Lukas Rathjen (Zürich): Postwar Shifts. Humanist rhetoric between heritage and censorship

The silence that defines the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s and 1960s has become a topos that is increasingly put into question by historians. But no doubt remains that there was silence around Auschwitz, so the research question can only be how and in what way one can specify this silence. Auschwitz was the most frightening ‘secret’ of the postwar period and is part of a much more complex ‘unwelcome’ heritage, which the Federal Republic and its citizens were confronted with. Not only a painful and lasting memory was handed down in 1945 but also a largely fascist population that was to bear the new democratic state: A state whose legacy was also that it could no longer be a nation but had to be a society. A state which was also charged, in its new function as guarantor of economic freedoms, with governing a new border (West Germany). While these inherited facts were to be acknowledged, there were several knowledge banks which, no longer seemed possible to accept in the aftermath of the World War and the Holocaust. Many of the ideas, opinions and values in circulation before 1945 were consequently suspected of Nazism and censored. Thus, a certain ’emptiness’ was handed over. When the need to act was met by a lack of evidence, it was rhetoric that responded. But skillful language was not only a provisional solution for this corpus of what was no longer knowable, but also a displacement technique that served as a strategy to avoid confronting the ‘difficult heritage’. This ‘repression’ needs to be specified in the act of ‘displacement’, whereby the not-good-not-knowable is kept at a distance by speaking about something other than what was to be spoken about.
By using the example of the humanistic culture of conversation in the 1950s, I will show how it was possible, by means of a specific rhetoric, to avoid the suspicion of censorship as well as to avoid the confrontation with the initial historical situation. Information Control (and transformation) is part of the communication and educational work that postwar humanism accomplished. Humanist rhetoric mediates between heritage and censorship.