hour zero

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The term zero hour was applied to May 8, 1945 and the earliest period of the immediate post-war period in Germany and Austria . He refers to the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces and the complete collapse of the Nazi state , which would have offered the chance for a new beginning without any preconditions.

term

The expression zero hour originally comes from the planning language of organizations , traditionally the military . It generally describes the decisive time at which a new type of chain of events begins. A maneuver order could accordingly read: “March off at 04:15. Reaching point P in zero plus 3 hours. ” The term was first used in the German post-war period with reference to the history of literature ; it is no longer possible to determine exactly when it appeared. The metaphor can be demonstrated in colloquial language and journalism of the time. In contrast to the formula of the day of liberation , which was later used in the German Democratic Republic , zero hour has more connotations with defeat, catastrophe and hopelessness . The title of Roberto Rossellini's 1948 film Germany in Year Zero is believed to have promoted the spread of the term.

Scientific discourse

Example of continuity on both sides of the zero hour : Fritz Kempfler

The catchphrase zero hour means that the defeat of Germany in the Second World War through the accompanying destruction of the Nazi state and the widespread destruction of cities, businesses and infrastructure would have brought about a radical and complete upheaval in German society, so that there were no continuities between the Federal Republic of Germany and its predecessor systems. As a result of the loss of self-determination of the German people under the military occupation from 1945 onwards, the (old) German society ceased to exist, and all of its old values ​​were felt to be refuted. A tabula-rasa situation prevailed from which "everything" had to be redeveloped. Various authors criticized the fact that this opportunity to start again from scratch was not used in the years of occupation and the Adenauer era : Instead, there was a restoration in which the capitalist conditions that led to fascism , or one for the first half of the century characteristic "pious Christianity" had been restored.

This thesis has been widely contradicted. On May 8, 1985 , Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker spoke of the fact that there was no “zero hour”, but only a “new beginning”. The mentality of German society has changed only slowly and only partially innovatively . As the cultural historian Bernd Hüppauf emphasizes, there was never a zero hour in literary history either. Although many German writers emphasized the supposedly radical newness of their writing in the so-called rubble literature after 1945, the similarities with the years before still outweigh the differences. Instead of the absolute term zero hour, one should therefore write better differentiated between continuities and change. According to the philosopher Steffi Hobuß, the “ myth of 'zero hour'” served to disguise the continuity of the functional elite from the Nazi era to the Federal Republic: the perpetrators' collective wanted to pretend “as if everything were different now”. What exactly was meant by this was also never quite clear, because the term was applied both to the one day when the war ended and to the years 1945–1949 as a whole. In the anthology they edited, Hans Braun, Uta Gerhardt and Everhard Holtmann describe this four-year period of occupation in West Germany as a "long zero hour", during which, under the guidance of the American military government, the transformation of German society from a National Socialist to a democratic society succeeded.

Thus, many different and by no means all-encompassing “zero hours” could be identified for post-war Germany . Families (for example, after parents and children have come together again under completely new life requirements), companies (e.g. after the resumption of "peace production"), art forms of newly emerging artists (after the rehabilitation of those defamed as "degenerate" by the National Socialists) Art movements - see the first Documenta 1955), institutions (e.g. the “ Tracing Service ” of the German Red Cross) and parties (here e.g. the CDU and CSU as Catholic-Protestant coalition parties) each have their own “zero hour” experienced. In particular, the currency reform on June 20, 1948 was seen by many Germans as a major turning point (cf. Anastrophe ), and from a socio-historical point of view also as the emergence of a " leveled medium- sized company ".

Richard von Weizsäcker argues in a partially autobiographical study from 2001 that there was not one but three hours of zero: first in 1949 with the establishment of the Federal Republic and GDR , then in 1969 with the social-liberal coalition and the beginning of the new Ostpolitik , and finally in 1989 with the end of the Cold War .

Many historians and political scientists deny that there was even a zero hour: Ulrich von Alemann describes the statement as a commonplace , but makes a restriction with regard to the party system , which actually did not exist at the end of the war. Rudolf Morsey , based on the economic historian Werner Abelshauser , emphasizes that the total collapse associated with it did not take place - rather, the "substance of German fixed assets" survived the war largely unscathed. According to Wolfgang Schieder , "much more of the legacy of National Socialism has been preserved in West Germany than many had imagined." This is the real core of the restoration or new beginning debate that has been going on since the 1960s. Henning Köhler wants to use the term as a description for the tiny period of time between the departure of the Wehrmacht and the arrival of the Allied troops . Even Heinrich August Winkler does not believe in zero hour, but conceded that the term, just meet the "perception of contemporaries" whose presence, whose future was chaotic uncertain. Michael Gehler finds the contemporaries' hope associated with the formula of "forgetting the past and being able to cope with the current tasks' from scratch '" problematic and refers to the West German confrontation with the Nazi past , which only began in the 1960s and the 1970s.

literature

  • Michael Falser: 1945–1949. The "zero hour", the question of guilt, the "German spirit" and the reconstruction in Frankfurt am Main. In: Ders .: Between Identity and Authenticity. On the political history of monument preservation in Germany. Thelem Verlag, Dresden 2008, ISBN 978-3-939-888-41-3 , pp. 71-97.
  • Kurt Finker: May 8, 1945. Chances for a new Germany. Potsdam 2005. (Dialogue in the PDS, 13)
  • Uta Gerhardt : Sociology of the Hour Zero. On the social conception of the American occupation regime in Germany 1944–1945 / 1946. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-518-29368-0 .
  • Hans Habe : In the year zero. A contribution to the history of the German press. Munich 1966. (German press history after 1945)
  • Peter Kruse (Ed.): Bombs, Trümmer, Lucky Strikes - Zero Hour in previously unknown manuscripts . Wjs Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-937-98900-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ludwig Fischer (Ed.): Literature in the Federal Republic of Germany until 1967 , dtv, Munich 1986, pp. 29–37 and 230–237.
  2. ↑ Christoph Kleßmann : 1945 - world historical turning point and "Zero Hour" , Version 1.0, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte , October 15, 2010.
  3. ^ Manfred Görtemaker : History of the Federal Republic of Germany. From the foundation to the present . CH Beck, Munich 1999, p. 159 f .; Christoph Kleßmann: 1945 - world historical turning point and "Zero Hour" , Version 1.0, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte , October 15, 2010.
  4. ↑ Ernst-Ulrich Huster, et al .: Determinants of the West German Restoration 1945–1949 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972.
  5. ↑ Dietmar Süß : [Adenauerzeit (Part 1):] Dear West, may you be quiet . In: Die Zeit , No. 39 of September 19, 2009 ( online , accessed May 28, 2015).
  6. ↑ Weizsäcker's speech
  7. ↑ Bernd Hüppauf: Introduction. In: Same: "The Troubles of the Plains". Continuity and change in German literature and society 1945–1949 . Winter, Heidelberg 1981, p. 11 ff .; similar to Waltraud Wende: There never was a zero point. Writer between a new beginning and restoration - or: continuities of educated bourgeois interpretive patterns in the immediate post-war era. In: Georg Bollenbeck (Ed.): The Janus-faced 50s. Cultural Modernism and Educational Semantics III. Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2000, pp. 17-29.
  8. ↑ Steffi Hobuß: Myth "Zero Hour" . In: Torben Fischer and Matthias N. Lorenz (eds.): Lexicon of 'coping with the past' in Germany. Debate and discourse history of National Socialism after 1945. 3rd, revised and expanded edition, transcript, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-8376-2366-6 , p. 45 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  9. ↑ Hans Braun, Uta Gerhardt and Everhard Holtmann (eds.): The long zero hour. Controlled social change in West Germany after 1945. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2007.
  10. ↑ Richard von Weizsäcker: Three times zero hour? 1949, 1969, 1989. Germany's European Future , Siedler, Berlin 2001.
  11. ^ Ulrich von Alemann: The party system of the Federal Republic of Germany . Leske + Budrich, Opladen 2001, p. 43.
  12. ^ Rudolf Morsey: The Federal Republic of Germany. Origin and development until 1969 (=  Oldenbourg floor plan of history , vol. 19). Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-70114-2 , p. 11 (accessed via De Gruyter Online); similar to Edgar Wolfrum : The 101 Most Important Questions. Federal Republic of Germany. CH Beck, Munich 2011, p. 14.
  13. ↑ Wolfgang Schieder: The upheavals of 1918, 1933, 1945 and 1989 as turning points in German history . In: Wolfgang Schieder and Dietrich Papenfuß (eds.): German upheavals in the 20th century . Böhlau, Weimar 2000, ISBN 978-3-412-31968-7 , pp. 3–18, here p. 10 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
  14. ^ Henning Köhler: Germany on the way to itself. A history of the century . Hohenheim-Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, p. 441.
  15. ^ Heinrich August Winkler: The long way to the west . German history II. From the “Third Reich” to reunification . CH Beck, Munich 2014, p. 121.
  16. ↑ Michael Gehler: Germany. From division to agreement. 1945 until today. Böhlau, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2010, p. 54 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).