Translated from Rolf Gutte/Freerk Huisken, Alles bewältigt, nichts begriffen! Nationalsozialismus im Unterricht. Eine Kritik der antifaschistischen Erziehung, VSA-Verlag, Hamburg, 2007, p. 175-194

Everyday life – making the incomprehensible comprehensible

The “lower levels of involvement”

“Descriptions of everyday life, a new perspective for looking at things” – with this news, the Federal Agency for Civic Education draws the attention of not only the education community to a new trend: ”For some years now, the number of publications describing everyday situations during the Third Reich as personal experiences or based on scientific research has been increasing in a striking way... With these publications, which contain more or less detailed descriptions by people of different ages who lived through the times, or depict certain spheres of life from the perspective of the lower levels of involvement, a broader audience is now engaging with an original contemporary historical research approach ... ... For young people, this provides a new and certainly attractive way of gaining insight into the period.”[163]

The focus on “everyday life under the swastika”[164] is noteworthy. Until the 1970s, normal everyday life was not at the center of anti-fascist instruction. Rather, it was the high points of a politics that was presented as highly abnormal: the seizure of power that led to dictatorship, the terror and propaganda machinery that forced the nation to participate, the heroes who gave their lives in the resistance, the Second World War instigated by Hitler and, in particular, the extermination of the Jews, the downright incomprehensible! At the center were “atrocities” and their perpetrators. Now the “lower levels of involvement” is to be brought more into focus: “We are interested in a view of the Nazi era ‘from below’. How did the average citizen live after 1933? What changed in the everyday life of the ‘little people’? This concept, which focuses on the effects of the Nazi regime, is intended to trigger a deeper [!] bewilderment in the reader than can be achieved with the conventional fixation on the figure of Hitler and other Nazi bigwigs. If you want to shock young people in particular, you have to show them situations that they can see themselves in. For them, the events in the Reich Chancellery and the Führer’s headquarters are less comprehensible than the concrete experiences that their peers and their parents had to go through every day at the time: freedoms were restricted, democratic rights were eliminated.”[165]

Historians and educators are once again grappling with the problem of bewilderment. They are quietly expressing doubts about a method of education that focuses only on the “fascist atrocities” that took place in concentration camps and therefore only deals with “Nazi bigwigs” and Jewish victims. The “average citizens” are not even mentioned, they criticize, neither in their everyday activities nor with their experiences and their view of the Nazi era “from below.” Isn’t there a danger, they speculate, that today’s young people will view the Holocaust as a kind of “horror video,” perhaps shocked by the acts of extermination, but not in the way they should be? They shouldn’t leave the classroom like a movie that has once again given them a good scare. Rather, what is desired is a feeling of grief and bewilderment that is lasting and can be activated at any time, that affects young people as Germans who share responsibility, and that presents fascism as a present danger that can only be continually averted by actively protecting democracy and praising the “opportunities for participation”[166] that exist within it. The plea for dealing with “everyday life” is clearly not about dealing with another subject that is essential to explaining fascism but that has been neglected so far. The aim is not to remedy a theoretical deficiency, but rather to find a pedagogical solution to a dilemma in the shock instructions. If the review of fascist crimes does not always trigger the expected national moral shock in students, then, according to the pedagogical findings, this is because the material is not relatable enough for the students. Where fascism is only discussed in terms of events and people that students can’t “see themselves in,” the “incomprehensible” easily remains incomprehensible. Consequently, the aim is to make the “incomprehensible” comprehensible. This is why educators have come up with the idea of borrowing from “oral history” and dealing with the “everyday life of the little people” in Nazi Germany.

The Holocaust in the everyday life of the “average citizen"

However, this pedagogical intention quickly runs into a problem. Everyday life under the swastika was largely characterized by the necessities that plague the “little people” in democracy and fascism equally: they have to earn money, look for a job to do so, keep it if possible, budget their wages carefully, give themselves a treat now and then, raise their children, and not attract attention even when one comes up short in such a normal, minimal program of bourgeois existence. All in all, even under fascism, a rather unspectacular everyday life took place, just like in any state that forces its citizens with its institutions and laws to perform all kinds of services and pay taxes; apart from fascism’s dealings with its enemies, who, however, are not even counted as (average) citizens in the textbooks.

The fact that this bourgeois normality determined everyday life under the swastika to such an extent that the fascist peculiarities that certainly did exist sometimes completely fade in contrast is repeatedly shown by sources in which Germans simply state that they did not experience much “of fascism.” On the one hand, these sources can certainly be trusted, because fascism did not fundamentally change the necessities of life under capitalist constraints, but simply took them into its own service. On the other hand, these sources must also be viewed with skepticism because today’s contemporary witnesses are confronted with an image of fascism as a standard that from the outset creates a contrast to any everyday business: anyone who reduces fascism to expulsion and expropriation, incineration and deportation, shooting and gassing will discover none of this in its everyday life. Other special features of fascism such as the Hitler salute, the Mother’s Cross, the evacuation of the children, or the Strength Through Joy program pale in comparison. They do not fit a fascism that is presented as a sum of “atrocities” and therefore carry less weight in the descriptions of everyday life.

However, the mentioned sources not only have this shortcoming in themselves. It is also inherent in the viewpoint of post-war educators. When they find their image of fascism in everyday life, then it must always contain a trace of the Holocaust, because only then is it suitable for the pedagogical aim of creating a “deeper bewilderment”: “The key question ... is not noncommital [!]: ‘How did people live in the Third Reich?’ but rather: ‘How does the injustice of the system manifest itself in this everyday life?’”[167]

It’s a given that the “effects of the Nazi regime” on the lives of “average citizens” will be identified and put “under the spotlight.” The school materials make use of a range of techniques for this. Everyday life is made monstrous simply by being presented as the absence of the rights and freedoms that characterize democratic everyday life. At the same time, it is clear that the Nazis “forced young people into their organizations,” “practically abolished their free time,” “stuffed them full of ideology,” and “shook up the schools”; that the Nazis “took away union rights from the workers without a second thought,” put them in the “German Labor Front,” in short: that “liberties were restricted, democratic rights eliminated,”[168] even if the young people and adults of the time did not miss them at all.

A kind of horror show of totalitarian subjugation is imagined in which every private movement of the citizen at work and in a career, in the family and at leisure, when raising children and on vacation was subject to constant and comprehensive control. This view is prescribed by the Federal Agency for Civic Education: “The state, which aimed for total domination ... demanded allegiance and active cooperation in the spirit of the doctrine from everyone at all times ... In order to be able to enforce this claim, the totalitarian state had to cast an organizational network over the people that guaranteed control of every individual at all times.”[169]

Accordingly, the inhumanity of the regime is also found in every area of private life. In many cases, simply mentioning a not even fundamental deviation between everyday life at that time and today is enough to indicate that the Nazi system was inhumane. Under the title “On the birth battle,” students are supposed to be morally outraged at the Nazis’ “child breeding plans” and “mother crosses” for large families. They should be appalled by the abolition of greetings such as “Grüß Gott” or “Tach auch” in favor of the everywhere obligatory “Heil Hitler” or the nationally enforced letter salutation “mit deutschem Gruß.” The uniforming of the Hitler Youth and their pre-military training are condemned just as much as the purging of “unreliable” officials from the teaching staff. By listing things that no longer exist today, the horror of everyday life should be sufficiently characterized without a single word of criticism.[170]

No wonder that this pedagogical intention shapes its subject matter according to its needs and puts a very biased emphasis under the heading of “everyday life under the swastika.” Rare and rather festive events such as torchlight processions, parades and marches by uniformed Nazi organizations, public honors for deserving men and mothers or the state-organized “Strength Through Joy” vacation events are loosely subsumed under “everyday life” according to the motto: Anything that shocks students because the image of everyday life under Hitler is not as civil as the one they know from their immediate surroundings is suitable for morally condemning the past and can therefore be used in a pedagogically meaningful way. This is why it is extremely unpopular to point out that “public oaths,” “mother-child leave,” the awarding of the Federal Cross of Merit to citizens who have “rendered outstanding services to the common good” and traffic jams on freeways due to uniformed and armed maneuver units are the order of the day in this country. Such a comparison is considered inadmissible because it has already been decided that National Socialism and democracy are incompatible.

Youth in war

The topic of “Youth in the Third Reich” is of course given special attention because, due to the obvious identification of the students with their peers under Hitler, it is particularly well suited for convincing today’s youth that they have it incredibly good in their current circumstances. The fact that 16-year-olds were conscripted as Luftwaffe soldiers to serve on the home front with corresponding consequences for their school careers is just as much a textbook topic as the “evacuation of children” to the countryside from the major cities threatened by bombing raids or the Führer’s honoring of wounded young fighters. Even the war years are written off as “everyday life,” as if nights of bombing, food rationing, and the deployment of women to the military were the same as a morning walk to school, shopping for the weekend, or the scouting life with a campfire and a guitar. Students should be outraged that none of the things they know from the democratic peace worked during the fascist war: “For entire school years, groups received inadequate instruction: thousands of schools were destroyed during the war; tens of thousands of teachers became soldiers; hundreds of thousands of children were kept in camps. Even fifteen-year-olds were placed in front of anti-aircraft searchlights and guns.”[171] Students are encouraged to collect further evidence from the war period to prove that everyday life under fascism cannot be compared with today’s and that it really messed up the lives of young people. They actually regularly find what they are looking for!

Nor is it difficult for the textbooks to blame the Nazis for the ingredients of every war as an original product of fascism: “For six of the twelve years of its rule, the National Socialist government waged a war it had systematically prepared for. It cost the lives of over 50 million people. Only about half of them were soldiers. Many nations suffered from the effects of the war and the disruption caused by the German occupation. The Germans themselves also increasingly became victims of the war and the growing Nazi terror ...”[172]

Seen in this light, the Germans’ everyday life during the war was not quite the same as that which, for example, the British were expected to endure by their government, but rather a specifically fascist-tinged one, which adds a degree of wickedness to the civically conceded right of their own state to wage a war that transcended all the “normal” notions of warfare.

As if the particular perversity of the Nazi regime could be studied from the well-known effects of inter-state massacres and the fact that Hitler had “systematically prepared” for war! Every state that has unfulfilled claims or has to “defend” those that have been fulfilled prepares itself for the worst case scenario in peacetime with compulsory military service, arms production, and general staff plans, and does so “systematically.” Hitler did nothing different because he wanted to have a superior military that would be respected in the world of states.

The authentic everyday experiences of contemporary witnesses

The “little man” must have found everyday life under fascism particularly hard and suffered greatly under fascist terror. This is what students are supposed to learn from the spoken memories of people who are given a special credibility as contemporary witnesses. On the one hand, this need is also fulfilled when Hitler’s contemporaries illustrate their memories with all kinds of fascist phenomena which, according to the school, are thankfully a thing of the past. On the other hand, these reporters did not take a didactic crash course in the pedagogy of bewilderment before delivering their life stories. Consequently, they do not tell the truth about fascism, but rather present themselves to the unbiased observer as objects of study from whom the truth about their participation in fascism must first be extracted: “I believed the promises of the National Socialists that they would eliminate unemployment and thus the misery of six million people. I believed that they would unite the German people from the fragmentation of more than forty parties and that they would overcome the consequences of the Versailles Dictate ... The generation growing up in the middle class ... was prepared in a fatal way ... to become a victim of his ‘ideas’.”[173]

Or: “... all of us, teachers and students alike, had long since been swept up in the maelstrom of the great successes of the new regime. We were impressed by Germany’s rise in power. The mood in March 1938 was particularly enchanting. I stood in front of the notice board of the local newspaper and kept reading the message: ‘The Greater German Reich has been created. Austria, the Ostmark, is back with Germany!’ A gentleman next to me said to me: ‘Yes, my boy, you can be proud: We are living in a great time!’ That's how I felt too ...”[174]

Without a guiding interpretation, the fascists’ reign of terror can’t be deduced from such testimonies, since the material provided does not correspond to the pedagogical purpose it is intended to serve. Nowhere is there any mention of “pressing” and “stuffing,” of “robbing” and “snatching.” These contemporary witnesses simply give an unbiased account of their reasons for taking part. And they say: we were pretty convinced of the fascist cause. They say that fascism as a program and policy made sense to them for the most part. So they didn’t feel manipulated, terrorized, or restricted at all. How could they?! Anyone who agrees with a cause and has reasons for pursuing it in practice is not oppressed by it. Nor do they become “victims of their ideas”; after all, they were their own!

The teaching materials, which generally let the texts of contemporary witness speak for themselves without commentary after the appropriate introductions, of course take something different from them: When they talk about how they “believed in promises,” they emphasize the “promises” and delete the acceptance of them. When they talk about the “allure of great successes,” they emphasize the “allure” and omit the enthusiastically celebrated “successes.” And one can only become a “victim of his ideas,” so they suggest, if one had thought ideas that could never have been one’s own. That’s how easy it was to be manipulated back then, the students today are supposed to think, who are once again taught that the majority of Germans were of course not fascists:

“Most people in the mid-1930s were undoubtedly ‘for Hitler’ – whatever that meant exactly. But that didn’t make them real Nazis.”[175]

No need to ask why they were “for Hitler”!

Nothing learned

What teachers and students could take from the material is that their witnesses have learned nothing to this day: As “not real Nazis,” but as real nationalists, these contemporary witnesses look back on their everyday lives with great confidence, sometimes accusingly, sometimes disappointed because of the betrayed ideals, sometimes with a brief flash of memory of an enthusiasm from that time that today's youth lack, but never with the belated claim of having thoroughly examined the familiar thinking in the categories of state unity, national community, and national success with all its false explanations and idealisms.

How does a person come to rave about the unity of the German people back then and lament its current “fragmentation” today? There is no practical reason that would arise from his private life. What does a citizen get out of the “unity” of his nation? If he misses it anyway, then he is accusing the existing political and economic differences and contradictions in society of destroying true unity and thus glorifying the coercive character of state power, which creates “unity” among its citizens on its territory, as a higher value. The fact that this “national unity” is still considered a high ideal today does not excuse the contemporary witness at all.[176]

And what should we make of the pride in Germany’s “rise in power” at the time, which contemporary witnesses cite? When “average citizens” today say that they believed the promises of the National Socialists that they wanted to “overcome the consequences of the Versailles dictate,” then they are saying that they empowered the state leadership at the time to shake off the “gags” and “shackles” that would lead to war. It may well be that many had hoped that things would work out without war, but they also knew what every citizen knows: Neighboring states do not accept shifts in borders without resistance, unless they have no chance against the aggressor. This way of thinking is not outdated today, but is celebrating new triumphs. New contemporary witnesses provide clear evidence of this: Didn’t millions of “Ossis” and “Wessis” recently embrace each other, drunk with nationalistic bliss, and celebrate the new Greater Germany which has brought the state a rise in power but not a rise in prosperity for the citizens?

And if German citizens are not even retrospectively aware of what it actually means for them when their national leadership gets involved in the highest problems of sovereignty – whether reparations payments should be made or refused, whether many soldiers should be recruited or few, whether old or new borders should be valid – but rather always only put on record that this is how one thought back then, then witnesses of the past become key witnesses of a new era in which the old promises continue to apply and are also not made without a claim to redemption.

A human trait

So these contemporary witnesses think just like the national leadership. They are still marching along in spirit, not as people eternally stuck in the past, but as eternally young citizens loyal to the state. Their descriptions of the mood of national optimism at the time should only reveal eternally valid things: “There was ... a widespread desire to join the triumphal procession of the victor, to be there, to take part. That too is an eternal, human – all too human trait.”[177]

So much for “human – all too human”! A feeling of triumph over a victory or the feeling of living in a “great era” can only arise if the successes of one’s own nation are appreciated, if it is accepted that one’s own success seals the failure of others, and finally if there is understanding for the fact that one’s own nation does not rest on its laurels, but makes further demands precisely because of what it has achieved.

The contemporaries also report quite impartially on their fascination with the newly created “national community,” on the great sense of unity that intoxicated them, on their enthusiasm for marches and the dawn of a new era, almost as if it were not a matter of something that required explanation, but of understandable human feelings that are completely harmless because everyone had them: “No slogan has ever fascinated me as much as that of the national community ... I was dying to throw myself into this stream, to sink into it and be carried along ... ‘We want to die for the flag’, the torchbearers had sung. It was a matter of life and death. Not about clothes or food or school essays ... I know that I was filled with a burning desire to be one of those for whom it was a matter of life and death ... and wanted to bind myself to something that was great and essential.”[178]

It is downplayed here as if it were some kind of adventure. Yet everyone knows that what is meant is not a Himalayan climb or a march through the desert, but the enthusiastic willingness to make sacrifices for the German nation. Wouldn’t the contemporary witness at least now want to criticize his “burning desire” from back then and to warn everyone about the consequences of such nationalist sentiments? Does he want to call on everyone to refuse to serve with a weapon, or does he want to say that back then people died for the wrong cause because it was unsuccessful? Would he like to say that everyone should judge a state’s policy by how it deals with “clothing and food”? Or does he want to say that the reunited “national community” always outweighs the sacrifice of “food and clothing”?

This is not in question for a convinced nationalist: “'You can say what you like about the man (Hitler), but he has made Germany great and respected again. ‘Fine, I don’t like the Jews either, but as a German you can now hold your head high in the world again. It’s hard to argue with that. Of course, there was something vain and false about the kind of patriotism that was expressed in this way, something that aimed for external effect; it was not the right kind of patriotism that wants to make one’s own country as decent and humane as possible on the inside. But it was the same patriotism that was and often still is common everywhere – ‘Vive la France!’ ‘America first!’ ‘Rule Britannia!’ It was not a special German vice. Foreign policy successes are popular everywhere.”[179]

Here an attempt is made to kill two birds with one stone: on the one hand, healthy patriotism is separated from the “false” and “indecent” patriotism of the National Socialists by identifying the good patriotism in other powers as well. “Hard to argue with”? Not at all! Why does it speak in favor of patriotism if it can also be attributed to other powers? Since when is a mistake not a mistake if others make it too? On the other hand, “good patriots” are once again being protected from the National Socialists, who used the good patriots for their “false patriotism.” If only the good Germans had not focused on the “external effect” alone – which is what German great power politics can also be called! – but had at the same time shaped internal affairs “decently and humanely” – maybe in cooperation with the fascists responsible for the external effect? – then one could not have blamed them. But like that?!

Most contemporary witnesses explain their own past under Hitler according to this pattern: If I had known back then how it would all end, I would not have so credulously empathized and gotten involved in the mood of optimism after 1933. You’re always smarter afterwards. I myself was not guilty of anything serious or personally reproachable. My behavior was that of a decent human. Afterwards, I can find nothing bad about my own political and other ideas, except that they were so easily functionalized and abused by the Nazis for their own purposes, which wouldn’t happen to me again today.

Contemporary witnesses

Presenting contemporary witnesses should also have a didactic value in itself. If one didn’t know that the educators have no criticisms of the contemporary witnesses’ messages, one could easily come up with the idea that the emphasis on the personality of the contemporary witness is intended to distract from what he or she witnessed. But that is simply not the case. The appreciation of contemporary witnesses has its own and additional message. Contemporary witnesses, according to one didactic guideline, are important and valuable because they are contemporary witnesses. They lived through the Third Reich. And this is somehow regarded as proof of expertise. Accordingly, contemporary witnesses are not simply people whose lifetimes happened to coincide with the Nazi era for twelve years, who happened to have survived fascism and who therefore have a lot to say that you won’t find in the “Conversations at the Führer’s Headquarters.” Rather, they are seen as witnesses to the fact that the “inhumanity of tyranny” actually existed everywhere, even in everyday life, which has been neglected up to now due to the usual preoccupation with the leadership levels. In this way, they bear witness to the fact that the past reality, which is considered incomprehensible, really did exist. Fascism – almost up close and personal. This is credible.

The contemporary witnesses from the people therefore have a moral weight regardless of the content of their statements because they testify to having experienced the period of National Socialist terror themselves, i.e. first-hand. Viewed objectively, this is neither a merit nor any proof of competence. But for this it is valid. What conclusions these contemporary witnesses drew from their experience is entirely secondary.

One should not imagine contemporary witnesses as partisans of the Nazi state or as its obedient citizens. Rather, they are simply to be seen as human beings who were affected by a dictatorship, regardless of whether or how they came to terms with fascism. Therefore, it must have been difficult for them, one would think, to decide the personal conflict between repressing and adapting, on the one hand, and rebelling, fighting back, or helping the oppressed on the other. This ennobles them in the eyes of posterity because of the difficult “everyday decision-making situations”[180] in which they were placed. In any case, the experiences of contemporary witnesses should be treated with respect, regardless of how they ultimately decided. Contemporary witnesses are therefore “valuable” in that they “preserve experiences” that enable students to “better understand what the rule of the National Socialists” meant for people.[181] Their experiences in the Third Reich are judged without question as the experiences of victims. This view follows the remarkable logic that someone who lived under fascism and was affected by it can therefore only have been a victim, regardless of whether they were a victim or were actually more of a (co-)perpetrator. And even if the witness is one of the victims of fascism, it is not advisable to simply take sides with such contemporary witnesses. This is because such a circumstance only speaks against the perpetrators, but does not automatically ennoble the victim.

Contemporary witnesses prove, regardless of what each individual did under fascism, that those born after fascism should not make things so easy for themselves. It is true that most of them more or less enthusiastically stood at attention and did their duty for Germany’s victory. Nevertheless, one should never forget that they were human beings with concrete individual experiences and fates and with different views and reactions, which prohibits any “abstract generalization” and “sweeping condemnation”: “These facts (of participation) should by no means tempt us to make sweeping condemnations. It is almost impossible to analyze what prompted individuals at the time to actively integrate or behave loyally; it is almost impossible to reconstruct the circumstances that led them to voluntarily or inevitably become involved.”[182]

The interest in “real people like you and me” thus substitutes for an explanation of the functioning of the National Socialist raison d'état and dissolves National Socialism into all kinds of experiential life stories, everyday and local. The sum of people’s experiences is taken as proof that the behavior of the Germans was very “complex”: because there were so many different experiences, the matter is not so easy to judge. Consequently, pretty much any behavior is “humanly understandable”!

Since, as a student living today, one never knows how one would have behaved at the time under the pressure of circumstances and mindful of one's own susceptibility to seduction, moral fairness demands that one refrain from making judgments that are only due to the achievements of a probing intellectual activity.

Of course, the whole thing boils down to a second-class acquittal of the German people. Because, viewed this way, they did not consist of politically conscious participants, but merely responded to the rule of the National Socialists for very different individual motives and human reasons. They can therefore under no circumstances be said to have been in political agreement with the Nazis. Contemporary witnesses thus document the “effects” of fascism on the everyday lives of real and very differently affected individuals who are thereby absolved of any blanket accusation of having participated in the functioning of a fascist society. Students may also embrace the message that one can never find out exactly what an individual was doing at the time and for what reasons when the totality of the circumstances under which he did so can “hardly ever be fully reconstructed.” In this way, one can also deny objective judgments about fascism and the role of the German people in its realization with epistemological skepticism according to the motto: If you weren’t there yourself, you can’t really judge anything properly.

So what remains for those born later who have the good fortune to live in a humane society and not the misfortune of being “inevitably ensnared” under a Hitler? Firstly, to be lenient with those who were badly off under the “unjust and brutal character” of the Nazi regime! And secondly, of course, to show gratitude to the current democracy. The whole effort with contemporary witnesses and local investigations, with research-based learning and oral history is intended to lend a new quality to the pledge of allegiance to democracy. Everyday life at home, viewed through the eyes of contemporary witnesses, allows only one conclusion: “By following the changes in everyday life, you will sharpen your awareness of how our democracy can be protected from comparable dangers.”[183] Authorized persons and institutions underline this: “The aim of the German history school competitions for the Federal President’s Prize is to contribute to the promotion of democratic historical awareness among young people using the method of ‘research-based learning’. By dealing with the traces of the past, the understanding of the tasks of the present and the insight into the rights and duties of the citizen in a free, social constitutional state should be deepened.”[184]

Coming to terms with the past should help us to come to terms with the present. Former Federal President Herzog agreed with this in his speech on Remembrance Day for the Victims of National Socialism in January 1996: “...there is a collective responsibility, and we have always affirmed it. It goes in two directions: Firstly, remembrance must not cease; for without remembrance there is neither an overcoming of evil nor lessons for the future. And secondly, collective responsibility is aimed precisely at the realization of these lessons, which always amount to the same thing: Democracy, the rule of law, human rights, human dignity.” [185]

This is the most elementary form of rallying the younger generation around the ruling state and its policies: democracy is the overcoming of evil. For evidentiary purposes, the memory of the “inhumanity of everyday life” under National Socialism must be kept alive even when political anti-fascism has long been obsolete.

The Unwanted Lesson:
The services of the private sphere for the democratic state

This is what students should learn:

In this lesson, students should learn above all to empathize with fascism and rediscover all the judgments about the criminal system in the everyday life of fascism. Because it is about eliminating distance, contemporary witnesses are called in to provide evidence about how deeply the unjust fascist system interfered in people’s everyday lives. Students learn that it also interfered in the private sphere, i.e. in an area that is beyond the control of the state. Not only at work and in their careers, but even in their families, in their leisure time and in their religious practices, it did not leave people of all ages alone. Nowhere did they have a private life; they were always entangled in fascist politics, controlled and harassed by it. So it is understandable – students are to understand – that they had little choice but to conform imperceptibly. But that didn’t make them real Nazis. In a democracy, students learn, things are very different. Here the state stays out of people’s private lives; they have a state-free area in which their interests are taken into account and in which they can make use of the freedom protected by the state. This is guaranteed by democracy, which itself must therefore be protected from all totalitarian dangers.

The following insights, on the other hand, are undesirable:

1. Democracy does not require its citizens to refrain from marrying certain people, nor does it make binding suggestions for how to spend their leisure time. In this country, citizens are not assigned a job by state decree, nor are business owners told what they have to produce to earn their money. In this country, professional careers are not dependent on whether citizens are members of a democratic people’s party and have proven themselves as party workers, nor does it prepare them for war in paramilitary military exercises in their free time.

Instead, people are allowed to marry whoever they want, choose their own profession, and look around the job market. In their free time, citizens can go jogging, watch TV, do gardening, or socialize at the pub. Membership in a governing party is helpful in many cases, but being non-partisan is not a stigma. Children are allowed to join sports teams, confirmation classes, scouts, the voluntary fire department or simply hang out with friends. And even the greeting that is used to wish the most annoying competitor or unpopular neighbor a “good day” does not have to include a commitment to the nation and its ruler.

Nevertheless, the private sphere in a democracy, the everyday life of citizens which is dominated by the pursuit of private interests, is anything but a state-free space. Rather, it is determined by the state in a very fundamental way, which gives content and direction to the free organization of private life.

2. This begins in working life. Whether a person in this country even gets a job, what they work for, how long they work, under what conditions and for how much pay, all depends not only on the interests of the workers, but also – as is generally known – on the calculations of the private owners who run factories and the like. In the world of work, therefore, two private interests face each other. And the outcome of the deal between the two determines what the employment contract stipulates in terms of performance and wages. However, the fact that this relationship between legally equal persons is nothing more than a relationship of blackmail, in which the interest of one side in profitable production is declared the winner from the outset, is due to the fact that the state has made itself the advocate of private property. However, only one side has this at its disposal. Whereas the other side, if it also wants to enjoy the benefits of state-protected private property, must submit to the interests of the factory owner – precisely because it has no private property of monetary value, which life in this country depends on. The private sphere, this social space in which people can devote themselves completely freely to the pursuit of their interests, therefore has a small catch: because the protection of all private interests is organized as the protection of a very specific production relationship in which owners and non-owners face each other, the result of the free pursuit of interests is fixed. Because of the state’s political partisanship for existing private property, wage laborers have to deal with an annoying condition when pursuing their interest: it is only taken into account on the condition that it is useful for the opposing interest.

The free, state-protected private sphere exists in a democracy, no question about it. But that is precisely why what takes place in it is not at all free from the state. Every private interest is forced to accept conditions on its actions that serve state interests as a prerequisite. And the bourgeois state is the last one to simply watch when its own budget, tax, or location calculations fall short in the negotiation of interests between wage laborers and capitalists. Then it intervenes directly and prohibits one interest or another: For example, it punishes “capital flight,” sorts the labor market politically, or “recommends” a location-suitable wage level to the collective bargaining parties, sometimes one that is even lower than what entrepreneurs ready to compromise would be willing to pay.

3. The same relationship between privacy and state supervision can also be found in the family. The family is not simply a natural form of human cohabitation, but is conceived and established as the “nucleus” of the bourgeois state – regardless of who the “spark” is between and how meticulously the marriage vows are observed. The fact that people who like each other freely enter into a legal contract with each other and must from now on comply with family, marriage, and divorce laws – including all legal provisions on parenting – and inheritance law is by no means in the nature of the decision to shape and enjoy a life together for reasons of affection. The difficulties in getting out of this relationship when things go badly in love – to which marital obligations often contribute – indicate that the rule of law still has an interest in the family even when the spouses’ interest in each other has already been extinguished. The state doesn’t really care. It maintains the obligations to the state that spouses entered into when they got married: It is keen on the wife providing for the husband so that he can devote himself entirely to earning money, that she step in when the husband is a permanent guest at the job center, so that the children at least grow up in “decent conditions” and do not cause the state any trouble. The reverse solution, the so-called role reversal, is also permitted today.

The family is therefore itself an institution of the state. That is why it is also appropriate for the state to use parental allowances and nationalist agitation – “The Germans are dying out,” “Germany is being overrun by foreigners” – to remedy an emergency that is purely of a state nature. And when “single people” are pilloried today,[186] when divorce laws are tightened, when abortion becomes a state affair in which, in its concern for offspring, it asserts its privilege of being solely responsible for “life,” then this proves that the democratic state is not afraid to subject even family management even more strictly to the purpose that the family must always serve anyway: To be the functioning breeding ground – in the truest sense of the word – of bourgeois society.[187]

4. There is still free time, that part of the private sphere about which the judgment is put into the world that here one’s voluntary interests no longer have to do with dealing with necessities. The sorting of people’s lives into leisure time and working time does not speak well for the democratic community. The division of bourgeois life into two qualities of time and design is not simply an expression of the necessity that a life shaped freely according to individual interests must first produce the necessary means of subsistence (in the broad sense), regardless of whether this work is satisfying or laborious. It is not about the sensible fulfilment of necessities, the products of which are enjoyed in free time. In bourgeois democracy, free time is first and foremost residual time, i.e. the time that is left over for somebody once they have completed their work in someone else’s service and everything that has to do with traveling to and from work, preparing for and following up on work, resting from the work that has been done and resting for the work to come, etc. The dispute over the length of the working day that has raged since the beginnings of capitalism alone proves that there is no agreement in this society on organizing work in such a way that people have as much time for themselves as possible. Where a fight for the 35-hour working day is waged by unions with the argument that the workers can no longer cope with the continually condensed working time, it becomes clear that work does not serve leisure time, but rather that in capitalism, on the contrary, leisure time must always be used to maintain the ability to work.

Since in a democracy everyone is free to decide how to spend their free time, the misunderstanding has crept in that free time is only set up so that people can freely pursue their inclinations and interests. However, the fact that people are free to decide what to do with the rest of their time does not mean that it is therefore entirely their own time. If people are free to put together their own leisure program in which they pursue their own interests, then they are only free to the extent that they manage to combine their leisure desires with the obligation, presented to them as an objective constraint, to equip themselves for the demands of working time.[188] Those who misunderstand or deliberately ignore this and disregard the demands of work in how they spend their leisure time experience this very brutally time and again. If they turn night into day, if they don’t even realize that their efforts are always for the benefit of others but never for their own interests, if they “overdo it” in sports or let themselves be guided by thirst instead of “common sense” in the pub, then an employer registers a “dubious lifestyle” and considers whether he needs to fill the position again.

The fact that not only two sections of a person’s private sphere come into conflict here can be seen from the fact that, for example, the compulsory health insurance fund intervenes and states that it expects the policyholder to organize their leisure time in such a way that their ability to work is not “willfully” attacked. The same applies to public leisure activities and the accompanying health and fitness agitation. The state may even ban certain leisure activities if it is bothered by their consequences. Then neither the emphatic “I can do what I want in my free time!” nor the “My body belongs to me!” applies.

And especially those who involuntarily have more free time than they would like find it difficult to follow their own inclinations during this time. Unemployment in this country is not individual “disposable time” (Marx). Rather, people are fully under the supervision of the welfare state, which makes the payment of money from the insurance pot to the person who has been declared superfluous by a company dependent not only on their continued availability for work, but also on them trying to find work at all costs and otherwise working on the marketbility of their working capacity through further training and retraining. His free time is free time on probation. He has to use it to prove that he has earned it. And he earns it by subjecting himself completely to the requirements of the welfare state.

Occasionally, the democratic state very openly denies the misconception that leisure time should serve the citizen and his individual concerns and that the state should protect the private sphere from any disruptive interference. When the state complains about a lack of growth, falling tax revenues and its own national debt and attributes this to the fact that its citizens misunderstand society as a “leisure park” (Kohl), then it is clearly warning them that they must subject their lives, even in leisure time, to the acute necessities of the state more than previously. As a rule, this begins with the extension or intensification of work, which manifests itself in a reduction in leisure time and continues with the demand to cope with the vicissitudes of working life with more “willingness to take risks” and “personal responsibility,” i.e. to compensate for the reduction of welfare state services with private provision, care and help in leisure time. And when the state warns the telecommunications industry to make cell phones that can be tapped, when “eavesdropping” is officially permitted, then the argument that the protection of privacy must take a back seat to the protection of state security has finally been accepted under the title “defending against organized crime,” i.e. defending against damage to the state. Of course, these state interventions are not considered totalitarian! In fact, many citizens in this country are very happy with them. They boast that they have nothing to hide and that they voluntarily organize their private lives in a state-pleasing manner. And when such citizens nowadays call for the state to interfere more in the pursuit of private interests, because in this country people – e.g. foreigners, criminals, punks or autonomists – can do whatever they want, then the state’s measures are, as we know, only responding to a citizen’s interest. This is seen as a sign of a sense of responsibility and by no means as proof that, in the midst of the most beautiful democracy, the citizen always understands the fascist standards that the state applies to the private lives of its people.

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[163] National Socialism. op. cit., p. 77. – The Federal Center’s concern to address the “lower levels of involvement,” i.e. research into the everyday life of the “little people” in Hitler’s Germany, is also shared by other public institutions. For example, the Körber Foundation, which includes representatives from politics, science and culture, has organized nationwide student competitions for the Federal President’s Prize on the topic of “Everyday Life in National Socialism.” There is a special issue of the Federal Center entitled “Life in the Third Reich.” The KMK has expressly recommended to schools the importance of the “local and regional historical environment” (see “Recommendation for the Treatment of Resistance in the Nazi Era” dated December 4, 1980).

[164] This is the title of a multi-volume series by H. Focke/Reimer, often used in schools, published as Rowohlt TB from 1979.

[165] Focke/Reimer, Alltag unterm Hakenkreuz, Bd. 1, p. 9.

[166] Ibid.

[167] Lehrerheft zum Schülerwettbewerb Deutsche Geschichte, 1980, p. 5.

[168] Focke/Reimer, ibid., p. 9.

[169] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 31.

[170] See: Special issue of Bundeszentrale “Leben im Dritten Reich.”

[171] Focke/Reimer, ibid., p. 117.

[172] Student competition in German history: “Alltag im Nationalsozialismus,” Körber-Stiftung Hamburg 1982, p. 2.

[173] M. Maschmann, Fazit. Kein Rechtfertigungsversuch, Stuttgart 1963, p. 23.

[174] H.G. Zmarzlik, Einer vom Jahrgang 1922, cit. Focke/Reimer, ibid., p. 79.

[175] S. Haffner, Nachwort zu W. Kempowski, Haben Sie Hitler gesehen?, München 1973, p. 105.

[176] Even today, people complain that the unemployment of so many people is leading to a “divided society.” It is not the material hardship that is being criticized, but rather the lack of a sense of unity, which needs to be strengthened accordingly.

[177] Haffner, ibid., p. 122.

[178] Focke/Reimer, ibid., p. 17.

[179] Haffner, ibid., p. 114.

[180] “In everyday life, the perspectives overlapped for the individual: As a fellow citizen, for example, he not only experienced how the Nazi regime affected him and his peers, but also learned how it dealt with the ‘bigwigs’ and ‘people's enemies’. This inevitably brought the individual into conflicts that he either tried to suppress or which, if he faced them, changed his life accordingly” (Leben im Dritten Reich, op. cit., foreword).

[181] “If you ... uncover the habituation to the unjust regime in everyday life and in political life, you will better understand what the rule of the National Socialists meant” (Körber Foundation competition, op. cit., p. 3).

[182] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 34.

[183] Schülerwettbewerb deutsche Geschichte (1981), p. 3.

[184] Schülerwettbewerb (1982), p. 2.

[185] Speech by R. Herzog before the Bundestag on January 19, 1996, Press Service of the Federal Government.

[186] See: W. Schäuble, Und der Zukunft zugewandt, Berlin 1994, p. 110.

[187] The most beautifully formulated phrase is still the Weimar Constitution, which served as the inspiration for the drafting of the Basic Law: “Marriage, as the basis of family life and [!] of the preservation and proliferation of the nation, is under the special protection of the Constitution.” (quoted from: FAZ, September 21, 1996, p. 1).

[188] See: The Unwanted Lesson: The Confident Obedience of the Democrats.