The Living Dead (1995)
Notes to accompany ‘The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past’ by Adam Curtis
Episode One: ‘On the Desperate Edge of Now’
Curtis makes the Nazis out to be Hobbesians, believing that democracy is no good because it is about the individual, and only the nation has the ability to curb the individual’s barbarism.
Curtis: ‘The Americans had come into the war, determined to put an end to European barbarism. But they found that the beliefs and assumptions they had brought with them were fading. Europe was a much darker and stranger place than America.’
The premise is that the Nuremberg Trials and the Allies’ memory of the good war depended and depend on the suppression of the evil acts required to win a total war.
Stunde Null:
The term Stunde Null (zero hour) refers to a historical moment after the collapse of the German Reich in 1945. Its meaning is derived from the imaginary moment at midnight, when the previous day is over and the new day has not started. The analogy is used to signify the undefined and open time span between two historical periods, the Third Reich and the creation of two German states in 1949. Its meaning refers to a break in the historical continuity, a few weeks following the capitulation of the German army in May 1945 (captured in Edgar Reitz’s film Stunde Null, 1976) or the years prior to the currency reform of 1948, and it has been used, without reference to a specific time frame, to signify a specific state of mind characterized by indeterminacy and potentiality. […] The collapse of the German Reich has no parallel in modern European history. The military defeat was complete (the Allies invented the term unconditional surrender). The entire territory was occupied by the victorious powers; the government and local administrations ceased to exist, and the sovereignty of the nation state was assumed by the military commanders of the four zones of occupation. National Socialism as the pervasive state ideology disappeared overnight. Most cities were in ruins. Public transportation, the postal services, and the infrastructure had collapsed, and in some areas water, gas, and electricity supplies were discontinued. Life was thrown back, it was said at the time, to Stone Age conditions. Soldiers returning home, released camp survivors and prisoners of war, 5 million refugees from eastern German provinces, and uncounted women and children who had fled the cities and now returned to their ruined homes created a massive movement of unsettled people. It was a society in flux, literally and metaphorically. In some cities and industrialized areas, political grass-roots movements emerged but soon disappeared, and the organization of political life and the everyday remained in the hands of the occupying forces. (Encyclopedia of German Literature)
Curtis describes zero hour like this: ‘The response to this cataclysm was a wholesale wiping of memory by most of the German population. Millions of men and women who had been part of the Nazi system hid and denied their murderous past.’ But, at the Nuremberg Trials, this was not Göring’s frame of mind. He wanted to hold on to Nazism, explain it, and defend it.
Curtis says that, after Göring had been cross-examined, the court ruled that other defendants were not to be allowed to go back over the same ground. There was to be no further discussion of the reasons for the Nazi crimes. So the perpetrators of the crimes came to be seen as monsters. Göring killed himself, and Nazism as an ideology that could actually be believed in, by masses of ordinary people, evaporated.
Curtis says that, in the late fifties, America quietly gave up on denazification. Germany was a prosperous ally in the Cold War, and it was easier to forget.
Pursued between 1945 and 1948 by the four occupying powers (the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France), U.S. denazification policy was initially the most sweeping and punitive. Denazification was enormously unpopular among Germans, and by 1952, the West German government had authorized the reinstatement of thousands of Germans who had lost their positions in the purges and formally terminated denazification. […] [T]he emerging cold war between the former wartime Allies compromised the Allies’ original intentions with regard to the purges. The U.S., British, and Soviet governments, for instance, raced to obtain former Nazi intelligence officers and scientists for their respective military, scientific, and commercial establishments. As four-power agreement over Germany’s future failed to materialize, the Americans, British, and French on the one side and the Soviets on the other sought to secure the allegiance of Germans in their respective occupation zones. This meant far less emphasis on reckoning with the past in the form of unpopular war crimes trials and denazification and a greater emphasis on reconciliation and reconstruction. This development, combined with the tribunal process many flaws, led the United States to relinquish oversight of denazification in 1948. (Germany and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History)
But the students of the 1968 movement wanted to know what their parents and grandparents had done. These included the Baader–Meinhof gang:
Byname of the West German anarchist terrorist group, Red Army Faction. Its leaders were Andreas Baader (1943–77) and Ulrike Meinhof (1934–76). The group opposed and attacked the capitalist organization of German society and the presence of US armed forces by engaging in murders, bombings, and kidnappings. The leaders were arrested in 1972 and their trial and deaths (by suicide) received considerable publicity. The group continued its terrorist activities until 1998, forming a number of splinter cells. (A Dictionary of World History)
Curtis says that, with the end of the Cold War, the suppressed barbarism, which was meant to have been got rid of by the Second World War, the good war, came back to the surface. ‘We are at zero hour, once again.’
