Mary Fulbrook, in front of photographs from an exhibition. Photo: Craig Baxter/University of Otago.

Interviews Traveling through the German historical landscape A talk with Mary Fulbrook

In her book on the East German experiment, The People’s State, Fulbrook launched a concept that owes a lot to her life-long preoccupation with Max Weber’s theories of Herrschaft. She calls it “participatory dictatorship”. An unbelievably large proportion of the population — roughly one in six, she calculated — took an active part in activities that had to be carried out to uphold the political system as such.

Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds 1, 2014 pp 22-28.
Published on balticworlds.com on April 29, 2014

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Professor Mary Fulbrook and the present writer belong to the same club. They are not particularly fond of Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s much acclaimed film from 2006 about Stasi monitoring under Communist Party rule.

“It is a terrible film,” she says. “It tells a story with which nobody can disagree.”

It portrays just a small and unrepresentative fraction of intellectuals, and “fails to present the GDR in all its complexities”. One of the main characters figures both as chief and as agent within the Stasi system, which is historically an “impossible combination”.

Her critique of the director is sharp and principled: von Donnersmarck does not raise interesting questions, although it took him six years to make the film. “Manipulative”, is her judgment, because the moral of the story is impossible to question, yet the historical portrayal is inadequate.

The film does not help us understand more broadly how the system worked. It is “historically unsound”, Fulbrook argues, because it does not sufficiently contextualize the narrow cultural milieu it portrays, and yet it suggests this picture of the Stasi can represent broader GDR society.

Artistic freedom?

“Some degree of ethical responsibility, a film director should also have.”

Over the years, she has dealt intensively with the political culture and everyday life of the former GDR in her own research. And she has come to the conclusion that people in that society had experiences that varied with age and generation. There were gaps that separated citizens when it came to attitudes and values.

“We have the generation of 1929, people born in or around that year. Christa Wolf was one of them. They were deeply ashamed of the past, of what Nazism had brought about and how so many people had been supportive of the Nazi regime. As young people at the end of the war, they sought a vision of something better, and although they were not able to change the basic parameters they nevertheless tried to improve conditions as best they could.” The next generation, born under Nazi rule and in the war years, might be called “the absent generation”: they could not find their place in the new society. In contrast, the first postwar generation was less aware of alternatives and tended at first to take the GDR for granted, along the lines that “this is the way the world is structured”. Only later did many of these become critical of the way the GDR failed to live up to its official ideals, and, by the 1980s, some became engaged in social reform movements. In turn, many of those born in the late 1960s and 1970s developed a happy childhood nostalgia particularly when seen retrospectively, after unification with the West in 1990.

In her seminal book on the German 20th century, subtitled The Divided Nation, written in the years before and completed immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mary Fulbrook points to parallels between social and political movements in East and West Germany in the eighties. These obviously irritated the men in power in the GDR, since they had no clear idea how to handle a political mix that included humanistic Marxists and “Third Way” intellectuals; religious dissenters, both Protestants and Catholics; and what she calls “unorthodox views” among peace activists, environmentalists, and adherents of alternative cultures.

About such expressions of protest and disapproval that never took on a mass character, let alone formed an opposition, Fulbrook writes:

Although the regime tried frequently to downplay dissenting views and denounce them as Western-instigated or -inspired, none of these three broad groups (each of which contained many differences of opinion within it) could be simply interpreted as supported by or supporters of the West. Frequently they were as critical of the consumerist materialism and social inequalities of capitalist society as they were of the bureaucratic authoritarianism of “actually existing socialism” in the East. They were generally seeking, not to abandon the East for a presumed Utopia in the West, but rather to transform the East into more desirable directions from within. There were also, of course, considerable numbers of disaffected GDR citizens who simply wanted to leave; and even larger numbers who engaged in a variety of demonstrative acts, such as minor unofficial strikes (downing tools, walking off the job), daubing graffiti, making political jokes.1

On the other hand Fulbrook reminds her readers of how relatively successful both the German states were during the Cold War era in “sustaining and reproducing their respective systems” and avoiding “the development of powerful anti-system oppositions of the sort that helped bring about the collapse of the Weimar Republic”.2 They both had rather harmless elite groups, the majority of whom never challenged the fundamental principles of the society in which they lived. The breakdown of the GDR and the subsequent regime change was, in Fulbrook’s analysis, only made possible by changes in external circumstances, above all by what had happened in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev.

Stability was crucial in both parts of Germany, although in the GDR, “from the late 1970s onwards there appeared to be a greater willingness among grassroots members to express differences from the official party line”. In the Federal Republic as well as in the German Democratic Republic there was certainly widespread popular resistance at that time to official policies of deploying nuclear missiles on German soil, with unofficial peace movements “becoming thorns in the flesh of established governmental politics on both sides of the Iron Curtain”.3

I have quoted rather generously from her printed words, in order to reveal something of the character of Fulbrook’s scholarly prose; how precise and varied she expresses herself; how reluctant she is to make ideological categories into analytical instruments. I read her German history, the whole story, as an attempt at Historisierung, and an attempt to understand historical epochs with all their flaws and merits, all their shortcomings and all their progress, rather than to glorify achievements or to condemn a bad system that lasted a mere forty years.

The historian must not be a judge or a lawyer; he or she is as interested in why something worked at all as in why it finally failed — since almost all things eventually fail.

Why, for instance, did the GDR perform better than most of the other societies that practiced some form of central economic planning and one-party rule?

One feature of the SED regime over the years was its ability to impose its will without relying solely on fear, coercion, and repression. After the crushing of the popular uprising in June 1953, there had been no upheavals in the socialist state, and no mass terror. The state in itself was both state and society, and it managed to function as a consensus building mechanism, by diffusing power and authority to many layers and segments of society.

In her book on the East German experiment, The People’s State, Fulbrook launched a concept that owes a lot to her life-long preoccupation with Max Weber’s theories of Herrschaft. She calls it “participatory dictatorship”. An unbelievably large proportion of the population — roughly one in six, she calculated — took an active part in activities that had to be carried out to uphold the political system as such. These people could be found in responsible positions in the organizational structure of the party state and its apparatuses, in many spheres and on different levels. They gave authority to the system as a whole and in turn gained prestige, pride, and privileges from it. Fulbrook talks of a widespread participation “in the multiplicity of little honeycomb cells of the many overlapping and intersecting elements in the GDR networks”4, whether it be the promotion of Sorb regional identities in the country or the protection of small gardeners who had their own recognized organizations.

Naturally, the contacts with the security organs are part of this picture, since the Stasi was a mass phenomenon in itself, with 91,000 fulltime employees out of a population of roughly 16.5 million in 1989, and a total of as many as 180,000 unofficial informants at its all-time high.

There were limits and boundaries to this involvement in political affairs, says Fulbrook:

“The lack of freedom of speech and association was non-negotiable. People were unable to get out of the system, but they tried to make the best of their lives under the circumstances.”

And they benefited?

“In the GDR misery was spread rather broadly”, answers Fulbrook. “If some people got advantages it was not, as in the Third Reich, at the radical (even fatal) expense of another section of society that was excluded, humiliated and degraded.”

That is also, I suppose, why Fulbrook reacts so strongly to my question concerning the extent to which her concept of “participatory dictatorship” bears any resemblance to the idea by German historian Götz Aly, developed in a controversial book from 2005, that the German Führerstaat under the Nazis can best be perceived as a “mehrheitsfähige Zustimmungsdiktatur”5.

“Firstly, the polarization between repression and acclamation is a false one. In Hitler’s Germany, they were both present to different degrees and in different ways throughout the twelve years. Enthusiasm rose and fell among certain groups under changing economic and foreign policy conditions; violent repression was targeted variously at different groups, and became ever more brutal and murderous, particularly during the war years. Secondly, there were individual Germans who benefitted from robbery and the exploitation of others, those who were being excluded, the victims — but that does not make all of them responsible for the crimes. Thirdly, there were many Germans who did not in the least benefit at the expense of others — those who sought to resist and ended up in the hands of the Gestapo, for instance.”

Both extremes — brutality and support — were more accentuated in the Third Reich than in the GDR, a Soviet satellite state which was never capable of waging war or murdering six million, Fulbrook says: “In the Third Reich you had at times enthusiasm for the system with great conviction. In the GDR, you could not see much of such enthusiasm. But nor were there concentration and extermination camps on the scale of the Third Reich.”

In her writings, Fulbrook, unlike many other historians of her generation, has always paid attention to both Germanys. A prevailing belief in the West before 1989 that, after Auschwitz, there should never be a German nation again “was central to liberal language”, she says. Unification did not come up on the agenda, since it was not regarded as “proper”. So the project was given up — rhetorically.

I myself recall a meeting in the summer of 1985 with another German historian, Peter Brandt, the son of Willy Brandt, former West German Chancellor. Peter Brandt had cowritten a book on the left and the German question (Die Linke und die nationale Frage). In our interview he strongly maintained that the Ostpolitik of Brandt’s government was not to be seen as an abandonment of the policies of national unity, a trademark of the SPD in the forties and fifties, but rather as a method of coming closer to that goal.

“Brandt’s policies made a big, big difference”, answers Fulbrook. “It really facilitated the collapse of the system in the East. The step-by-step policy encouraged contacts across the border and assisted the rise of unofficial social movements in the GDR. It was just a CDU propaganda claim that Brandt had renounced unification. His policy of Ostpolitik instead led to a growing interaction between East and West. It promoted self-organization and led to a degree of partial loosening up. In this context, for example, the Church-state agreement of 1978 gave churches a semi-autonomous role allowing them to act as a protective umbrella for dissident voices in the GDR.

“So it wasn’t harmful at all. If anyone was propping up the GDR, it was the CDU/CSU Kohl government. It was even Franz Josef Strauss of the CSU who, in 1984, gave financial support to the ailing economy in East Germany.”

Retrospectively, unification seems to have been the more or less inevitable outcome, after the demise of the old regime. To many Easterners of those days, obviously, it was not. They started to write a new constitution for a democratic GDR. Was that a silly idea?

“No, the silly idea was the one-to-one rate of exchange in the single currency reform. In the course of a few weeks, people lost their jobs all over the country. One-to-one wasn’t economically viable. Without this it is perfectly possible that there could have been a longer period of debate on constitutional matters and on the future of the state.”

In an interview not long before my discussion with Fulbrook, Helmut Schmidt, Brandt’s immediate successor as SPD Chancellor during the 1970s, admitted that many mistakes had been committed by the conservative Kohl government in the process of unification. “Ohne es wirklich zu wollen, haben wir die alte DDR-Industrie plattgemacht”, he declared. And he warned about an “Entleerung ländlicher Räume”.6

“Yes, there occurred a sudden rise in unemployment, and worst hit were women in their mid-forties. They lost their child care support, they were too young to take early retirement, and too old to be retrained for new jobs.”

In well-paid positions, for instance in the academic world, Westerners came and took over. Christa Wolf, in one of her lamentations (Ein Tag im Jahr, from 2003), spoke of a wave of colonization.

Fulbrook wants to differentiate: “The West were imposing a system that worked much better. The subjective experience of being colonized is one thing; that doesn’t mean you can make a widespread feeling into an analytical tool.”

Reading German history, one is struck by the large share of British specialists, which runs counter to common wisdom that British historians only bother about Britain. Mary Fulbrook is accompanied by many other outstanding representatives of her trade, such as Ian Kershaw, Richard J. Evans, Jane Caplan, Christopher Clark, Lyndal Roper, Nick Stargardt (albeit the last three of Australian extraction).

“I think it is a combination of biography and the shadow of the war”, says Fulbrook. “Often there is a Continental European family background, in the parental generation at least. The second generation starts to think things over.”

She remembers having been appointed to an US-based committee, the Joint Committee on Western Europe (JCWE) of the American Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Five committee members, from different disciplines, were gathering for a meeting at the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin. During a coffee break looking out from the window of the WZB, Fulbrook realized and commented that this part of the city, the Kulturforum near Potsdamer Platz, was the place where her mother grew up. Three Americans on the committee suddenly also spoke up: they too had roots in Germany: one had a mother from Hamburg, two others had fathers from just the same area of Berlin; all were refugees or survivors of Nazi persecution. Only the fifth member of the committee had no central European roots: he was Canadian. Fulbrook has increasingly noticed the prevalence of “second generation” colleagues with a similar background.

So: what is professional often turns out to be personal, though the linkage is not always easy to find. I came to London to talk to Fulbrook about a book that hasn’t yet been mentioned in this article. It is a book that has meant a lot of pain to her — shock and pain. Now, we shall have to wait a little further. Not only her family background, but also her professional training and academic skills are vital for my understanding of her approach and reactions when she wrote that book.

It turns out that German studies was not her first choice of subject. She started as a student in Cambridge. Her parents were both academics: her mother a criminologist, German by birth; her father, a crystallographer of Canadian origin (“he never learned to speak German fluently”). Her mother wanted her to study economics. Fulbrook quickly discovered that economics was meaningless to her, so she turned to other subjects: archaeology and anthropology, then social and political sciences. As a graduate student, she went to the US and another Cambridge, to the Department of Sociology at Harvard, where Barrington Moore was a major intellectual influence at the time. She did her PhD in comparative history under Daniel Bell and, perhaps more significantly, Theda Skopcol. There she studied both Max Weber — in fact, there is a nice collection of Weberiana on the shelves of her office at Gordon Square — and Karl Marx (“though I was never a Marxist; I didn’t find Marxism to be either a coherent body of theory or a politically acceptable program of action”). Continental neo-Marxism at that time and place was nevertheless a “very special” subject, and Fulbrook smiles, which she often does, when she comes to think of how “perhaps six copies of Louis Althusser’s book For Marx were smuggled into the US” when she had been on a trip to London and the book was unavailable for purchase in the United States.

Having returned to Britain, she completed her dissertation on religion and the rise of absolutism in England, Prussia, and Württemberg during the early modern period. That landed her smack in the middle of a heated debate on the English Revolution, or Civil War, in the mid 17th century. At New Hall (nowadays Murray Edwards) College, Cambridge, she encountered Margot Heinemann, who taught literature (“a committed communist who never left the Party”); and the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, a former Master of Balliol, would now and then “come over from Oxford for lunch”. However, before she could publish her thesis as a book (Piety and Politics, 1983), she had to defend herself against revisionist historians such as John Morrill who questioned the interpretation of the events in England as the outcome of social conflict and revolutionary upheaval. Fulbrook comments, “he originally savaged my thesis”, but it emerged much strengthened by having to respond explicitly to his criticisms.

Starting in her childhood she had traveled a lot in Germany, spending holidays in Bavaria, coming to love Germany, the language — it happens, in the course of our interview, that we pick a couple of German words as the most appropriate expression. That made her wonder “why nobody was looking to the other Germany, the GDR”. There was a blind spot. And beside the love of Germany, she had felt, “for very long”, the “inexplicability” of the German destiny: “There was no time in my life that I didn’t know about the Holocaust.”

In 1983, she was fortunate enough to give birth to a son, followed in 1987 by twins. In the late 1980s, as she continued to travel around Europe, now with small children in tow, the demise of socialist Germany was imminent. The first drafts of her Concise History of Germany, as well as the Divided Nation, were completed during the remarkable year of 1989, the year of collapse. With minor amendments of tense, putting the GDR into the past, they appeared shortly after unification.

Indeed, there are many Germanys. The Germany of her mother was that of the Weimar Republic and the early Nazi years. Her mother grew up in Berlin as a German and a Christian — but she also came from an assimilated German-Jewish family background. In April 1933, after the Nazi takeover, Fulbrook’s mother was forced to leave school and was never allowed back again. Having married a practicing Jew, she left Berlin to live in Spain. When the marriage broke up she briefly returned but, as an active socialist and a committed Christian, soon realized that she had to leave for good and emigrated to England. Her mother had a best friend from her schooldays, Alexandra, who was to become Fulbrook’s godmother. Alexandra had an aristocratic background, and in matters of race and politics the girls were in sharp disagreement, for instance over how to judge Hitler’s Nuremberg Rally speech in 1935, and so they decided to avoid topics that were too sensitive for the friendship to withstand. Though geographically separated, they retained an emotional bond, exchanging letters until the war broke out. World War II interrupted their communication, but a few years after the war they reestablished relations.

“A precondition for continuing the friendship was never to talk politics again”, comments Fulbrook.

That silence allowed the development of a family myth. Fulbrook later in life was to discover the real story in the most terrifying way.

“I was physically shocked”, she says. “My mother had always thought that the conservative Alexandra, my godmother, had been in the Resistance. I discovered after her death that Alexandra’s husband, a man whom I knew well, had in fact been a middle-range Nazi functionary. We had known nothing about his Nazi party membership, or that he as a civil servant had actually been part of and supported the Nazi system.”

Alexandra’s husband, Udo Klausa, was born in 1910, in the Prussian area of Silesia, near Katowice. His career goal was to become a regional administrator, just like his father who was a Landrat in the town of Leobschütz (today: Głubczyce). In early 1940, Udo Klausa himself was appointed Landrat in the Polish town of Będzin (renamed Bendsburg under Nazi occupation) in a border region in Eastern Upper Silesia, a few months after the German occupation of that part of Poland. His mission was to “Germanize”, to “cleanse” this land from its Jewish inhabitants, integrating it into the new expanded Greater German Reich. Right from the start this was a dirty and murderous task, and Fulbrook, in her book called A Small Town Near Auschwitz, is very keen to stress that large-scale killings in the East did not begin only with the German assault on the Soviet Union in 1941 but was an integral part of Nazi policy from the very first days of the war in 1939:

In Poland in 1939 it was clearly the case that violence against civilians, indeed mass murder of civilians, was planned, premeditated, and carried out right from the very start, but perhaps with some passing pretence at quasi-militaristic “legitimation” through notions of “partisan warfare”, “provocation”, or “reprisal”.7

Będzin, a town of 54,000 people, of whom almost one half were Jewish, had been both an economic and a cultural center of Jewish life in Western Poland before the war. All that came to a brutal end in the course of a few years, with the burning of the synagogue filled with people, followed by the humiliation, degradation, deportation and eventually mass murder of its Jews. And all that was carried out not only by military Einsatzgruppen but also as a result of the policies enacted by civil servants, of which the Landrat was the most important one in the town of Będzin and the surrounding county of the same name. He was on the frontline; he knew perfectly well what was going on in nearby Auschwitz. And he certainly did not protest; on the contrary, Klausa helped pave the way for the atrocities: he pursued and supported policies of the expropriation, ghettoization, and starvation of the Jews, easing the eventual process of deportation and murder. Nazi policies in this area had tragic as well as grotesque consequences: at one stage Jews were evicted from their homes in Auschwitz and forced to settle in the ghetto in Bedzin — just to be “re-transported back to their home town to be murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau”.8

Fulbrook’s book is a detailed study of how this enterprise was completed, and actually one of the first ever to focus on the middle-level bureaucracy within the Nazi hierarchy.

It has been possible only through meticulous archival research, but not everything could easily be looked up in the archives of official institutions. Fulbrook found to her dismay that Udo Klausa, her godmother’s husband, had joined the NSDAP in February 1933, just three weeks after Hitler’s coming to power, and at the same time became a member of the SA, having applied for membership in December 1932. In 1936 he wrote an ugly tract, Rasse und Wehrrecht (Race and Military Law), which obviously promoted his career, and he became a Landrat at the young age of thirty — often behaving in a highly conformist manner to demonstrate his loyalty in order to become a permanent official. Fulbrook quotes from the ’36 tract:

Today there is barely any nation that is made up of a pure race any more […]. The law must contribute to the process by which the more valuable hereditary elements are constantly secured. This takes place through positive furtherance of the racially most valuable people, and through negative selection of the degenerate.9

It goes without saying: nobody is forced to write such rubbish.

But how did she find out?

“It would not have worked without Google”, answers Fulbrook. “The only hard copy I could find belonged to the old Staatsbibliothek in what had been East Berlin, and it was the Internet that made that finding possible. Otherwise it would have been a lost publication.”

What had been concealed in Udo Klausa’s history, or had been a “lapse of memory”, now came to the fore. After the war, Klausa went to great efforts to diminish his role as a key figure in the regional administration, having been, he maintained, one of the “decent” Nazis, for instance when he claimed that he had joined the party in order to fight the “riffraff” from within when it became impossible to do it from outside the party. However, Fulbrook is able to discredit him on point after point. He did not simply pay lip service to the cause of National Socialism. He took advantage of his position, and even if he was not a fanatic, a leading player, or a policymaker, he was without question an energetic and loyal administrator. “Not everyone was a perpetrator in the obvious sense of committing direct acts of physical violence”, Fulbrook states in her book, “or directly giving the orders that unleashed such violence.”10 Apart from perpetrators, victims and bystanders, you have to include functionaries and beneficiaries in the socio-political scheme. They were more than mere fellow travelers. Alexandra and her husband moved into a villa that had been robbed from its owner — “the Jew Schein, a big industrialist who fled in time” (Alexandra in a letter to an acquaintance).11 A Landrat in annexed territories, following directly after the outbreak of war, writes Fulbrook, “had to oversee crucial issues related to population planning, the mapping, expropriation, and acquisition of confiscated estates and properties, strategies for the ‘Germanization’ of previously Polish territories, and implementation of a whole gamut of racial policies”12. And she can demonstrate that Klausa willingly did exactly that.

The Klausa story is full of horrifying facts. It plays out in a corner of Europe that had been contested — not least militarily contested — throughout history, by Austrians, Prussians, and Poles alike. In the vicinity are the partly destroyed sites of the Counts of Henckel von Donnersmarck, a once fabulously rich family in Imperial Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries, who owned castles, land, mines, and ironworks here — and who, by the way, were the ancestors of the film director who appears on the first lines of this article.

But the story continues. After the war, Udo Klausa miraculously escapes the justice of the victors by hiding.

“He should have been placed in an automatic arrest category”, explains Fulbrook. “Instead he hid for the first years after the war, then when it was safe to emerge started his efforts at self-exculpation. It is a sickening story. It made me very angry.”

It seems that the Klausa family took rescue at the palatial moated estate of an aristocratic friend to whom Alexandra, Fulbrook’s godmother, had connections. Alexandra’s children also received tutoring along with the children of Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, who was to become the renowned editor-in-chief of the leading West German weekly Die Zeit.

Even so, Alexandra sent letters to Mary’s mother complaining about the lack of food in postwar Germany — not mentioning that this was in part because her husband Udo was in hiding, and thus without a ration card. “My mother was sending care packages to them.”

And what happened to Udo Klausa himself?

“It is the very typical story: a Nazi conformer becoming a democratic conformer.”13

In 1954, he is back as a regional administrator, without having been interrogated, fined or put in prison; nor was he banned from reentry into the civil service. He then takes up the post as director of a recently created Landschaftsverband in North-Rhine Westphalia, a governmental body with a staff, eventually, of some 12,000 employees.

He was “clearly uncomfortable about his past”, writes Fulbrook. Klausa himself claimed, in retrospect, that, in the thirties and forties, he became “increasingly uncomfortable with the political context in which he had sought to pursue his long-held dream of following in his father’s footsteps as Landrat”.14

His family defended him with silence and excuses. They trusted him, and believed his stories about the past. In this too, this is a typical German family tale. ≈

Note: Mary Fulbrook (b. 1951) is dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, professor of German history and director of the European Institute at University College London (UCL). She is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of its Council. She has served as chairperson of the German History Society and was one of the founding editors of its journal, German History.

references

  1. From the 3rd edition of A History of Germany, 1918–2008: The Divided Nation, MA Malden et al. (Wiley–Blackwell, 2013) 225.
  2. Ibid., 206–7.
  3. Ibid., 206, 208.
  4. The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005) 247.
  5. Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer Verlag, 2005).
  6. Die Zeit, September 6, 2013.
  7. The full title of Fulbrook’s book is A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) quoted from page 58.
  8. Ibid., 143.
  9. Ibid., 74.
  10. Ibid., 47.
  11. Ibid., 117.
  12. Ibid., 78.
  13. One of Klausa’s regiment comrades was Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg, a 22nd of July conspirator who was executed by the Nazi regime. Klausa, however, never thought of entering the Resistance (if there ever was a movement of resistance in the Hitler state). Could this personal connection explain why Mary Fulbrook’s mother was so mistaken with respect to her friend’s stance?
  14. Ibid., 94.