This chapter analyses a selection of personal testimonies written by non-Jewish German refugees and non-Germans with experiences of Germany under Nazi rule to the 1939 Harvard essay competition ‘My Life in Germany before and after 1933’ in order to explore how behaviour in private in Germany under National Socialist rule helped to constitute a ‘bystander society’. It argues that the pressures to demonstrate conformity in public did not simply create dissonance between individuals’ public and private selves, but also transformed private attitudes and habits. As a result, a ‘bystander society’ emerged after 1933 in Germany that was characterised by people tending not to intervene on behalf of the direct targets of persecution: as such, it was a precondition of the Holocaust.

THE EVENTS OF 9 NOVEMBER 1989 were initially greeted with what appeared to be virtually universal acclamation. Over the summer of 1989 the “Iron Curtain” that had divided Cold War Europe began to develop gaps and holes through which people were able to escape to the West. In the course of the early autumn, across East German towns and cities hundreds of thousands of people came out on the streets to demonstrate their disaffection with the regime. On the occasion of the GDR’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, on 7 October 1989, the Soviet Union under Gorbachev’s leadership had indicated its unwillingness to step in and shore up by force an unpopular Communist regime. On 9 October 1989, despite intense preparation and the real possibility of a bloodbath on the lines of the earlier Tiananmen Square massacre in China, the ruling East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) and its State Security Service, the Stasi, renounced the use of force and allowed a mass demonstration in Leipzig to proceed peacefully. In the face of widespread popular opposition and lacking in reliable support even among its own ranks, in the following weeks the SED itself began the process of unraveling its own grip on power. Long-time SED leader Erich Honecker was replaced by the ever-smiling Egon Krenz and, following a brief trip to Moscow from which Krenz returned apparently converted to the cause of reform, sweeping political changes were introduced. It was even an official spokesperson for the SED, Günther Schabowski, who on 9 November 1989 conveyed the momentous Politburo decision about new travel regulations, which effectively meant, as Western journalists and East Germans alike rapidly realized, that the wall would no longer serve its previous function — exercised for some twenty-seven years — of keeping East Germans inside the GDR against their will. The unification of Germany, which took place less than a year later, on 3 October 1990, was neither intended at this time, nor was it a direct outcome of this moment, yet the opening of the Berlin Wall removed the crucial precondition for the existence of an independent second German state, which could not continue to exist in face of a more affluent democracy in the west.

IN 1988, RUTH KLÜGER, at that time a visiting professor at Göttingen, was crossing the road when she was hit by a young cyclist speeding around the corner. The consequences of what could have been a quite minor accident were major: Klüger spent months in hospital, with a combination of amnesia, brain damage, and physical impairment to mobility. During her recovery, Klüger, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, had a flashback to the accident, and realized why she had smashed her skull so badly. Instead of putting her arms down to soften the impact of the fall, as one might naturally do, she had flung them forwards to protect herself from what she felt, deep inside, to be the greater danger: an attacking German; in her instinctive perception, a Nazi. Of course, there is nothing instinctive about perceiving an oncoming, threatening young German as a Nazi; it was some deeply internalized reaction rooted in Klüger's childhood experiences. Pondering this incident as it resurfaced to consciousness, Klüger decided she would finally have to write out her experiences and reflect on the ways in which her innermost self had been shaped historically. Her reflections have contributed substantially to a growing literature on the long-term reverberations of the Nazi past, both among those who were victims and those who were perpetrators or bystanders (both being problematic terms) at the time, and among the generations that followed.

Klüger's reflections raise interesting questions about the nature of life writing as not only a product of the historical periods out of which it arose and the later contexts in which it was produced, but also as a historical source for exploring the changing character of social selves over time. Klüger, for all her distinction and individual talent, was also part of a particular generation — children during the Third Reich — and a specific group, victims of Nazi racism; and she was part of a later, transatlantic community of educated debate. Her writing is of a particular genre: that of articulate, self-conscious reflections on a traumatic past and its implications for the changing self at a later date.