Reframing Antifascism

Memory, Genre and the Life Writings of Greta Kuckhoff

J. Sayner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137358905
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Moderne Geschichte

Greta Kuckhoff belonged to the anti-Nazi group, 'The Red Orchestra'. She survived the War and spent the next thirty years working to commemorate their resistance. Using previously unpublished sources, this book traces the interventions of this key figure and raises provocative questions about remembering antifascism in contemporary Germany.

1

‘The Radio Today Is Our History’: Greta Kuckhoff’s Radio Broadcasts and Speeches

Ich erinnere mich nicht gern an meinen ersten Rundfunkvortrag zum Gedenken meines Mannes. Cläre Jung, die damals die literarische Abteilung mit Güte und Festigkeit leitete, hatte mir ermöglicht, einen ersten Sprechversuch zu machen, obwohl sie eigentlich [hoffte] einen Schauspieler – ich glaube Paul Bildt, der selbst mit Adam gut bekannt gewesen war – zu gewinnen. Mir lag soviel daran, mein Manuskript, das sie alle gut fanden, selbst zu sprechen. Es war in einem großen Aufnahmeraum in der Masurenallee […]. In der Mitte des Raumes stand das Mikrofon und ich kam mir vor wie auf dem Potsdamer Platz. Mit Pathos und Stimmaufwand – ich wollte es extra gut machen – deklamierte ich den Text statt ihn still und ruhig zu lesen. Schon am gleichen Nachmittag rief Cläre mich an: Es geht nicht. Es geht wirklich nicht. Kommen Sie her, wenn Sie wollen und hören Sie sich selbst an, wie unmöglich das klingt. […] Ich fuhr hin, kaum waren die ersten Sätze gesprochen, als ich mir die Ohren zuhielt. Ich war erschrocken. Es klang unecht und überdreht. […] Es war eine Zumutung, das Ganze noch einmal – ohne Gewißheit, daß es nun wirklich klappt, zu versuchen. Ich hatte keinerlei Lampenfieber. […]

Ich weiß nicht, wieviele Leute mich damals daraufhin ansprachen. Ich meine nicht Bekannte und Freunde. Leute, die ich niemals gesehen hatte. […] Das war es auch, was mir den Mut gab, Gedanken in die Bevölkerung zu tragen durch ein Medium, das bald von vielen gehört werden würde, sehr viel mehr als auf Vortragsreisen. Und ich lernte, meine Gedanken auszudrücken, dass man wirklich zuhörte.¹

I do not like to remember my first radio programme in memory of my husband. Cläre Jung, who led the literary section at that time with kindness and firmness, allowed me to do a first take, even though she had hoped to get an actor – I think Paul Bildt, who had known Adam well – for the job. It was in a large recording studio in Masurenallee […]. The microphone stood in the middle of the room and I felt as if I was on Potsdamer Platz. With pathos and vocal effort (I wanted to do it especially well) I declaimed the text instead of reading it calmly and quietly. Already that afternoon Cläre rang me: It won’t do. It really won’t do. Come and listen if you want and hear for yourself how impossible it sounds. […] I went. The first few sentences were hardly spoken before I covered my ears. I was horrified. It sounded false and overexcited. […] It was unreasonable to try the whole thing again without any certainty that it would work. I had no stage fright at all. […]

I don’t know how many people spoke to me back then about it. I don’t mean friends and acquaintances but people whom I had never seen before. […] It was that which gave me the courage to take my thoughts into the population in a medium that would soon be heard by many, many more than on lecture tours. And I learnt to express my thoughts so that people really listened.

The broadcast Kuckhoff refers to was for the Soviet-controlled station, the Berliner Rundfunk [Berlin Radio], in 1946 entitled ‘Adam Kuckhoff zum Gedenken’ [In Memory of Adam Kuckhoff]. It was initiated when Kuckhoff wrote to the radio station offering a programme with extracts from her husband’s works.² Commemoration of her husband and the members of the ‘Red Orchestra’ was at the heart of her public speaking and the subject of key broadcasts in the immediate postwar period. However, her topics also ranged far beyond that. Over the course of the next two years, Kuckhoff wrote and presented regular economics programmes entitled ‘Commentary of the Day’, as well as broadcasts on denazification, democracy and gender equality. These topics were also the subjects of many public lectures she gave in the immediate postwar period. This chapter explores her commemoration of antifascist activities on the radio within the context of these other public appearances prioritizing the spoken word. Using archival sources, it explores the ways in which Kuckhoff negotiated key issues of legitimacy (that is, having the right to speak), authenticity and familiarity in order create and maintain an audience.³ It examines the significance not only of the texts themselves but also of Kuckhoff’s involvement in emerging national institutions. As such, the chapter considers how the speeches and broadcasts were a part of Kuckhoff’s agenda of practical antifascism, how she considered each aspect of this work ‘ein Stein zum Denkmal für unsere Toten’ [a stone in the monument for our dead].⁴ It examines how, in her terms, she aimed to prevent her speeches becoming merely ‘schöne Wörter’ [fine words].⁵ It investigates how these ‘audioscapes’ functioned as forms of memory, how they conveyed new identities and modes of citizenship, and how they engaged more widely with the historical and socio-political context. In particular, Kuckhoff’s speeches and broadcasts are read within the context of histories of antifascism and the GDR which characterize the years from 1945 to 1947 as a time of ‘controlled pluralism’, as an ‘antifascistdemocratic’ phase, which subsequently gave way to a Stalinization of the GDR from 1948 onwards.⁶ I begin by considering Kuckhoff’s broadcast on her husband following her return to Berlin in 1945. I then investigate her ‘Commentaries of the Day’ within the context of her work at radio stations in the Soviet and Western Zones. I conclude by showing how her speeches reinforced the emphases of her radio programmes and how they particularly addressed a gendered listening community.

Returning to remember: Commemorating Adam Kuckhoff

On her return to Berlin in May 1945, Kuckhoff had few contacts. As a qualified economist fluent in English, she began to look for work with the Allies. Her perceived lack of experience was a hindrance, though, and she only gradually managed to make herself known by giving speeches in her local neighbourhood of Schöneberg. Her archived papers suggest that the speeches focused on issues related to rebuilding Germany and were presented to a predominantly female audience.⁷ They describe the difficulties that she had as someone not accustomed to public speaking, with a tendency to be ‘sehr sachlich, eher etwas herb’ [very matter-of-fact, somewhat rather harsh].⁸ It was, however, such local speeches that led to her first job with Berlin City Council’s ‘Ernährungsamt’ [Department of Food] and it was while she was working there that she began her radio commentaries.⁹ This was not the first time she had appeared on the radio, however, as she had used it as a means to appeal for information on her son, Ule, in the first months after the war.¹⁰

Kuckhoff’s first regular broadcasts were for Berlin Radio. Although situated in the British sector, the radio station in Masurenallee had been controlled exclusively by the Red Army since they occupied Berlin at the start of May 1945. There had previously been disagreement between the Allies about what was to happen to this station at the end of the war.¹¹ It was originally intended as a joint Allied station and the first broadcast after the unconditional surrender of Germany included all four national anthems. It took place on 13 May 1945 and lasted one hour. It followed a script that had been agreed by Stalin and Truman and was aimed at ‘establishing a new authority’.¹² This belied a degree of co-operation that was, however, to disintegrate amid arguments over how much air time each of the Allies were allocated.¹³ Discussions continued until the end of 1946 about shared Allied control of the station but this was not achieved before the political situation deteriorated.¹⁴ This tension escalated because, already towards the end of 1945, a station was set up in the American sector, first known as DIAS (Drahtfunk im amerikanischen Sektor), and renamed RIAS (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor) in September the following year. When Kuckhoff was doing her broadcasts, radio was the most important medium of communication and, until 1948, Berlin Radio was the most widely listened-to station in the capital. Between 42 and 50 per cent of people owned a radio set in Berlin at this time.¹⁵ Berlin Radio was also one of the few stations which reached beyond the city to a comparatively large area.¹⁶

In the months preceding Kuckhoff’s first commentary on antifascist resistance, confrontations with the Nazi past dominated the output at Berlin Radio. Such broadcasts tended to focus, however, on those persecuted by the regime rather than resistance to it, although such distinctions are often difficult to draw.¹⁷ Those programmes that were broadcast on resistance took the form of speeches, commentaries and portraits, and occurred to coincide with anniversaries of the resisters’ deaths.¹⁸ Kuckhoff’s first programme was no exception. The station originally proposed broadcasting it on 5 August 1946, the anniversary of Adam Kuckhoff’s execution, but when Greta Kuckhoff said that this date would be too painful, they suggested recording it earlier.¹⁹ The broadcast on Adam Kuckhoff bore the same name as a slim volume published earlier in the same year by Greta Kuckhoff, Adam Kuckhoff zum Gedenken: Novellen-Gedichte-Briefe [Adam Kuckhoff in memoriam: Short Stories. Poems. Letters].²⁰ From the exchanges between Kuckhoff and Cläre Jung at Berlin Radio, it is clear that this book was the prompt for the broadcast and that the programme followed the contents of the book by including extracts (‘Gedichte und Zitate’ [poems and quotations]) from her husband’s work.²¹ Jung comments, in her editorial interventions on the final radio manuscript, that she had kept ‘ganz streng’ [very strictly] to Greta Kuckhoff’s own editorial essay in the volume of his work. In the absence of a transcript of the programme, assumptions can therefore nevertheless be made about the themes of the broadcast.

In her lengthy introduction to the edited volume, Kuckhoff begins by emphasizing that her husband’s death was ‘kein Schicksalschlag’ [no quirk of fate] but that it was something which they had long accepted as part of the dangers of their resistance work. A teleological description follows of his political path towards this resistance and the ‘endgültige Klärung’ [final clarity] of realizing that the right form of society was the prerequisite for everything else.²² The tenacity with which Adam Kuckhoff read political and economic texts, his stream of poems and essays, his early editorial work for the journal Die Tat and the publication of his first novels are all interpreted as paving the ground for his decision to remain in Germany in 1933 despite offers to emigrate. Pre-empting the comments that Kuckhoff was to make at the First Congress of German Writers a year later, she engages with the role of writers during the Nazi regime. Her narrative emphasizes that Adam Kuckhoff refuted any independence of art from its social setting, that he worked hard to prevent the recuperation of his work by the fascist state, and that he ultimately sacrificed his artistic endeavours for his political work. It was only in prison awaiting his death sentence that he was finally free to write: ‘Als Kuckhoff dann nicht mehr kämpfen konnte, als die Hände ihm wortwörtlich gebunden waren, schrieb er den Grundriß einer dialektischen Ästhetik, den die Gestapo genau so einbehielt wie seine Kleidung, seine Uhr und all die lieben persönlichen Dinge, die er bei sich trug.’ [When Kuckhoff could no longer fight, when his hands were literally tied, he wrote the outline of a dialectical aesthetics, which the Gestapo kept along with his clothes, his watch and all the much-loved personal items he had on him.]²³

The books he would have written, his stance on nationalism, his belief in ‘Solidarität, die keine Landesgrenzen kennt’ [solidarity which knows no national boundaries], and his avid consumption of works of world literature and languages (alongside the daily newspapers) are presented as evidence to characterize the man who can no longer address his audience. That Greta Kuckhoff has the right and the knowledge to represent this characterization is persistently and emotively reinforced throughout the narrative. She refers to standing watching her husband unobserved as he worked, to their joint appearance in front of the Nazi court, and to her being the recipient of some of the few letters that he was allowed to write in prison. These last letters contain an emotive power which derives from the fact that they were originally meant for no other audience than their addressee. Kuckhoff’s assertion that she included them in the edited volume ‘nicht leichten Herzens’ [with an uneasy heart] is, I would suggest, not merely a rhetorical trope.²⁴ Adam Kuckhoff’s repeated assertion in these texts ‘denn weiß ich “wie” du leben wirst’ [for I know ‘how’ you will live] was used as a phrase by Greta to frame her postwar work and public engagement.²⁵ It is probable that Greta Kuckhoff would have selected the letter and poem written by Adam Kuckhoff to his sons before his execution for the broadcast, not only because these were frequently cited by reviewers of the volume as being the most powerful texts,²⁶ but also because these were the ones she chose for the commemoration ceremony at the First Congress of German Writers a year later.²⁷ Along with these last letters, it is likely that the programme would have included the closing sentiments of Kuckhoffs introduction: ‘Fröhlich Bestehen!’ [Cheerfully Persevere!] This phrase comes from Adam Kuckhoff’s Till Eulenspiegel and they were also the last words that he passed to the prison vicar for his wife before his execution.²⁸

Despite the transmission date originally planned for this commemorative programme of 5 August 1946, a rather angry letter that former prison vicar, Harald Poelchau, sent to the radio station suggests that it was in fact only broadcast on 7 August and at such a late time that many listeners would have missed it.²⁹ Nevertheless, the broadcast seems to have had two notable outcomes: Kuckhoff’s edited book continued to be reviewed positively in both Eastern and Western Germany for quite a long while after its publication,³⁰ and Kuckhoff was commissioned to begin writing and presenting regular radio slots.³¹

Commentary of the day

Kuckhoff’s commentaries began in October 1946 and she presented weekly economic broadcasts for the next eight months.³² The broadcasts were, on average, five minutes long and were heard at 8.15 on Saturday evenings directly after the news.³³ This was not only peak broadcasting time³⁴ but was also when 80 per cent of the Berlin audience were tuned in to Berlin Radio.³⁵ In the first few months, her programmes tackled a range of issues including currency reform, textile supplies, the importance of German self-administration, the history and role of the banks, the stock market in Frankfurt, and problems of the supply of goods.³⁶ In line with the policy of Berlin Radio, she advocated the administration of a united Germany.³⁷ Many of these broadcasts made direct and explicit links to the Nazi past, reminding the audience that the Nazis had used the economy to produce military uniforms and bombs,³⁸ that the regime had destroyed civilian industries,³⁹ and that the big financiers were currently appearing in Nuremberg.⁴⁰ However, there was also an awareness of the delicate negotiations involved in maintaining the interest of the audience, when Kuckhoff referred to the fact that no one gets warm hands or feet through reminders about the Nazi past.⁴¹

Several of the b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Memories of Resistance
• 1. ‘The Radio Today Is Our History’: Greta Kuckhoff’s Radio Broadcasts and Speeches
• 2. Fashioning the Self and the Recipient in Letters: Kuckhoff’s Correspondence
• 3. Exhibiting the ‘Red Orchestra’
• 4. From Einheit to Die Weltbühne: Kuckhoff’s Journal Articles on Resistance
• 5. A Film without a Protagonist? KLK an PTX: Die Rote Kapelle
• 6. From the Rosary to the Nightingale: Memory as Published and Unpublished Autobiography
• Conclusion: Genre and Memory – Repetition as a Way of Knowing
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index