Bristol Hannover Council
Winners and Losers? Britain and Germany after the Second World War
FEB 18: Lucy Noakes (Essex) and Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck) in conversation at the GHIL
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** Despite some initial challenges with the technology, several BHC members were able to participate in this excellent session with two leading historians from Britain and German contrasting the memories of the war in both countries. Lucy Noakes characterised popular memory in the UK as ‘resentful winners’-we were ostensibly the victors but had not come out on top economically like Germany.
Frank Trentmann said that memory in Germany is complicated by the division of Germany. In West Germany the central question was: did the German surrender in May 1945 represent defeat or deliverance? By and large the movement over time was from the former to the latter.
East Germany developed an official narrative in which they were both victims of fascism and co-victors with the Soviet Union. In West Germany the official post-war memory was that Germany carried responsibility for the war and its consequences.
In the 1950s with the Cold War and the growth of anti-communism groups of former veterans and expellees often cast them as heroes or victims of the war. The 2 experts traced changes over the decades in attitudes to the war in both countries as depicted in popular culture-Fawlty Towers, Dads Army and the 1966 World Cup final got mentions, as did the series Auf Wiedersehen Pet! In Germany, the fall of the Berlin War was a critical in the shift in the focus of memory towards Holocaust commemoration.
The speakers agreed that it would be overly simplistic to characterise German memory as a successful but earnest ‘overcoming of the past,’ whilst the British collective memory involved more humour but was too nostalgic. In both countries historical memories are the focus of much popular and academic discussion.
However the historians cautioned that understanding history and untangling fact from myth is not enough to preserve democratic values and traditions. A full recording will be available from GHIL Podcast https://www.ghil.ac.uk/publications/podcast
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