Death and the Making of West Berlin, 1948–1961*
Furman University
monicablack{at}furman.edu
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Abstract |
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This essay traces shifts in attitudes towards death, practices of burial, and rituals of mourning in West Berlin from the 1948 currency reform to the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall. It shows that West Berliners in the years immediately following the Second World War maintained an arduous devotion to their dead—particularly the war dead. Yet as the war became a less immediate experience over the course of the 1950s, broad cultural shifts took shape, including a renewed sense of optimism and an emerging feeling that the suffering associated with the war could be and was being redeemed. Meanwhile, a cult of the dead long venerated as part of the very foundation of German culture gradually became ‘less German’ and ‘more Western’ over that same period. In this way, it also became a means of distinguishing West Berlin from its Communist neighbour to the East. By focusing on shifts in perceptions and practices surrounding death, the essay reveals part of the process by which moral and ethical values were reconstructed after Nazism, and how the racist collectivism of the Third Reich gradually gave way to the broadly individualist, democratic-socialist humanism that would form the basis of an expressly West German politics and society.
Keywords: death, burial, Volksbund deutscher Kriegsgräberfürsorge, ‘death for the fatherland’, memory
* This article is based on my book manuscript, Death and the Making of Three Berlins. The research toward the article was made possible by the Freie Universität Berlin/SSRC Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the German Marshall Fund and the Council for European Studies, and the Mellon Foundation/Council on Library and Information Resources. I am delighted to have this opportunity to thank the anonymous readers for their comments and suggestions, which greatly improved this essay. I am indebted to Alon Confino for his wisdom and continuing mentorship. As always, I am most indebted to Matthew Gillis.