Surviving 'Stunde Null': Narrating the Fate of Nazi Elite-School Pupils during the Collapse of the Third Reich

Abstract

The image of the eyewitness as the historian's enemy ('der Zeitzeuge als Feind des Historikers') has become something of a commonplace in German scholarship in recent years-seemingly part of an amorphous (yet nonetheless very real) anxiety among professional historians that popular perceptions of their discipline are all too easily dominated by media-driven affect and emotive stimuli, rather than the drier, more sober products of 'rational enquiry'. 1 Yet, at the same time, figures such as Konrad Jarausch and Robert Moeller have made an appeal for a less divisive, more analytical approach towards the evidence of these contemporary eyewitnesses ('witnesses of time'), which can 'treat individual tales as stories, asking about their emplotment to unlock their meaning'. 2 In this context, Robert Moeller has particularly stressed the importance of collecting the testimonies of those who experienced the end of the Second World War, in order to provide insights into individuals' construction of meaning from the 'patchworks' (Gemengelagen) of their lives, and facilitating the construction of a history of the war's end 'in which some Germans were victims, some Germans were perpetrators, and some Germans were both'. 3 We might detect a certain similarity here with oral history methodologies of the kind put forward by Alessandro Portelli in his seminal work The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (1991), which argues for the 'psychological truth' (and hence the inherent sociological and historical value) of narrations which may not be