The Troubled Patriot: German Innerlichkeit in World War II

Journal article

How German society responded to the Holocaust, military defeat, Allied bombing and the mass flights from the Eastern territories in 1945 needs to be seen in relation to the larger question of morale and attitudes towards the continuation of the war per se. Any attempt to assess German morale inevitably involves psychological and emotional analyses, and this article explores how these issues operated at the level of individual subjectivity. It focuses on the personal diary of August Töpperwien, a German Protestant, who was not a Nazi and yet maintained a loyal patriotism to the end. In so doing, it probes the troubled conscience of someone whose conflicting senses of personal duty and political obligation found their vent in pages of silent self-reflection, and so reveal with an unusual clarity the underlying frames of moral reference, which so often remain implicit and unargued in the short-hand and commonsense of other diaries and family letters, let alone macro-level surveys of popular opinion. Many historians have followed the lead of Martin Broszat and accepted that, after the Battle of Stalingrad, German society was increasingly alienated not only by the demands of the Nazi regime but by the war itself, and retreated into privacy. Careful reading of a diary such as this one reveals that support for the Nazi regime and for the war were not the same thing, and questions how much interiority remained untouched by the emotional and moral claims of war. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved.

Authors: Stargardt, N

• Publication status: Published
• Journal: GERMAN HISTORY
• Volume: 28
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 326-342
• Publication date: 2010-09-01
• DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghq061
• EISSN: 1477-089X
• ISSN: 0266-3554
• Language: English
• Keywords: August Topperwien; World War II; ego-document; Protestantism; diary; Nazism; moral conscience; morale; Germany; Holocaust