Nazi past of the Suhrkamp publisher: Siegfried Unseld knew about his NSDAP membership

After the historian Thomas Gruber reported on his random discovery of the NSDAP membership of the Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld last week and the weekly newspaper constructed the “case”, it is now eagerly researched according to evidence and statements about the Nazi past.

The head of the Siegfried-Unseld archive in the German Literature Archives (DLA) in Marbach, Jan Bürger, and book scientist Ulrike Anders presented documents from the Baden-Württemberg State Archives in Ludwigsburg on Thursday, which showed that Unseld undoubtedly knew about his membership.

In his denazification procedure in the spring of 1946 in front of a chamber in Ulm, he announced: “I joined the NSDAP in 1942 when I was not yet 18. I had no office in this organization. On October 20, 1942 I moved into the marine.”

And on a reporting arch “due to the law on the liberation of National Socialism and militarism”, which Unseld filled out on April 26, 1946, a “yes” stands for membership in the NSDAP and “candidate” in the “Highest rank” section.

Furthermore, citizens and differently, Unseld said that he was “automatically transferred to the party’s entitlement”. “I didn’t pay any membership fee. Meeting and the like was not able to attend because I was moved in afterwards.”

There are documents that apparently nobody viewed in dealing with Unseld’s life, such as biographers like Peter Michalzik (“Unseld. A Biography”, 2002) or Willi Winkler (“Kissinger and Unseld. The friendship of two survivors”, 2024) and also not the responsible for Unseld in the German Literature Archives in Marbach.

It was known, which also made no secret of the fact that the origin of a Nazi faithful family (father since 1933 at the NSDAP and the SA, sentenced in 1947 for participation in the November pogroms in 1938, mother in the Nazi women) and his enthusiastic work from 1933 at the German young people, a youth organization of the Hitler Youth between ten and 14 years.

There, in 1940, he was already 16 years old, was promoted to the senior young train leader, as he confessed in the saying chamber sheet, until 1942. And: “As an o.jungzug leader, I only served my service on a voluntary basis.”

However, Unseld, however, has always avoided the term “Hitler Youth”, in which he was at his age and as a senior fashion driver. The abbreviation “DJ” for German young people was given by him, behind “HJ” there was a no.

Unseld, whose denazification was completed on November 21, 1946 (the Judgment of Ulm stopped the procedure against him), then always provided information over the years in the war from 1942. He is a “formed and former war participant in Nazi years”, so it says in his chronicle.

Boachless Nazi biography

Unseld was a marine on the Baltic Sea and on the Black Sea; The last days of the war in 1945 he had duty as a radio operator in the command center of Admiral Dönitz in Flensburg, and then he was prisoner of war and interpreter with the English.

And he kept telling the anecdote how he escaped the Russians in 1944 in the Crimea: “The Russians came, and then an officer said to me: we don’t just want to try to climb the steep rocks and swim into the sea and just try to be lucky? And so we did it.”

Unseld was lucky. After several hours in the Black Sea, he was recorded and saved by a German “speedboat”. Swimming then got a symbolic dimension in his life, it became his passion.

Silence about the NSDAP membership

As often as unless this rescue history gave the best, he was silent after his denazification regarding his NSDAP membership-that is undisputed. At least no letters or briefs have appeared in which he would have exchanged information about it with contemporaries or later Suhrkamp authors.

But what does this silence change in its basically seamless Nazi biography until 1945, the last, by no means unimportant puzzle part this entry to the NSDAP is?

In the attempts to color these somewhat early biography, less brown, among other things with the friendship with Hans Scholl at the Jungvolk, the turn to the literature through this fracture with the Nazi era, “when a lieutenant of his replacement company told him about the crimes of German troops in Greece, as it says in his chronicle of the Suhrkamp Verlag.

The silence may be one; The other endeavor to express the effort, shame and awareness of his own guilt, as he successfully did with his work as the Enlightenment Suhrkamp publisher.

Defense posture?

The debate about unseld and his NSDAP membership, if you can understand it as such a debate, is still turning a turn. Namely, that the “case” does not really want to develop as a “case”. So the “time” throws all those who do not really want to fulfill this, trivialization before, even a “defense”, or or from oral in “a new era of German self -assurance and self -confidence.”

Large letters stand above the text “A Lappalie?”, As if there were long reactions to the discovery of Unseld’s membership everywhere, as if it had not been worth mentioning. As if there were no further reactions. Only they were and are not in the alarming sense, as the “time” would have liked to have after its great presentation. And deriving from one (no “case”) the other (normalization, “relaxed handling of the involvement of the Nazi era”) is a bold short circuit.

Similarly, the author, handke biographer and journalist Malte Herwig commented in a comment on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. He considers the reactions to be “behavior”. You would show one thing above all: “The turning point has arrived in the cultural company.” And, free to Günter Grass, with such reactions you would simply wash down the brown sewer and not deal with the NSDAP past.

Herwig stems the war in Ukraine, the strength of the AfD and a possible new compulsory military service in his opinion to be treated with the discovery of the discovery of the NSDAP membership, and that has a rather misleading effect.

It’s a good thing that the Swiss writer and Suhrkamp author Adolf Muschg does not want to go completely in that new edition of the “ZEIT”.

He writes that the feuilleton should actually have “greater worries” and that Germany has “more urgent” to “deal with a misstep by mental sizes, which – in unselling – is 83 years ago. The exemplary of it – but his load must bear and endure its load.”