It is a truism to state that military units thrive on traditions and there is a strong memory culture within various units that helps bind recruits to the institution. Military traditions posed a particular problem for both German states' military forces in the aftermath of the Second World War. Pressure against celebrating a military past came from both within and without the two Germanies as there was a strong current of opinion that held German militarism as responsible for German aggression in both world wars. But rather than inventing new military traditions wholesale, the German military culture on both sides of the iron curtain celebrated a very selective reading of their military past that these militaries constructed to be the antithesis of the military under National Socialism.

One surprising area of common ground for both the National Volksarmee and the Bundeswehr was their celebration of both the Prussian military reformers like vom Stein, Scharnhorst, or Gneisenau and Prussia's battles against Napoleon during 1813. The celebration of these heroes and 1813 diverged quite markedly though. The GDR cast the Prussian reformers as proto-class warriors that realized that uniting the masses was now possible and had a revolutionary potential. For example, Alexander Abusch, one of the early luminaries of the GDR's Kulturbund drew a direct line between these Prussian reformers and the mass warfare practiced by Lenin and Stalin in his 1946 survey of Germany's historical maldevelopment, Der Irrweg einer Nation. Abusch contended that the reactionary Prussian government ignored the import of the reformers and the military focused only upon planning for military operations, not a mobilization of the population. The Prussian reformers also had the added benefit of fighting in a war in which they were junior partners of the Russians and thus were a prequel to the "socialist brothers in arms" that permeated propaganda about the Warsaw Pact. The NVA made both Blücher and Scharnhorst the subject of medals for valor, and the NVA enshrined these generals as archetypes of people's warfare. This selective reading of the past was in keeping with the larger Soviet wartime trend of celebrating tsarist generals like Suvorov or Bagration as historical individuals that transcended their class origins in the name of a people's patriotism.

The FRG's approach to the Prussian reformers differed somewhat from their Eastern counterparts. Instead of being leaders of a people in arms, instead they were cast as advocates of modern citizen-soldier. One of the architects of the FRG's rearmament, Wolf Graf von Baudissin, would in various speeches and articles draw explicit parallels between the Bundeswehr of the 1950s and those of the earlier reform era. The military traditions of the past were not passive symbols according to von Baudissin, but rather a military past repurposed for a democratic present. The decision by the Bundeswehr to use the German Iron Cross as its symbol was one that was highly contentious but justified by the FRG Defense Ministry because it was a symbolized the democratically-minded army of 1813, not the later armies of Prussia and the Third Reich. The Bundeswehr returned to the Wehrmacht's style of saluting and standing at attention, but von Baudissin insisted that a soldier should only be under the requirement to salute only his immediate superiors, lest older habits of slavish deference return. Other unit traditions became similarly enmeshed in the idea that they were in service to a democratic state that would defend Europe against totalitarianism. Tradition rooms on Bundeswehr bases would help ground new recruits in a democratic ethos by connecting them to now sanitized forebearers.

One area of its military culture in which the FRG and the GDR parted ways was their respective attitudes towards the Wehrmacht. The Bundeswehr developed an early version of the "clean Wehrmacht" and celebrated the common German soldier for doing their duty for a criminal regime. In this formulation, the common German soldier became a victim of the regime that ordered him to fight a war he could not win. Heroes of the Third Reich like Günther Lütjens, Werner Mölders, and Erwin Rommel had prominent Bundeswehr bases, units, and ships named after them on the rationale that they were martyrs of the previous regime's criminal incompetence that squandered their lives. Some of these new formations were led by former Wehrmacht officers like Gunter Rall and fed into this presentation of a sanitized military past. In contrast, the GDR already had a large pantheon of KPD and other political martyrs to name NVA formations after. Additionally, the GDR derived a good deal of propaganda value from presenting the FRG as only superficially denazified and the presence of these veterans in the Bundeswehr added to this. The NVA did recruit from veterans as well, but a number of them came from the Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland and Bund Deutscher Offiziere, which were organizations set up during the war for German prisoners of war to participate in in anti-Nazi activities.

Cracks in the edifice of this sanitized version of the military past began to appear by the 1960s and 70s. The NVA's Prussian-style uniforms and goosestepping became indelibly associated in the West with the Berlin Wall, not the obscure martial traditions of 1813. The Bundeswehr of the 1960s and 70s also became a haven for anti-communist sentiments and its close association with Germany's large veteran culture caused periodic embarrassment for various FRG governments. Military traditions sometimes slithered into a clandestine celebration of the military triumphs of the Third Reich. In his autobiography, the British test pilot Eric Brown recalled being invited by his German hosts to a backroom of a Bundesmarine bar where Kriegsmarine ensigns and other trophies were kept on display. One of the most famous and emblematic scandals was the Rudel Affair of 1976, where Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a famous stuka pilot and a darling of the FRG extreme right, attended a reunion of the Immelmann Squadron at the Bremgarten airbase in 1976. When questioned about it, Luftwaffe General Walter Krupinski and Karl Heinz Franke committed a faux paux when questioned about Rudel's attendance commented that Rudel had as much right to be active as former KPD members like Herbert Wehner were active in FRG politics. Comparing an active member of the SPD unfavorably to an unrepentant National Socialist like Rudel was too much for Bonn to bear, especially right before an election, and the generals were cashiered.

The Rudel Affair opened up a number of questions about the Bundeswehr's use of tradition and uncritical acceptance that its Third Reich predecessors were just soldiers. Critics on the SPD and the left began to call for a dismantling of the traditions and clearing house of right-wing elements. By the 1980s, historical research had begun to dismantle the image of the clean Wehrmacht, showing the widespread complicity of regular soldiers in the crimes of the Third Reich. Reunification ushered in a further round of renaming and purging of problematic traditions. The Defense Ministry expressly forbid the display of any historical items on Bundeswehr bases unless they were provided with the proper historical context. A 1998 Bundestag law forbid any official commemoration of soldiers that served in the Condor Legion, prompting a spirited, but futile, defense of Mölders as an opponent of the regime by JG 74. Although the name of the GFM Rommel barracks complex in Augustdorf have remained unchanged, there have been repeated calls to change it given the new historical consensus that Rommel was more involved with the Third Reich and thus a more tarnished figure. Recent Bundeswehr regulations of 1998 point out only three periods of German military history are proper to celebrate: the Prussian reform era of 1807-1813, the 20 July 1944 Plot, and the postwar Bundeswehr itself. Officially, this is a much more restrictive use of the past than in prior postwar generations.

Sources

Abenheim, Donald. Reforging the Iron Cross: The Search for Tradition in the West German Armed Forces. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Feinstein, Margarete Myers. State Symbols: The Quest for Legitimacy in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, 1949-1959. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001.

Frevert, Ute. A nation in barracks modern Germany, military conscription and civil society. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

Large, David Clay. Germans to the Front West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.