Re-Educating Germany: Film Censorship in the Post — War Period
| Published date | 01 April 1987 |
| Date | 01 April 1987 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9256.1987.tb00270.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
RdItiCr
(1987)
7,
40-47
RE-EDUCATING
GERMANY:
FILM
CENSORSHIP
IN
THE
POST
-
WAR
PERIOD
George
Brennan
I
also saw a
rather good
Englishfilm
with
a
commentary
in Gennan about
the
invasion
of
Normandy
and
the
Liberation
$Patis.
In&mation
&rvices
Conttol
were
worrying
about
whether
Germans
should
be
allowed
to
see
it
because
it
would
remind
them
that
there
had
been a
German
Army.
I
told
them
not
to
be
si&.
-
Senior
Political
Division
OJker,
I94
7
(FO
1049/942)’
CENSORS,
usually, are underlings who dare not err on the side of tolerance
yet
dare not
persist in ‘silliness’ when chided from above. Censorship, usually, is legitimised by some doc-
trine pretending to be above ‘politics’ in the narrow sense.
A
stubborn and principled censor
can accidentally expose the shallowness of the doctrine and the opportunism
of
the politics.
Film censorship in occupied Germany provides
an
entertaining instance. Postwar GamanY’s
Cultural life was regulated in the name of ‘Re-educauon’, which at
every
stage of
its
short life
was
governed by politics.
This ‘Re-education’
was
in part seen
as
a humane alternative to merited punishment, for in
1945
it
was universally agreed that the German people were collectively responsible for the
crimes of the German state. In friendlier times, former officials
of
the occupation (Balfour,
1973)
have
stressed that ‘Responsibility’ was never officially equated with ‘Guilt’. This must be
qualified. Certain concepts
of
‘Responsibility‘ do imply no culpable failure of wilk they arise
merely by virtue of kinship
or
legal obligation. Parents take responsibility for damage
by
unruly children. Germans unborn in
1945
thought it right through their taxes to compensate
Jewish
survivors.
But
this
was
not the sense of the word ‘Responsibility‘
as
used in the postwar
policy
direc-
tives. There, ‘Responsibility‘ signified passive,
as
against active guilt. It was allowed that the
German people as a whole had not voted for gas chambers
-
even Papen and Schacht, Hider’s
stirrup-holders in
1933,
were acquitted at Nuremburg
of
active guilt.
But
most Germans wefe
deemed to have known about Hider‘s crimes and culpably to have failed
to
prevent them.
They were guilty by acquiescence. German national character was seen
as
the explanation
rather than the result
of
German history. Germans were judged to be servile,
arrogant,
self-
pitying and profoundly unbalanced. They were
to
‘atone’ through suffering or reparations;
their children would be educated to
be
different The long-run objective of the British
was
to
refashion the political institutions of ‘their‘ zone in the image of the British polity. The
immediate objective of
all
the Allies
was
to
make
the
&man
recognise
his
responsibility
-
meaning passive complicity
-
for the crimes of Hider.
This accusation of collective complicity
was
believed to have grounds. Hider, after captur-
ing the followers of the middle-class parties, had collected more than
13
million votes in a
free
election; the German Labour Movement failed to generate a partisan resistence equal to Him-
mler‘s
terror; and the ordinary German soldier fought hard
to
the end. Auschwitz
was
not the
ultimate horror among the revelations of April
1945.
The ultimate horror, according
to
many
observers,
was
the complacency
of
German officialdom.
A
careful historian seeking to condemn a majority
of
Germans
of
passive
guilt
might find
this evidence weak, but the dogma
of
German guilt was determined not only by evidence but
by politics.
It
was a notion with something for evexyone.
For
the Western Allies, it
served
to
obscure the class character of German fascism. The guilt
of
all Germans implied the
guilt
Of
all
classes of Germans, thus confounding victims
with
accomplices and denying any special
postwar role to the
&man
Labour movement. Witness to this are deletions from the
draft
Handbook for Military Government, following Roosevelt‘s angry objections
to
it in August
1944 (F0942/118):
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