Frank Biess

“Pioneers of a New Germany”: Returning POWs from the Soviet Union and the Making of East German Citizens, 1945–1950

In early December 1945, the Communist Party functionary Karl Lewke sent an alarming report to the leadership of the German Communist Party (KPD). It was entitled “One million anti-Bolshevists are approaching. The democratic reconstruction of Germany is threatened by greatest dangers!” The report referred to the thousands of returning German POWs from the Soviet Union who daily entered the Soviet zone of occupation through Frankfurt an der Oder. Lewkes description of the mentality and the attitudes of these returning POWs was not very comforting for his party superiors in Berlin.

Moral Panic in Postwar Germany: The Abduction of Young Germans into the Foreign Legion and French Colonialism in the 1950s*

The French Foreign Legion was very much on the minds of West Germans in the 1950s. In September 1958, the pop artist Freddy Quinn topped the German charts with “Der Legionar,” a song that depicted the plight of a German soldier in the Foreign Legion. That same year, the Legion was the subject of a high-profile movie production, Madeleine und der Legionar, directed by one of the most distinguished filmmakers of the postwar period, Wolfgang Staudte. An expanded version of the movie’s plot appeared as the serialized novel Lost Sons from November 1957 to June 1959 in Der Stern, one of West Germany’s most popular magazines with a circulation of over one million. These representations of the Foreign Legion in West German popular culture echoed an intense and sustained preoccupation with the Legion throughout the first decade of the Federal Republic’s existence. Starting in the early 1950s, West German newspapers began to publish sensational stories on “human kidnapping” that depicted the abduction of young German men into the Foreign Legion by paid recruiters.1 In the public imagination, the Foreign Legion became a major site of anxiety, a “horror of mothers” whose sons were said to taken away by unscrupulous “headhunters” only to fight on behalf of French colonial interests in Indochina and North Africa.2 Several state par-

The other alliance: student protest in West Germany and the United States in the global Sixties

There are some minor problems, most likely a result of the size of the book. His claim that “the New Left was at the heart of 1960s protests” (p. 5) might be true in 1965 but if he is talking about SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) it was irrelevant by Tet. “Finally,” he declares early on, “when it comes to the ultimate test – whether it helped to end the war in Vietnam – it is far from clear that the antiwar movement had any meaningful impact at all” (p. 11). If that is the case, students will say, then why am I reading this book? Nevertheless, Hall has done a lot of reading of secondary sources, and although all books on the 1960s – an enormous library – are not cited, the result of this research is that the author has packed the 150 pages with colorful quotes often presented in stimulating prose. Although I have expressed my misgiving about the format of this series, in the long run, Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement usually is a good read.