The Novel Das Boot, Political Responsibility, and Germany's Nazi Past by Dean J. Guarnaschelli

Author:Dean J. Guarnaschelli [Guarnaschelli, Dean J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Germany, Military, World War II, Modern, 20th Century, Scandinavia, Literary Criticism, European, German
ISBN: 9781000453362
Google: 5h8-EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-09-23T01:40:49+00:00

4 Popular and critical reception

DOI: 10.4324/9781003190998-4

4.1 Buchheim as a public figure

Almost eighty years ago, both Lothar-Günther Buchheim and Antoine de Saint Exupéry, two gifted artists also intent on becoming writers, published eyewitness accounts of their combat experiences during World War II. In Jäger im Weltmeer (Hunters at Sea) Buchheim's 1943 “prototype” for Das Boot, he attempted to relay a message similar to Saint Exupéry's Pilote de Guerre (Flight to Arras) from the same year about the senselessness of war. Despite the fact that they were on opposite sides of the conflict and belonged to different military branches Das Boot meant that Germans, like their French and British counterparts, could preserve their wartime memories in prose as a way of dealing with their experiences. This was a link to global public memory that Buchheim aimed for in 1973. The initial reactions from the general public, intellectuals, and navy veterans, were mixed. Not long after hitting the stands, the book went into its second printing and Buchheim was a household name in Germany. A stance by intellectuals, though, was not detectable.

Understanding the role that Buchheim's life and creative works played in West Germany's quest to publicly assess the consequences of its Nazi past requires a syntopical view of the analyses of his life and his creative productions. Just as essential is exploring the opportunities that afforded him access to a voice in the public realm after World War II, something he expressed as having been dominated by privileged intellectuals and media sensationalists.1 This chapter discusses the critical reception of Das Boot and Buchheim within the context of what Assmann has described as communicative memory graduating into cultural memory, which is the replacement of eyewitness-based accounts that once informed the public, with ones acquired through media forms of all kinds.

Erll's contributions to the field help explain the trajectory that transcultural memory takes. Her theory, called “traveling memory,” is used here to illustrate the path taken by the debates and retorts concerning Buchheim and Das Boot. The discussion that follows demonstrates how this process translates from a metaphoric state into historic terms and shows how the narrative in Buchheim's autobiographical novel became a part of West German cultural memory.

Scholarly opinions about Buchheim's claims to promote an antiwar message through Das Boot did not follow a predictable, singular path in which harsh critique eventually mellowed into general respect for his writing. Nor did studies on his work only boom with the bestseller's surge in 1973 and taper off once the book was adapted as a screenplay for the box office success directed by Petersen. The factors surrounding his career by the early 1980s, the apex of his popularity concerning the novel, were fluid. The number of citizens with acute, personal memories of National Socialist hegemony lessened as a new generation of German politicians, born after WWII, inherited the legacy of the war that Germany waged under Nazi rule. German citizens as a whole needed to weigh whose accounts were legitimately a part of a common memory of the past, and whose were damaging to the idea of mastering that same past.

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