It is against this background that the demonstration in the Michaeliskirche took place. The anti-nationalist students claimed to be protesting against the fact that churchgoers were mourning allof the deaths that took place during the catastrophe, rather than making a distinction between the guilty and the innocent. However, as they blew their whistles and sounded their horns, their objections seemed to go much further. Their banner claimed that there was no reason to mourn whatsoever, thus implying that every Hamburger who died in 1943 got what he or she deserved. Since all of Germany had stood by and allowed the Nazis to march to power, all of Germany was to blame. 22
As an outsider, this strikes me as a bizarre form of self-flagellation. I find it shocking that a group of Germans will go so far as to deny their countrymen the right to mourn the deaths of thousands of undisputed civilians, simply in the name of expiating their guilt. Even the most hard-hearted proponents of British bombing expressed regret at what they felt forced to do. Even those theorists who claimed that women and children were a legitimate target recognized that bombing them was a horrific idea – indeed, they believed that the very horror of it would prevent civilized nations going to war in the first place. None of those groups would ever consider denying Hamburgers the right to mourn their dead. I doubt that such a denial would get much support in Germany either, but that a group like this can suggest it seems significant. If German war guilt has grown so great that it takes precedence over the city’s capacity to mourn, it is unsurprising that there has been a right-wing backlash against it.